Too Many Ideas

This may not be the normal thing for a comedian/writer to complain about but if you've been reading my blog you'll be aware that I can complain about pretty much anything. It's not that I'm a very negative person, I'm not, but I do tend to concentrate on the minutiae instead of the big picture. That's how I write my stand up too, I pick a situation, then I look for the little snippet of information that we all just take for granted and pick it apart. This strategy seems to work pretty well for me, most of the time.

I guess it works well for me because I fixate on an event and let it stew in my head for a while before writing about it. I'll have the makings of a joke churning around in my head for days if not weeks or months before I write it out and it becomes an official joke. That makes it sound like all jokes have to be written out and approved by the council, like planning permission for a joke extension.

Until a joke is properly fleshed out it's not funny enough, it's just a casual observation. And I just can't seem to flesh out ideas on paper, only in my head. This method of writing has failed me this week because, quite simply, I've had too many ideas.

I have had loads of ideas over the last week and they're all too far away from being funny for me to write down. My wife says that I should just spend a day writing them all out and then I'll have loads of new jokes that I can add punchlines to later. But I don't write that way! I write most of it in my head, I edit on paper but if it's not almost there by the time I write it down I will never make it funny. Again, I know this sounds stupid. It's kind of a superstition of mine, that if I write down an unfunny idea it'll never become funny.

(I am also aware that I'm going to be getting a lot of comments and emails pointing out that most of my jokes are unfunny etc... I'm waiting, do your worst.)

With too many ideas floating around in my head I haven't been able to find the funny bit in any of them. When I only have one or 2 ideas in a week it's great because I can be really neurotic about them and find an angle that others haven't noticed. But this week I've been drowning in an ocean of unfunniness.

That's not to say I don't often have unfunny ideas. I have loads of them. But I don't write them down because after a week of thinking about it I tend to notice that it's not funny. I also have loads of ideas that sound a lot funnier in my head than they ever sound said out loud. I had a joke this week about Steve Jobs resigning as CEO of Apple that I thought was hilarious on the day he resigned, but when I said it out loud to an audience that night, they chose to disagree with me. For the record, here's the joke:

"So, Steve Jobs resigned as CEO of Apple today. The Telegraph newspaper ran an article entitled, 'Steve Jobs - A Career in Pictures'. It was just a series of photos of Steve Jobs getting gradually thinner."

I thought it was hilarious! And to be fair, I still think it's pretty funny. When it didn't work I assumed the audience was wrong so I did it again the following night... nothing. Even after adding a reference to putting the pictures into a flip book, the audience wasn't having any of it. I know it's not a fantastic joke but, for a topical gag, it's not terrible. It's also the only thing I've written this week so I was putting all of my eggs into the one turtle-necked-basket.

That's the danger in topical gags, the desire to do it while it's topical means that my mind doesn't have time to realise that an audience won't like it. I'm not bagging on the audience for not liking my joke. They paid their money, they get to make up their own mind. Some of the funniest jokes I've ever heard have been said by comedians back-stage. Jokes that made a room full of comics cry with laughter but jokes that, all the comedians there unanimously agreed, an audience would never like.

But what will happen to all of the ideas I've had this week? I will probably forget most of them. Some of them probably weren't ever going to be funny anyway but there may have been one idea in the lot of them that, if i had thought of it on a slower ideas week, could have become a fantastic joke. I like to console myself by thinking that if it was a really good idea that I'll think of it again. But I probably won't. It's gone to die with my Steve Jobs joke.

It is a commonly held maxim that comedy is all about timing. People have always taken that to mean that the delivery of a joke has to be perfect to get the most out of it. While that's true, it's also true to say that writing comedy is all about timing the perfect moment to have the idea in the first place. Unfortunately you can't plan to have more or fewer ideas. Which leads me to conclude that writing comedy is more about good luck than I had ever thought.