Why Your Best Jokes Keep Disappearing
The Comedy Habit That Saves Great Ideas (Comedy Mindhacks #123)
If you’re anything like me, you’ve had this happen before: You’re driving down the road, standing in the shower, mowing the lawn, or walking through the grocery store when a joke suddenly pops into your head. It’s clever, unexpected, and just funny enough that you actually think it’s worth using. Then, almost immediately, another thought arrives: “I’ll remember that later.” By the time “later” shows up, the joke is gone.
For years, when something like this happened, I blamed my memory. I figured I was simply getting older or becoming more forgetful, which I am, but let’s not dwell on that. The other truth I’m trying to get at is much less dramatic. In those situations, my memory wasn’t really failing me; I was simply asking it to do a job it was never really designed to do.
Several years back, while preparing to deliver a conference lecture on learning Ancient Greek, I came across the work of a guy named Hermann Ebbinghaus. Back in the 1800s, he ran experiments on how quickly humans forget. He found that we lose about half of what we take in within an hour, roughly 70% within a day, and nearly 90% inside a week if we don’t do something deliberate to hold onto it.1
Here’s the craziest part: The most massive drop in memory happens fastest right after the moment itself. So, that shower joke I was so sure I’d remember? Half of it was already slipping before I even got out and dried off. And this is exactly why I think one of the biggest mistakes comedians can make is trusting their brains to store ideas instead of trusting a system to capture them. We assume that because something feels memorable in the moment, it’ll still be there an hour later. That’s almost never true. Sometimes? Yes. Most of the time? No!
Ideas are surprisingly fragile. If they’re not captured quickly, they often disappear without leaving much of a trace. It gets worse when you look at what’s actually happening, for instance, when you’re driving. Working memory, the tiny front-of-mind space where a fresh thought first lands, holds maybe four things at once under real cognitive load. And without a chance to repeat it back to oneself, whatever’s sitting there decays in about 15 to 30 seconds. This means a person can’t rehearse a joke with lots of success while they’re trying to parallel park. So, it’s already gone by the time they reach for it.
I’ve experienced this often enough that I don’t argue with my brain anymore. The moment something makes me laugh, catches my attention, or feels even remotely interesting, I write it down. Sometimes it’s a complete joke. More often it’s a phrase, an image, or a strange observation that makes absolutely no sense to anyone but me. I’ve learned not to worry about whether it looks important. My only job is to keep it from escaping.
That habit changed the way I think about creativity. I used to believe great comedians had better memories than everyone else. Now I think many of them simply have better capture systems. Jerry Seinfeld famously worked off a yellow legal pad and marked an X on every day he wrote, refusing to break the chain. Louis C.K. was known for scribbling on napkins and scraps of paper and then transcribing them into notebooks later. Mark Twain carried a pocket notebook everywhere he went, and the ones that survived him are packed with thousands of raw, half-formed fragments. Robin Williams kept a small recorder on him during shows because he was terrified of losing anything he improvised on stage.
The point is that their notebooks, Notes apps, voice memos, and random scraps of paper aren’t signs of disorganization. They’re actually evidence that they understood something the rest of us often forget, namely, that our minds have incredibly limited capacity. Every day our brains are trying to remember appointments, conversations, passwords, grocery lists, family schedules, work deadlines, and a thousand other details. Then we expect them to faithfully preserve the tiny observation we had while waiting at a red light three hours ago. That’s asking far too much of a system that’s already overloaded.
There’s also a quieter cost to carrying uncaptured ideas around. Psychologists often talk about the way the brain keeps unfinished business cycling in the background and just won’t let go until a person closes the loop. David Allen built his whole productivity system around one line about this: The brain is for having ideas, not storing them.2 Every joke we try to hold onto is quietly eating bandwidth we could be using to notice the next one.
Looking back, I think this connects directly to something I wrote about recently that I called “Observation Debt.” The problem usually isn’t that comedians stop having ideas; rather, it’s that they stop capturing them. Every uncaptured observation is like making a deposit into an account someone immediately throws away. Eventually they sit down to write and wonder why the account feels empty.
I’ve also noticed something interesting about notebooks. The act of writing an idea down often creates two or three more ideas while recording the first one. One observation reminds me of another story. A single phrase unlocks a completely different premise. There’s actually a reason for that. When pulling one thought out and putting it on paper, the brain lights up all the connected thoughts around it. The retrieval itself fires the network. Capturing doesn’t interrupt creativity. It multiplies it.
These days I trust my notebook far more than I trust my memory. My notebook never tells itself it’ll remember something later. It never gets distracted by traffic, interrupted by a phone call, or loses an idea because it got hungry. It simply keeps everything until I’m ready to come back to it. Two philosophers, Andy Clark and David Chalmers, made an argument back in 1998 that still intrigues me: When we use an external tool reliably enough, it stops being a backup for our brain and starts being an extension of our brain; it becomes “coupled” with it, so to speak.3 That, in a way, is how I’ve come to think about my notebook/Notes app. It’s not where I store thinking. It’s where some of the thinking actually happens.
That’s why I think every comedian should build a capture system before worrying about becoming a better joke writer. Great writing starts long before a comedian sits down to write. It starts with becoming the kind of person who notices things and refuses to let them disappear. One’s memory is a wonderful place to have ideas, but it’s a terrible place to store them. A comedian’s notebook, when utilized well, is simply smarter than their memory.
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I discussed this and the concept of “The Forgetting Curve” several years back. See: T. Michael W. Halcomb, “10,000 Bad Performances: Embracing the Errors of Our Ways as a Key to Greek Pedagogy,” Annual Performance Criticism Workshop at SBL (2019).
See: David Allen, Getting Things Done: The Art of Stress-Free Productivity (New York: Penguin, 2015).
See Andy Clark and David Chalmers, “The Extended Mind,” Analysis 58/1 (Jan., 1998): 7-19.