Why I Write Jokes I Know Won't Land
A Mental Shift for Rewiring How You View Bad Sets (Comedy Mindhacks #93)
I have one place I keep all my jokes. In it are the jokes that work, ones that don’t work, ones I’ve retired, ones I’m still working on, and some I haven’t even tried yet. It’s less of a system and more of a running record of what I’ve done on stage and, to some extent, what I’ve avoided. Over time, I’ve come to the conclusion that, when I write jokes, it’s imperative that I don’t have the mindset that I’m out to write the world’s funniest joke; instead, I write with the simple expectation that what I produce should have the shape of a joke and be funny to me. I don’t care if others think it’s a terrible joke or not. At least I’m writing and, well, that’s the goal.
In developing joke-writing techniques, I know how to move through jokes and pretty much write, in a matter of minutes, jokes about anything. I know how to start and where the laugh is supposed to be. I can feel the rhythm before I even say it out loud. But one of the silent killers here, one of the enemies, can actually be familiarity because familiarity brings comfort. I can get too comfortable with my process. And if I’m never doing anything unfamiliar, anything new, I can start to get stagnant and not grow.
Of course, this isn’t just a comedy problem. More than anything, it’s a psychological problem. Psychologists call this a fixed mindset: a mentality where a person treats their skills as something to defend instead of something to develop. Thus, if I were to only write jokes that work or only try to write the perfect joke, I’d be protecting my identity as someone who is funny, instead of becoming someone who is getting better at being funny.
Because of this, I’ve found it helpful to think about my writing in two lanes. One lane is built for reliability, that is, the jokes that can carry a set when things feel unstable. The other lane is built for exploration, a lane for the ideas I don’t fully understand yet or that haven’t been as polished or developed yet. As one would expect, the second lane always feels riskier, but it’s also where growth happens. Approaching things this way is to approach them with what’s called a growth mindset, a mentality where failure is not a verdict, but simply information.
In a growth mindset, bombing still feels like failure when it happens; that part doesn’t change. The difference is: when I look back on bombing afterward, I’ll do so for information so I can improve. And it really helps to look at specifics, which many comedians are afraid to do because it may force some admissions about sucking in that moment. Maybe sometimes the setup wasn’t clear or I rushed. Maybe sometimes I assumed the audience was with me when they weren’t. That kind of feedback is uncomfortable, but it’s also precise and super helpful.
There’s another layer to this that took me longer to see. A lot of what I might call “bad sets” are really just moments where my expectations didn’t match reality. Psychologists also talk about prediction error, the gap between what we think is going to happen and what actually happens. I believe comedy lives, moves, and has its being in that gap. When the audience doesn’t laugh where I expected them to, that gap is not just failure, it’s data.
I had a bit about being a dad that I worked on for months. It wasn’t edgy or shocking. It was just honest in a way that made me uncomfortable. The idea was simple: As a parent, sometimes I don’t step in right away because I’m hoping the problem fixes itself without me. But I couldn’t get it to work. So, I softened it and tried to make it sound more reasonable. But every version of it stalled.
The first time I said it straight, without at all trying to clean it up, I felt a bit of hesitation. Of course, I could’ve adjusted it and made it safer, but I didn’t. I just said it. There was a pause, then a real laugh. It wasn’t a huge laugh, but enough that it felt like recognition. That moment taught me something: When a joke doesn’t work there are two easy reactions: 1) I can drop it and move on; or, 2) I can blame the room and protect my ego. Both feel good in the moment, which is why they’re so common among comedians, but neither one helps with improvement. What helps is going back and asking where I lost my way and the joke lost its shape.
And, instead of labeling the joke, bit, or set as bad, I try to reinterpret what happened. I ask questions like: Where did I lose them? What assumption didn’t land? What did I skip? Why am I talking about this? Because this sort of practice as a comedian shifts me from judgment to analysis, which makes it a lot easier to return to the material instead of avoiding it. And really, it’s never about the joke itself but what the joke reveals about me, and whether I’m willing to sit with that. Let me put it another way: I’m learning as a comedian, but also just as a human, that my job isn’t to avoid failure; it’s to work with and through it. But, of course, that only happens if I’m willing to write things that fail on a regular basis. So, it’s helpful to constantly remind myself that failure isn’t the opposite of success in comedy; it’s just part of how the whole thing works. So, go write some jokes!
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