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Chapter Ten (THEORY): Never Be
Ashamed of Your Joke Writing
Process
Great ideas are even better when you share them.
Loesje
I’m told that in the BBC writers room you can say anything you like and not be
judged. It’s a haven for the joke writing brain that needs to sift through every
connotation without being hampered by other people’s judgement. Everyone
there knows joke writing is a process. Everyone accepts that they’re going to say
some great things, some rubbish things, some obscure things, some weird things
- it’s all fine.
One writer told me that when he’s in brain-storming sessions with other writers,
the most important thing for him is to just say something. If he starts to clam up,
he’s lost. His brain freezes. If he says something, anything, it loosens him up and
makes him part of the team.
I know this from when we were recording the topical panel show The Treatment.
We were expected to chip in on all the subjects, not just the ones we’d been
assigned. I found that as long as I had some kind of comment (the weakest of
jokes would do) someone else would often pick up on it. I would be part of the
conversation, and once you’ve made one comment it’s easier to make the next.
I practice this philosophy on my joke writing courses. If students seem reluctant
to talk then I give them the following speech.
‘No matter how rude an idea you have, I have written something ruder. No
matter how politically incorrect your thought is, I thought something worse. No
matter how weak a joke you have written I have written something weaker. You
need to let all thoughts and ideas out of your system, because if you don’t they’ll
stick in your mind like a train stuck in a station and other thoughts won’t be able
to get through. Think of it as a train of thought...’
To live a creative life, we must
lose our fear of being wrong.
Joseph Chilton Pearce
Even so some students can still look a bit disappointed if I say something that is
clearly unfunny rubbish. I can see them thinking, ‘Blimey! She’s the teacher, she
should do better than that.’
And I can do better than that. I can do worse as well. I have no control. I just let
it all come tumbling out. I say rubbish things, I say obscure things, I say puns a
child of five could have written, and I say great things, but I needed to say all the
other things to get there. So when students look at me that way I say: this is the
process. Often, to write one good joke, you have to write a number of mediocre
jokes, and before that a lot of half jokes and even more non jokes and ideas that
you’re not sure what to do with.
Don’t be ashamed of your methods. Don’t worry about the half jokes and non
jokes. Don’t shrink away and think they are crap, and therefore decide it means
you’re crap. NO, it’s part of the process. You are on your way to a fabulous joke.
If you shut down the process, you shut down your thinking and you shut down
your own potential. This especially applies when you are working with someone
else. If they say something and you say ‘Naaa, that’s rubbish mate,’ they’re
never going to say anything again. But if you take their idea and think about it,
you might be able to add to it or do a twist on it. It becomes part of the flow of
ideas.
There is the risk that you cannot
afford to take, (and) there is the
risk you cannot afford not to take.
Peter Drucker
I once had a student in my class who was very loud, bossy and critical. When I
put students into groups to work, I would hear her saying ‘Nope, nope,’ until her
team would be sitting in silence afraid to speak. During one of the sharing
sessions she confided that she often invited people round her house to write with
her.
‘They come round once and I don’t see them again’ she said.
I think she was lucky to get someone round once!
I’m glad my friends are not like her. If ever I try my jokes out on them I always
start by saying that some of them are rubbish, some are okay, some are half-
formed but ‘I’m going to read them all because I believe that’s what you have to
do in the joke writing process,’ and they nod solemnly while I go through
everything.
There’s always one joke I hate and they love and vice versa; they’ll always make
one comment that leads me to another thought and another joke and there are
always the duds that don’t work - but in the bigger scheme of things it doesn’t
matter.
We used to never say ‘no’ to each other, if we didn’t like each other’s idea
we’d just stay silent. Sometimes we were silent for so long we forgot what
we were being silent about.
Galton and Simpson
None of that could happen if I followed my prejudices and prejudgements – and
I do have them. I just live with them. I even send off ideas that I’m not sure
about, because you never know what others will make of things.
Some people I know are so self-critical they won’t even write something down
in their notebook, let alone tell it to anyone, which is crazy, because, you know
what? It doesn’t matter if you have a hundred unworthy sentences written down
if it leads to one joke. It’s not a testimony about your personality. No-one’s going
to read it at your funeral as a measure of who you were, so write it down and let
it go, or try and adapt it. See Honing (Chapter 13).
Here’s the news: creativity is a process. Creative people are simply better at
running this process (whether they do it consciously or not) than their less
creative (and slightly more envious) peers.
Joe Gregory
So don’t judge anything. See everything as part of the joke writing process. If
necessary, tell yourself that you will burn all your notes, but I have to tell you
that I used to keep all mine because sometimes you don’t see the joke until long
after you have written it. I would often go through all my old notes on a joke
hunt and would be pleasantly surprised. The joy of distance: leave something
long enough and you will have forgotten that you wrote it, then you will really
see what’s funny and what isn’t.
Summary
Sharing ideas is one of the most powerful joke writing tools we have. It’s
probably good for the soul too!
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