I performed stand up comedy for over a year and I can relate to this (but I've got a computer science background). I was a one-liner instead of a story teller (even though I wished I was a story teller). Here's how my background in computer science helped:
* Getting a joke to work best often requires A/B testing
* I tried to choose my best jokes objectively. I'd watch my videos and keep track of the jokes that got the laughs consistently. I then wrote a program to sort jokes by the best ratio.
* There are lots of rules (though they are fuzzy). This kind of reminds me of programming language syntax. Like you should attempt to make the punchline the last part of the sentence. Start with your funniest joke, end with your second funniest (this rule might be reversed, I can't remember).
* Try to be as concise as possible. Usually if you can cut out words your joke will be more effective. This reminds me of removing DRY violations in code.
* Some jokes are really technical. They'd consistently get a laugh if every word was said in the exact tone and order they're supposed to, but if anything about the joke changed, it wouldn't "compile".
* Sometimes you'd think of a tag for an already existing joke. A tag is a joke that only makes sense in the context of the immediately preceding joke. This is like adding a feature to a legacy code base. It often requires refactoring and maintenance.
I like the way Marc Maron put it: One liners are the Math majors of comedy. Story tellers are the English majors.
In this case I think it means "trying out versions that isn't your optimal estimate a priori". If I were a comedian, I probably wouldn't dare do that, I would live for each performance and try to do each one optimally. Although I've heard from my comedian friends that to get really good, you need to bomb once in a while.
Most of the time comedians are performing at open mics. Unless you're in LA or NYC, this will be in front of the same people every time (other comics who are notoriously difficult to make laugh) and maybe 1 or 2 "civilians" (non-comedians). This is the place to experiment. You can think of it as a code kata or a prototype or something. It always sucks to bomb, but it's better to do in front of a few peers than a crowd of 300 civilians. Plus, no harm done, you have another chance tomorrow. It's not like you screwed up a system in production. The open mics are where you practice and figure out what works and what doesn't and what can work better.
Once you figure that out, then you go to booked shows (shows where you are specifically selected to perform) in front of big audiences like at the Improv or the Comedy Store. This is where you use your best jokes. But you can't know your best jokes before you try them out. You never know if something will be funny until you try it.
These are the fuzzy rules. Some people use improvisation at booked shows and some people perform the same jokes over and over again at open mics without experimenting but I'd say this is the standard path to take.
> This is the place to experiment. You can think of it as a code kata or a prototype or something. It always sucks to bomb, but it's better to do in front of a few peers than a crowd of 300 civilians. Plus, no harm done, you have another chance tomorrow.
True, but becoming less true in these days of ubiquitous high-res cameraphones. Used to be that if you tried out some risky or potentially offensive new material in front of ten drunks, the worst-case scenario was that you pissed off the ten drunks. Now you have to worry about pissing off the whole world, because any one of the ten drunks can record you and upload the video to YouTube for the world to see. Which makes it harder to "A/B test" new material than it used to be.
Yep, that's a valid concern, especially if you're already famous. (As far as I know) that was never an issue to me. It's good to be the peasant.
I don't know of a solution to this. No one wants to hear the same jokes for a decade. To get new "best stuff" you have to experiment. When you experiment, it may not be funny/ready. And with today's technology, it can be recorded at any time.
Similarly, we have a Circus Open Mic in Seattle (https://www.facebook.com/events/533760116677373/) where ground rules are that admission is free and open to the public but it's generally a supportive and in-community audience. We've had comedians, magicians, aerialists, acrobats, jugglers, extremely weird people, clowns, and strip history lessons.
I present both of these as ideas for ways to develop and grow without being subject to eternal Google search indexing and YouTubing by random civilians. I think both of these seem to come down to controlling the venue and rules. If you experiment in a bar or club, you're in the wild.
We do these in theatres, black boxes, and dance/performance spaces. This allows us to control the door.
We solve this problem in Clown Jam by essentially just being audience for each other. It's open to anyone who wants to come practice but no one is a "civilian" and there are reasonable person ground rules about posting pictures and video.
> I tried to choose my best jokes objectively. I'd watch my videos and keep track of the jokes that got the laughs consistently. I then wrote a program to sort jokes by the best ratio.
Thank goodness someone mentioned Tom Lehrer. He's "exhibit A" in the case for funny mathematicians. I wish there were a Youtube clip of Tom performing "New Math", but this is close:
Clever humor, a product of wit, mental sharpness which usually comes with the ability to make correlations quickly and creatively.
Mathematicians are trained to understand systems and manipulate it with the confines of certain rules - which is not unlike taking social system, beliefs, etc, and applying logic creatively and insightfully to create witty humor!
"Clever humor, a product of wit, mental sharpness which usually comes with the ability to make correlations quickly and creatively." - That's a good way to put it. Couldn't agree more!
I don't think the current generation of Simpsons writers would be the best group of writers to put this comparison to, but rather to the writers of shows like Futurama (which as I'm sure many devotees will know, consisted of a staff of mathematicians that actually developed proofs for plot continuity and one-offs).
Though, I don't think mathematicians really is the ideal here (hell, I'd even go one further and put magicians ahead of mathematicians). I prefer Conan O'Brien's observation that comedy is most similar to music and how musicians often make good comedians (and why stand-up comedy is inundated with musical comedians http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_musical_comedians). Because comedy is about character, point of view, timing and rhythm more than it is about formula.
There are plenty of comedians out in the world that make a living having read their share of formulaic stand-up books, tell their lazy formulaic jokes, get their easy laughs, collect a paycheck and burn out into obscurity or languish in D-List infamy. Or more relevantly, write mediocre episodes of an animated sitcom that stopped being funny 12 seasons ago aimed at a fan-base that watches out of habit.
Mathematics can provide the latter, but the former takes an approach that goes beyond the mathematical. That isn't to say that great mathematics can't produce great material, but like the mathematics of the Eulers, the Pythagorians, the Euclids, The Turings, and so many others, it takes subverting the problem at a slightly different angle.
Re: musicians. Perhaps that's just because this skill can be directly used on stage. Your entire set can be musical. I can't bring a laptop on stage and program as an entire set. Rather, I've never seen anyone do that. Also, musicians probably already have stage experience.
> Mathematics can provide the latter, but the former takes an approach that goes beyond the mathematical. That isn't to say that great mathematics can't produce great material, but like the mathematics of the Eulers, the Pythagorians, the Euclids, The Turings, and so many others, it takes subverting the problem at a slightly different angle.
What are you basing this off of? If you look at the top tier stand up comedians, they all have a variety of backgrounds.
Yeah, I find plot construction in fiction writing to be very similar to doing software development. There's a general high level outline that you start with, then as you follow the story the complexity increases as you have to tie in disparate story lines.
The same logic can be applied to a variety of other fields as well. Many formulations within mathematics, signal processing, machine learning, AI, etc follow this. Higher level problems in real life usually have to deal with unknown terrains and the techniques need to adapt to that.
I've performed stand-up comedy for nine years. I have an MA in mathematics from UCLA. And have been programming since I was a kid. My humor is definitely more on the clever side (http://richardkiss.com/).
Unfortunately, stand-up comedy is mostly dominated these by people trying to show how cool and selfish they are. All too often the punch line is a variant of "I'm an edgy and anti-social loser", aka the "I'm a piece of shit" school of comedy (a phrase I coined a few years back).
This is often coupled with a careless (carefree?) towards knowledge and fact, and discussion of mundane or trashy details about the comic's life that requires an audacious quantity of (undeserved) confidence to pull off, lest the audience realize they're being hoodwinked into listening to narcissistic drivel.
When most comics are not clever, the audience who show up are the kind of audiences who are not interested in clever humor. Clever people go to a comedy show and realize it's not aimed at them. This makes it even more difficult to try to do clever humor that requires the audience to think. Unless you're famous (and bring your own audience), live performances tend to be mass-market/lowest-common-denominator.
I find this very frustrating. I wish I could figure out a way to create a business model for comics whose style is not the dominant mode.
There is a notable book called Laughter by French philosopher Bergson. Its argument is that comical effects are reducible to something mechanical (mathematical) (mis)applied on some living thing.
This could be a better explanation than what I read here and in the article.
If you're interested in the subject, see Inside Jokes: Using Humor to Reverse-Engineer the Mind by Hurley, Dennett, and someone else. They critique Bergson (and many others) and conclude something interesting but which I can't remember because I'm traveling and don't have the book handy.
* Getting a joke to work best often requires A/B testing
* I tried to choose my best jokes objectively. I'd watch my videos and keep track of the jokes that got the laughs consistently. I then wrote a program to sort jokes by the best ratio.
* There are lots of rules (though they are fuzzy). This kind of reminds me of programming language syntax. Like you should attempt to make the punchline the last part of the sentence. Start with your funniest joke, end with your second funniest (this rule might be reversed, I can't remember).
* Try to be as concise as possible. Usually if you can cut out words your joke will be more effective. This reminds me of removing DRY violations in code.
* Some jokes are really technical. They'd consistently get a laugh if every word was said in the exact tone and order they're supposed to, but if anything about the joke changed, it wouldn't "compile".
* Like programming, it'll probably take 10 years to get good at it (see http://norvig.com/21-days.html )
* Sometimes you'd think of a tag for an already existing joke. A tag is a joke that only makes sense in the context of the immediately preceding joke. This is like adding a feature to a legacy code base. It often requires refactoring and maintenance.
I like the way Marc Maron put it: One liners are the Math majors of comedy. Story tellers are the English majors.