The impatient scribbler

This is not much of a secret, yet not a well-known fact too – standup comedy begins with writing. While the people around you may have told you that you are funny, to make that translate into a solid act on stage, takes some work. Pages and pages of work, unless you plan to type it out on a computer. In which case, it’s a lot of use of BACKSPACE.

Most standup comedy is basically ‘hurried storytelling’. In a story, you have ample time to paint a scenario, in fact even the luxury to share unnecessary information. In comedy, anything that does not contribute to the set up is deadweight and a punchline is prime real estate.

To give a Harry Potter reference, when I read page 231 of Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets, my world shook; the story reveals that ‘Tom Marvolo Riddle’ transforms into ‘I AM LORD VOLDEMORT’ – this was the punchline. While JK Rowling had the luxury to take 230 pages to reveal this show stopper, a standup comedian would need to do pull this off by the end of page 1.

Now, why scribbling? My writing typically begins with scribbling. These are ideas. Not sentences. Any reasonable human cannot make sense of it. Sometimes, when I look at something I myself had scribbled a long time ago, I wonder what that meant. A lot of these scribbled items are meaningless, either they lack a punch or they are too vague for comprehension.

More to come on this topic. Stay tuned for something related to boredom.