How Do Comedians Write Jokes | 20 Bedford Way

Writing a good joke is a genuine art form. The idea that a joke just springs into being, conjured from thin air, couldn’t be further from the truth in most cases. However outwardly simple they may appear, a joke is a complex beast and will have been tweaked and endlessly rewritten, trailed on audiences and refined some more before it is finally ready. In this article, we find out how some of the biggest and brightest talents on the comedy scene go about writing their jokes.

Comedy Secrets Revealed…

Tim Vine

Image by Paul Bailey via Wikimedia Commons

Typical Joke:  “I decided to sell my Hoover… Well, it was just collecting dust.”

Tim Vine is the master of the one-liner, having won the ‘Funniest Joke of the Fringe’ accolade twice – no mean feat! In 2014, he won with his above effort on vacuum cleaners.

Vine told the Guardian that he writes 15 new jokes per day on a postcard. What method does he use to generate so many one liners?

In an interview with the Independent, Vine revealed that he often works backwards, writing from punchline to set-up. “I hear punchlines in everyday conversation and think, ‘How could we get there in a different way?’ If someone says, ‘Serves him right,’ I’ll think, ‘Right, OK… A friend of mine’s got a left arm missing. Serves him right.’”

Once perfected on paper, Vine will then test his jokes on an audience until they are at their most potent. “I know it sounds daft, but sometimes you think to yourself, ‘Which way round shall I put it?’” Vine says. “‘I’ve got a friend who’s a tent peg. He’s driven himself into the ground.’ It doesn’t really get much. But you could do, ‘I’ve got a friend who’s driven himself into the ground. He’s a tent peg.’ It may never get beyond a weak laugh and I’ll drop it. Or I’ll tell it and shout, ‘Come on!’ after it.”

Shappi Khorsandi

Typical Joke: ‘What Iran needs now is a more modern leader – a mullah lite.’

Shappi Khorsandi is an Iranian-born British comedian who started out in comedy back in 1997. It wasn’t until her 2006 sell out Edinburgh show Asylum Speaker that things really took off and she established herself as one of the UK’s leading comedians.

In an interview with Beyond the Joke she talked about her writing process: “In stand up, the important stuff goes on before any actual writing happens. I’ll have a strong emotional response to something, an incident, something I’ve seen or heard. If it dances about in my head bothering me, I get on a stage and say it in front of an audience. If I’m relaxed enough, a punchline will eventually arrive. Then I write it down, do it again better, write that down. Each time I tell it, it becomes sharper.”

Khorsandi goes one step further than most comics and actually uses the live environment to discover her jokes, relying on her comic brain to find the punchline. The process of refinement then begins.

Demetri Martin

By Tammy Lo from Brooklyn, NY (Demetri Martin @ Revenge of the Bookeaters) [CC BY 2.0] via Wikimedia Commons