How & Why Comedy Is Both "Art" and "Science"
Insights From Jimmy Eat World & Aristotle (Comedy Mindhacks #129)
When I was in college, I spent many hours driving up and down the East Coast with one of my best friends. We had started a band in high school and kept it going into college; we were an acoustic duo. We were living the dream: Playing music, eating terrible gas station food, and listening to Dashboard Confessional, Weezer, John Mayer, and, among others, Jimmy Eat World on repeat. It was obvious, even then, that some albums become more than music to us; they become part of who we are. Today, every time one of those songs comes on, I’m instantly transported back in time. Nostalgia immediately sets in.
Jimmy Eat World, in particular, has been a decades-long soundtrack for me. Their music has lasted through more than just one season of life. I’ve been blessed to see them live in a packed arena back in Ohio then again in a tiny venue in Hawai’i. Somewhere along the way, being the good dad that I am, I introduced my kids to their music, of course, and now they know the songs that shaped so many miles of my own life. All that and more is part of the reason why I was genuinely excited when the band recently started releasing a video series celebrating the twenty-fifth anniversary of Bleed American.
When I first started watching, I was really only expecting one of those nostalgic trips back to college. I got that. But I’ve also found myself taking notes in relation to stand-up comedy. The more I listen to the band and to producer Mark Trombino explain how those songs were written, arranged, edited, and rebuilt, the more convinced I became they were describing a very similar process I go through when writing jokes.
Interestingly, I also recently enrolled myself in Dr. Ben Byer’s “Classical Logic and Rhetoric” course (what can I say, I’m truly a lifelong student/learner). The intersection of his course with the Jimmy Eat World episodes has helped me finally put words to something I’ve been saying for a while now without ever really defining it, namely, that joke writing is both an “art” and “science.” I was never saying that to simply sound smart or insightful; I really believed that. Even so, given what I know now, I don’t think it’s particularly helpful to say that until I give those words some teeth.
I think the philosophical distinction between “art” and “science” is, as Dr. Byer points out, a fundamental Aristotelian concept: The mind naturally apprehends universal concepts (like “treeness” or “awkwardness”) through simple apprehension (we’ll call this observing/seeing the “science”), but actually articulating or producing a tangible reflection of what’s been seen requires the deliberate tools of the “art.” This dance between the “science” (contemplation and observation) and the “art” (craft, structure, and production) is, in my view, the secret engine of both a timeless rock album and a legendary stand-up special because it’s the engine of creativity.
All the jokes, books, sermons, lectures, songs, podcasts, and articles I’ve written over the years started with the “science” part, that is, simple observation. That, in fact, is much of what the “Scientific Method” is all about, observing and hypothesizing. It’s learning to notice patterns, contradictions, emotions, and universal truths about how people actually live. Good science doesn’t create jokes or anything else, it simply discovers the reality of what’s already there.
That’s why I spend so much time talking writing about things like curiosity, carrying a notebook or notes app, and paying attention to everyday life. Those aren’t writing techniques. They’re ways of strengthening the science. Before I can ever write a joke about airport security, awkward family dinners, or self-checkout machines, I first have to notice something true about them. If I don’t have an observation, I don’t have anything to build.
The “art” of comedy, however, is something altogether different. The art is what happens after the observation. It’s the editing, the timing, the word choice, the pauses, the callbacks, the act-outs, the escalation, the structure, and so on. The art doesn’t discover truth. It manufactures an experience that allows an audience to feel that truth together.
Listening to/watching Jimmy Eat World describe Bleed American, I realized they were constantly moving back and forth between those two worlds. The songs began with emotional observations (science). One track captured the feeling of finally finding your place in a crowd. Another reflected uncertainty, longing, or hope. Those feelings weren’t the finished songs. They were simply the raw materials. The real work came afterward as they argued over the art: Drum fills, simplified rhythms, rewritten guitar parts, experiments with arrangements, and searching for exactly the right emotional payoff.
Joke writing works the same way. I can observe that airports are ridiculous. That’s science. I can notice that parents have invisible rules, marriages create funny misunderstandings, or people behave strangely in grocery stores. That’s still science. None of those observations automatically become funny simply because they’re true.
The art begins when I ask a different question: How do I turn this observation into laughter? Suddenly I’m rewriting setups, deleting unnecessary words, moving punchlines, changing my tone of voice, trying different act-outs, and experimenting with tags. That’s the art. The observation (science) may have taken thirty seconds. The craftsmanship (art) might take thirty days or three years.
For me, I find thinking about it this way super helpful. When I can’t think of any new ideas, for instance, I no longer assume I’m struggling with joke writing itself. Nope! More often than not, it simply means I’m struggling with observation. Or, put differently: My science has stalled. On the other hand, when my notebook is overflowing with ideas that never seem to get laughs, I know the problem probably isn’t observation at all. Instead, my art needs work.
Again, that simple distinction has been surprisingly freeing because it gives me better questions to ask: Am I spending enough time noticing and collecting enough raw material? Or, have I gathered plenty of material but failed to shape it into something worth sharing? Those are two very different problems, and they require two very different solutions.
In their short documentary series, the members of Jimmy Eat World aren’t trying to teach comedians anything at all. They’re simply talking honestly about their creative process. Even so, I can’t help but notice how closely what they’re saying mirrors what happens when I sit down to write a new joke or bit. The medium may be different, but the creative journey feels remarkably similar.
That’s one reason I’ve become increasingly interested in studying musicians, novelists, filmmakers, psychologists, theologians, and teachers alongside comedians. They’re all trying to solve problems. They’re all trying to transform ordinary human experiences into something another person will never forget. The tools may change from one discipline to another, but the underlying challenge remains remarkably consistent.
So, I now have something worthwhile to point back to when I say comedy is both an art and a science. The science teaches me to see things, especially what everyone else might overlook. The art teaches me how to build something from what I’ve seen. Observation (science) spots the comedy. Craft (aft) manufactures the laugh. I’m convinced that, to become a great comedian, I need to be a lifelong student of both.
Along the same lines, let me just say that, if ideas like this are helpful to you, that’s exactly why I wrote Comedy Mindhacks. My goal here isn’t simply to help comedians write better jokes. It’s to help comedians understand the invisible thinking behind better comedy. Every mental model becomes another tool for building momentum, and over time those small shifts in thinking have a way of producing much bigger shifts on stage.
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