Writing comedy

 So, I'm writing comedy now.

I'm reading Greg Dean's Step-by-step guide to Standup comedy, which I was skeptical about when I started, but it's actually solid and does give you a clear path to understanding standup jokes and writing new ones. The techniques may not be super advanced, and the joke construction may be simple but one's gotta start from somewhere, particularly if somebody is not talented in the field, and that's possibly the best book to start learning comedy writing for performing.

I should write a review of the book once I'm done reading, but it's more of a reference book than an end-to-end reading, though it helps tremendously if one does read the book end-to-end before using it for reference. I'm learning a lot and my confidence in writing jokes has been growing. Also now I'm understanding that writing jokes is just like writing a blog, and the way you create a comedy routine is to string together a bunch of jokes with a segue and keep polishing the routine after performing them in front of various crowds until you perfect it. It's hard work and it can take years but you gotta start somewhere. Kinda like learning golf. Except people don't throw tomatoes at you if you're a bad golf player and also you're not playing golf for the entertainment of dozens of really drunk people.

It's exciting, I'm eager, his suggestions have already help me rethink a bunch of jokes I was thinking of taking to the comedy class that's starting in a week! Oh yea, the comedy class starts in less than a week, and I'm trying to read up and come up with at least a few minutes of material. The only thing I'm afraid of is the LPM metric, or the laugh-per-metric, they recommend you try to maintain it at 5 or above, which I think is going to be quite rough for somebody like me who's never done comedy before, but that's ambitious and I guess it'll help me set my aims high.