creative maverick

Back when I did standup, people would often ask “How do you come up with your material?”

My answer it that it’s not as difficult as you might imagine, it’s all in the editing. Here are the steps:

1. Start a new Word document called “Comedy material”
2. Write down everything you can remember that you think is funny, including any riffs you get into when talking with friends
3. For several weeks, wherever & whenever a possible joke comes to you, write it in your comedy material file
4. Take what you reckon is the best of the material in your file and test it in front of a forgiving audience
5. Move the material that gets a laugh to the top of the file
6. Add new material into the file as it comes to you and test isolated bits of the new stuff within your working routine
7. Create your best routine out of your top 10% of material and go perform it. A lot.

(My own comedy material file is 30 pages long and the first 3 pages made up my 5 minute routine.)

To make it even simpler, it’s capture, test, edit… and repeat.