Generating Ideas for Stand-up Comedy

Generating ideas for stand-up comedy is difficult at the best of times. Just about any topic is open game, but that freedom doesn’t make joke writing easier. If anything, the brain needs constraint to help focus the creative muscle.

Here’s four constraints that we use at the Hard Knock Knocks comedy school to help our students generate ideas for stand-up comedy:

• Experiences
• Random Word
• Omit a Given

Experiences

Have you backpacked around Australia, Europe or the entire world? Have you had twins, or been brought up with five other siblings? All of these experiences make for good comedy. You just might not see it because it’s simply part of your life.

We spend around 40 hours of the week at work, so use this as a source for inspiration. Is there an odd colleague, strange manager, or Gollum-like creature in accounting? Alternatively, you could talk about some soul-destroying jobs you’ve had in the past. Again, bounce stories of your work life off another person and see which stick.

Even if your life has been relatively mundane (although everyone has a story), that in itself can be comical. If you’ve been married for 24 years to your first crush, or worked as an accountant since you graduated, then add a (fake) twist that will catch your audience off-guard.

Random Word

In the Hard Knock Knocks stand-up comedy course, we ask our students to click this link to generate a random word.

The skill of using random words is not to literally write a joke about a ‘flamboyant kidnapper’, but rather use ‘flamboyant’ and ‘kidnapper’ as inspiration and metaphorical stepping stones towards other ideas. For example, ‘flamboyant’ might remind you of the the Sydney Mardi Gras, which in turn makes you think about the cleanup effort of millions of tons of confetti. You’ve jumped from flamboyant to street party to confetti. Now write a joke about confetti (without any reference to flamboyant).

“Confetti. That’s what they call the result of a high speed crash in Italy.”

Or, together ‘flamboyant kidnapper’ might make you think about a murder mystery movie, which in turn makes you think about a little English town. Now, write a joke about visiting an English town.

“During the holidays I visited my ancestral home; a little village in England. It turns out, it’s so small everyone lives in the same house.”

Alternatively the word kidnapper might remind you of the movie Home Alone, and specifically Macaulay Culkin. This then reminds you of child actors in general. Now write a joke about child actors in the comments at the bottom of this article.

Omitting a Given

What do all restaurants have? You might have said “tables”. Now imagine a situation where a restaurant didn’t have tables. This is the premise. Answer the following:

• What happened to the tables? Maybe the boss has a phobia.
• How do your customers get served? Maybe they have to squat.
• Why are there no chairs? Perhaps a new law to reduce bowl cancer?

When you omit a given, you create a new reality. This creates new patterns of thinking and is an awesome way of generating ideas for stand-up comedy

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