5 Old Advertising Tactics for New Joke Writers
Psychology Hacks (Comedy Minhdacks #107)
One thing that fascinates me about comedy is how often the best lessons come from outside comedy itself. For me, it happens all the time. Some of the most useful things I’ve learned about joke writing, for instance, have come from rhetoric, storytelling, psychology, theology, teaching, and even advertising. Recently, I was reading some old advertising theory from the early 1900s by a guy named Claude C. Hopkins.1 While his book has some age on it, I immediately realized how aggressively applicable it still is today to stand-up comedy, especially joke writing. You see, comedians and advertisers are fighting the exact same battle for the same exact thing: attention.
That’s really the game underneath all this. Walk into a restaurant and look around and you’ll see families with their faces in their phones. That’s because attention is scarce! Walk into a classroom and you’ll see students scrolling socials. That’s because focus drifts fast! Getting and keeping peoples’ attention is really the end-goal. A stand-up comedian wants people to focus their attention on them. So, whether I’m trying to keep a crowd engaged during a show or an advertiser is trying to keep somebody reading an ad, the mechanics underneath the process are surprisingly similar: Get and keep peoples’ attention!
Knowing that as a comedian is huge. It’s clear that comedians like Dave Chappelle, who is a master storyteller, know this. And if it’s good enough for him, it’s good enough for me. So, here are five old advertising tactics that I think are insightful, beneficial, and apply directly to modern joke writing.
1. Every Setup Is Making a Promise: One thing early advertisers like Hopkins understood extremely well is that headlines create expectations. If the headline promises one thing (i.e. oversells) and the product delivers something else (i.e. underdelivers), trust collapses immediately. Comedy works the same way. Every setup silently promises the audience a certain kind of payoff.
That’s why weak setups destroy otherwise decent punchlines. If the setup points the audience toward the wrong emotional tone or creates unclear expectations, the punchline struggles to release the tension properly. I think many comedians often focus entirely on endings while ignoring the fact that the setup is secretly controlling the audience’s emotional posture the entire time.
I pay attention to this constantly now. If I open a joke sounding sincere, frustrated, confident, nervous, sentimental, or irritated, the audience begins processing the punchline differently before it even arrives. To put it another way, the setup alone is already steering interpretation of the punch long before the punch even happens.
2. Specificity Creates Believability: Hopkins and advertising copywriters in his day knew that vague claims disappeared from people’s minds almost instantly. Specific details, however, create mental pictures, and mental pictures create emotional investment. Comedy operates the same way because specificity strengthens both visualization and credibility at the same time.
If I tell the crowd I have a “bad car,” they barely picture anything in their minds. If I say I bought a white Tesla, the kind where the doors that open toward the sky, suddenly the audience starts constructing a very specific image. The setup, in other words, is much more active in the crowd’s mind because they’re participating in the picture-building process. That’s what I want to happen every time, I want to create word pictures in their heads; I want them to build assumptions in real time. The clearer the image I create, the stronger the reversal can become once I disrupt it.
3. The Audience Needs Direction: A lot of early advertising theory focused on guiding attention intentionally. Good ads move the reader through a sequence psychologically instead of just dumping information randomly all over onto the page. (I can’t stress how important knowing some basic psychology is for storytelling and joke telling!) Strong joke writing works the same way. The comedian is guiding attention step by step toward a very specific emotional and cognitive destination.
I think this is where a lot comedians lose momentum. They observe something relatable, for instance, and then share it, but the observation never really becomes a joke. The audience recognizes the observation but they don’t feel tension increasing because the comedian never guides them toward a meaningful reversal. Here are a couple of questions to ask in this regard: 1) Is tension increasing here? 2) Is the audience subconsciously leaning forward toward a conclusion? If not, the setup usually needs work.
4. Testing Matters More Than Guessing: One thing those old advertisers obsessed over was testing. They constantly compared headlines, wording, and structure to see what actually produced results. Comedy should probably be approached much more similarly to this than many comedians admit or are willing to admit (though, I’ve heard many seasoned pros say this kind of thing repeatedly).
I’ve mentioned it numerous times on this site before, but bad sets are often incredibly useful because they expose weaknesses: Maybe the setup was unclear, maybe the audience did not trust me enough yet, or maybe the wording accidentally telegraphed the turn too early. Here’s a very healthy way to think about stage time: It’s professional experimenting. Obviously, I still care about good performances, but I also realize this is all experimenting, it’s all working things out. And I must say, going at it this way takes a lot of pressure off my shoulders.
5. The Best Comedy Feels Useful: One thing people like Claude Hopkins understood was that audiences respond better when they feel helped rather than pressured. I think strong comedy works similarly. The audience should feel like they are receiving something meaningful rather than simply being targeted for laughs. That doesn’t mean, of course, that every joke needs a moral lesson attached to it. I’m not saying that!
I just mean that audiences respond differently when comedy offers recognition, relief, honesty, insight, tension release, or emotional clarity. Interestingly, some of the best comedians often feel generous even when they are being dark, sarcastic, or aggressive. That realization helps me view the audience less as a wall standing between me and their approval, and more about the whole thing as a contribution. For instance: What perspective am I offering this room? What tension am I helping release? What emotional experience am I creating for people sitting there listening? If I’m unable to answer those questions, I’m not giving them anything of worth.
The older I get, the more I realize comedy depends on a handful of very old human realities that haven’t changed much at all. Attention still matters. So do expectation and emotional tension. Audiences also still respond to clarity, specificity, rhythm, surprise, and trust the same way they always have. Put another way: While the technology around us changes constantly, human psychology barely changes at all. And it’s good for every comedian to know that!
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Claude C. Hopkins, Scientific Advertising.