8 Comedy Principles That Changed Everything For Me

When Comedy Stopped Feeling Random (Comedy Minhdacks #103)

One thing I’ve realized over time is that a lot of comedians don’t actually struggle because they lack jokes, though some do. More comedians struggle because they don’t understand what makes jokes work in the first place. They get trapped chasing laughs without understanding structure, audience psychology, tension, credibility, rhythm, or expectation. I know because I’ve spent years working through all of that myself but also because I’ve seen it time and time again.

The longer I do comedy, the more I’ve come to see that good material usually comes from understanding a handful of foundational principles really well. Here are eight of the biggest ones that have changed how I write and perform.

1. Credibility matters more than many comedians realize: In any form of public non-fictional type of speaking, audience members cannot and do not disconnect the speech from the person telling it. Whether it’s a song, poem, sermon, prayer, lecture, or stand-up comedy set, that’s just how it works. I had a comedian friend tell me recently about a young comedian who opened with jokes about him and his wife being married for a few years. But then he suddenly shifted into jokes about taking a girl on a date the night before. Either the guy was lying to his wife or lying to the audience. Neither won the audience to his side and they immediately felt the contradiction.

When that happened, he lost credibility with the audience and they tuned out. That leads to the point that, once a comedian’s credibility breaks in a set, it’s game over. I’m not talking about embellishing or exaggerating here. I’m talking about how a comedian presents themselves to an audience and how the audience can pick up almost instantly on whether he/she is being authentic or not. That’s one reason most of my jokes are personal. It’s also why I make myself the butt of so many jokes. If the story belongs to me, I have permission to talk about it; I have credibility. That also means the audience doesn’t have to work to figure out whether I’ve earned the premise or the right to say what I’m saying. If it’s about me, there’s automatic credibility.

2. Emotional truth matters more than factual precision: I’ve talked about it many times on this site and in my podcasts, but crowds care more about emotional truth than historical/factual truth. Audiences are not sitting in a show fact-checking every detail of a joke. They’re listening for emotional honesty. If something feels emotionally true, people usually go with it even if details are compressed, exaggerated, or rearranged. It’s the same when people watch movies or sitcoms. That’s why perspective matters so much. A joke without the comedian’s opinion behind it often feels lifeless. This also plays into credibility, which I mentioned above. For me, I want the audience to feel where I stand before the punchline even arrives. Embedding emotional truth in the joke is a huge part of making that happen.

3. “Word smuggling” is one of the strongest tools in comedy: One thing I do constantly, pretty much in every single joke, is plant words that send the audience toward the wrong conclusion. I’ve seen others call this “word smuggling.” This is where specific words in the setup quietly guide a listener’s imagination one direction while the punchline suddenly redirects it. The early words create a completely different mental picture before the punchline flips them. That reversal is what creates a surprise, makes the audience realize they’ve been tricked, and that leads to a laugh.

4. Specificity creates stronger mental pictures: Generic details weaken jokes because they don’t force the audience to visualize anything clearly. As noted in the previous point, I use “specific words.” This is because specificity creates sharper images, and sharper images create stronger reversals. I recently wrote a joke about coaching debate students at a college. The setup makes people picture formal debate training. Then the punchline reveals the students will be shadowing my wife for a day because she always wins arguments. The detail completely changes the picture people thought they were building in their minds.

5. The last few words of a joke carry enormous weight. Everything before the punchline should build tension and expectation. The ending should release it and generate surprise. That’s why I spend so much time thinking about the final words of a joke. I test material out loud constantly because rhythm matters just as much as wording and euphony (good sound) is very important. Sometimes moving a single pause changes whether a joke works or not. Sometimes dropping a syllable or adding one can create a massive difference.

6. Comedy is far more learnable than people think. I don’t buy the idea that comedians are simply born funny. Comedy is art, but it’s also structure, rhetoric, psychology, and timing. Once I started studying how stories work and how people process surprise, joke writing stopped feeling magical and started feeling workable. The truth is, all of this is much more mechanical than it is mystical. I teach joke writing regularly now (to around 40 college students every Thursday), and I’ve seen people improve dramatically once they understand the mechanics underneath the laughs. Talent matters, but nowhere near as much as repetition and study.

7. Bombing is information, not failure: When a joke fails or doesn’t work or dies, I don’t just assume the material is bad. I want to know why it failed. That requires interrogating myself. Did I telegraph the punchline too early? Did I fail to establish credibility? Did the audience simply not connect to the premise? Every bad set contains tons of information if I’m willing to pay attention to it.

8. Many comedians wait too much and build too little: A lot of comedians want the hour special before they’ve built the foundation needed to support it. They stay stuck in open mic cycles hoping stage time alone will somehow carry them forward. I’ve learned to create opportunities instead. I started a podcast. I blog constantly. I produce shows. I teach comedy. I drive ridiculous hours to perform in unfamiliar places. None of that guarantees success, but it creates movement and waiting rarely, if ever, does.

At the end of the day, comedy stopped feeling random to me once I started studying how it actually functions underneath the surface. The laughs still feel magical in the moment, but the construction underneath them isn’t. The better I understand tension, expectation, credibility, rhythm, audience psychology, and work ethic, the more intentional my writing becomes. It’s the difference between hoping jokes will work and learning why they do or do not work.

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