first it was sometimes strangely scary.
Perhaps we are all afraid to walk down an avenue when we don’t know the
outcome, in life and in joke writing.
But that’s what you have to do.
Action may not always bring happiness but there is no happiness without
action
Benjamin Disraeli
Joke writing is joke thinking, and joke thinking is going places that are mentally
scary and putting your thoughts on the line. Does it matter if you spend 10
minutes going down an avenue and it doesn’t work out?
If jokes were that easy to write we wouldn’t laugh so hard at them. A joke
writing brain is just one step ahead of all the other brains that we want to
understand and admire our joke. It can’t be outside anyone’s grasp, unless you
don’t understand jokes in the first place.
Jokes
are exaggeration, lateral thinking, twisting words, applying one situation
to another, taking things out of context, mimicking, slapstick, observation and
any combination of the above.
Ideas enlarge the mind, and once the mind has been stretched, it never goes
back to its original size.
Robert Mankoff
What’s more we all make jokes naturally to a greater or lesser extent. As I said
in the foreword I’m trying to mimic and speed up the brain’s natural joke writing
ability and that means exploring a lot of different avenues, and seeing which
ones work and which ones don’t. When you tell a joke it looks great that you
have walked down an avenue and got to the joke. The listener doesn’t know all
the avenues you tried where there wasn’t a joke. And we don’t need to tell them
about it we just need to be prepared to walk down those avenues to find jokes.
So each joke writing exercise in this book is a way to walk down an avenue. And
walking down an avenue is a metaphor for thinking.
It’s not just doing the exercises that’s important. It’s thinking about them. For
example, you could do a double joke-web and might stumble across a link.
Unless you think about how to use that link (by exploring
different avenues with
it) it’s just a link on a piece of paper. When you bash two subjects together
unless you think each one through you might not create any jokes at all.
I have been accused of making joke writing look easy in my classes and the
students find it much harder when they get home. The reason joke writing
exercises work in class is the sheer number of brains all going down different
avenues, so between us we cover every available base. There are no distractions,
there’s nothing else to do, they’ve paid me to make them write jokes so no
matter how scared, sceptical or reluctant they are at the beginning,
the group
energy will carry them along.
I know when some people do the exercises alone their old fears can kick back in
and that’s partly because it’s bound to take more time at home than it does in
class because you’ve got to explore each avenue yourself and you haven’t got
anyone to make you do it, so it’s easy to give up.
If you relax a bit you actually write more than if you’re worried about blank
pages and so on.
Graham Linehan
Believe it or not it works the other way too.
I find it much easier to come up with jokes when I am with a class than when
I’m working at home.If I get stuck at home now, I go through the motions of
imagining a class. When I take my class through each step I have to practise
what
I preach, I can’t abandon anything, I have to see everything through. And
you know what? It works, and the jokes come, some of them even written by the
imaginary students themselves!
You can do that too.
Imagine you are with a class, explaining the ideas, walk down each avenue with
them, see everything through and see the difference it makes.
I really do understand fear of thinking because sometimes in class even I have
felt like that but I can’t admit it or indulge it I just have to carry on, going
through the exercises exploring each avenue and walking my talk.
So if you hit a
blank and the fear comes up, you have a choice you can spend your time and
energy indulging in the fear or you can carry on working.
