One of the hardest things to do for a comedian is to develop new material while simultaneously paying the bills. If you are hired by a comedy club, you can't foist half baked ideas on a paying audience. If your new jokes don't work, the chances of the comedy club rehiring you in the future are negligible.
Most shows I am able to try one or two new jokes, that way if they do not go well, at most 30 seconds have gone by and I can switch to an old joke and maintain the momentum.
Unfortunately, there a few problems to this approach. Number one, jokes get developed at a snail pace, particularly because you sometimes have to try one joke seven or eight times in different ways before you have a working draft. Number two, sometimes if you sandwich a new joke between two great ones, it creates a false impression of how good the joke is as you have built such a momentum that the audience would laugh at anything you say.
To really know if a joke is good enough you have to be able to TRY IT COLD surrounded by other new jokes. Famous comedians have the option of doing 'work in progress' gigs where they are on stage with a notebook and their fans will happily come watch them try out an hour of ideas. I'm not there yet, so my new jokes are generally test driven to paying audiences.
Yesterday I was doing a lower paying gig so I seized upon it as an opportunity to try out a lot of new jokes in one go. However, I still couldn't sell the punters short. Imagine my new jokes were all rubbish. My solution was to make a game out trying out my new jokes in a random order determined by one audience member. Whenever a joke failed another audience member would suggest a random old joke for me to do. In this way I managed to try 25 minutes of new jokes in a 41 minute set.
Here are 10 excerpts, five jokes which worked as planned, and five which didn't. In the first excerpt I set up the game and tell a joke I wrote on a train traveling towards the gig.
The next joke is the expression of an idea that has been in my notebook for a few weeks.
Some jokes I write are really stupid. This does not mean they are not funny.
The next premise is brilliant. Really! It's the best premise of the jokes I tried yesterday. The joke fell hopelessly flat though, and yet sometimes it does not matter because I know that in future drafts I'll be able to milk every morsel of humor from it.
Comedy writers keep their ears open for odd sayings. This next premise will also be much better once I perform it a bit and do some acting work on my French accent.
The next joke may have been a tad too obvious.
The next one will surely be part of my 'Love Sucks' one man show.
The next one was also written for 'Love Sucks' but will most likely NOT be part of the final show.
The next one began life as a tweet which lots of people retweeted.
And finally a story.
And the path from blank page to new one man show continues...
