Photo: Rebecca Kerswell / Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0. Michael Kosta at the Super Serious Show, Los Angeles, 2016.
You do not need a persona, a tight five, or a bit about your childhood. You need one sentence that turns. The rest of standup is reps. The first job is writing something you can say out loud in a room that did not ask for it.
If you have never gone up, read How to Start Stand-Up Comedy after you have five premises. This is how you get those premises.
A joke is a turn
Setup points the room one way. Punch lands somewhere else. The laugh is the gap. If both halves say the same thing, you have a comment. Comments do not get laughs. Turns do.
“I got a dog” is a fact. “I got a dog so someone would be happy to see me when I got home” is still a fact. The joke starts when the second half is not the reason you thought you were hearing.
You do not need a formula tattoo. You need to hear the first half and know the second half is a different door.
Start from one specific true thing
“Dating” is not a joke. “My last date asked what I did and I said standup and she asked if that was a real job” is a place you can write from. The more specific the first picture, the easier the turn.
Write down things that already happened. A text. A job. A family sentence you have heard twenty times. A thing you did that you would not put on a résumé. Then ask what the room thinks comes next, and write the other thing.
If you cannot point to the night it happened, you are writing a topic. Topics sit on the page. Nights turn.
One punch. Tags later.
New comics stack three endings on a joke that never had a first one. Write the turn. Stop. Say it out loud. If they laugh, you can add a tag: one more sentence that uses the same turn. If they do not laugh, another ending will not save it.
A tag is not a new joke. It is the same door, opened again. If you have to reset the setup, you started a second joke. Put it on the next line in the notebook.
Say it in one breath
If you cannot say the whole joke without grabbing air in the middle, it is two jokes or it is too long. First-mic jokes die in the extra clause. Cut the why. Cut the “basically.” Cut the second example that proves you were right.
Read it to the wall. Then read it faster. The version you can say while walking to the fridge is the version you can say with a light in your face.
Do not explain the punch
The room either got the turn or they did not. “You know, because…” is you doing their job for them. If they missed it, the setup was muddy. Fix the first half. Do not narrate the second.
Same rule after the laugh. Let it sit. Talking into a laugh is how you teach a room to stop giving them to you.
Bring five, not one
One precious joke is a hostage situation. Five premises is a set. Some will die. That is the point of a first mic. You cannot tell which ones from the couch.
Write them the same week you go up. Do not polish one line for a month. Take the five, time them, and leave. The next morning you will know which turn was real.
Then you can lock a five with How to Develop a Tight Five, or use the mic to play with How to Have Fun at Open Mics. If you are in Southwest Florida, the rooms are here.
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