Jokes are everything to comedians. It all starts with the jokes. If you don’t have good ones, you’re not going to make it. Your job is to make people laugh, and that all comes down to whether the joke hits. A well-known comedian like Damon Wayans, Jr would say the same.
The real question here is, how do comedians write jokes? Let’s visit some of those ways.
Personal Experiences
Probably the most common way a comedian writes a joke is from personal experiences. Watch a standup show, it will be loaded with personal experiences or stories that actually happened in their life.
Good comedians know how to manipulate these stories into good jokes. Good comedians will know right away if the story will make a good joke and they will start playing with it in their mind until they can finally sit down to hone it in.
Observing
This is similar to personal experiences, but it doesn’t always have to be an experience that happened directly to the comedian. It could totally be something they see happen to someone else.
Real-life situations make for the best jokes. All comedians should have nightly sessions where they think about what happened throughout the day and just have a brainstorming session with a notebook to see if they got anything.
Creative Thinking
Great jokes can also be made up. It doesn’t always have to be a real-life experience. Sure real-life experiences are real, authentic, and easier to craft, but all great comedians need to have a creative mind to be able to create jokes that come from their mind.
This shouldn’t be too hard either because chances are those real-life experience jokes have some fictional aspect to them to make them a great joke. To be a respectable comedian, you’ll need to be a creative person.
Co-Writers
Comedians don’t always have to write their own jokes. They can have a ghost writer or co-writer for some jokes. Some people may be great at writing jokes, but could be lacking the ability to command a stage presence or crack the fear of performing in-front of a large audience. Their career path may not lead them down the route of being a comedian, but they still may like to write in your free time. Comedians should try to link up with people like this, as it could be beneficial for both parties.
