Parallel thinking

[Brian J.]

Is anyone else having a problem with parallel thinking?

I wrote a joke last week in the News jokes section about Mubarak looking good for his age and how he must be doing whatever they do to preserve mummies. Then, last night, they said that it's proof that Egypt is good at preserving things.

A year ago, I would have been happy and taken it as evidence that I was capable of writing material of a professional caliber. Now, this is happening all the time and I feel like maybe my jokes are too generic.

In the book, And Here's the Kicker, There is a part where Steve Martin describes how Jack Handey's logic is so different from anybody else and that's what I'd like to accomplish.

[mikemayberry]

My friend and I used to play a game called beat weekend update and wrote jokes we thought Jimmy Fallon would do and would get a few of the premises and or punchlines each week. I think that parallel thinking is part of the deal with writing topical material.

[Unholy PCP]

I think that parallel thinking is part of the deal with writing topical material.

he's right, if its topical, there's bound to be similar takes on the topic. If I wrote topical jokes I would run into the same situation. No biggie : )

whats great is you're practicing thinking up jokes. focus on that

[MJEH]

The same situation happened to me as well. In the "News Jokes" forum, I did a line about Anderson Cooper being attacked by the demonstrators and all he was worried about was his hair getting messed up. I read where Jon Stewart ("The Daily Show") did a joke about AC's hair getting messed up by the attack. It happens with topical stuff.

[Keith Whitener]

Just write another joke, I'd say. Parallel thinking strikes me more of a fun thing than a problem.

[Dylan Smith]

The same situation happened to me as well. In the "News Jokes" forum, I did a line about Anderson Cooper being attacked by the demonstrators and all he was worried about was his hair getting messed up. I read where Jon Stewart ("The Daily Show") did a joke about AC's hair getting messed up by the attack. It happens with topical stuff.

Either that or one of his many writers is a user/lurker of AST and wants to keep his job.

It's possible!

[Cameron]

Just write another joke,

Aaaand that's it. End of thread.

[sneezix]

Either that or one of his many writers is a user/lurker of AST and wants to keep his job.

I was just about to say that!

[ErikNielsen]

Well, that's the danger with topical jokes. Let's say your typical one-liner is 15 words long. If you're starting with a topical premise, those first 10 are going to be the same for everyone. (Not strictly true -- you can focus on an aspect of the story to make the punchline work, but whatever.)

And then you have to go in a direction that's going to register to people. Because you have so little space to work with, this means you're going to have to fall back on something people already know -- in the above case, for example, you have two main options. You can do a punchline about how Anderson Cooper is handsome, or one about how Anderson Cooper is probably gay. If you have anything more nuanced to say about Anderson Cooper or the situation he got himself into, or any concepts the audience is not immediately going to get, you will probably need at least a couple more lines.

So the point becomes about the most economical/elegant way to say Anderson Cooper is handsome and/or probably gay. Which is why you end up with parallel thinking.

I mean, there are exceptions. But it is very difficult for monologue jokes to be truly original, because the subject matter is so rigidly proscribed. They can be well-done and ingenious, certainly. But it's difficult to make them parallel-thinking-proof, because you have to start in the same place as everyone else, and you more or less have to go in the same direction.

Whereas someone like Jack Handey isn't bound by either of those things. He can start with any premise he wants, and take it in any direction he thinks is funny. And good for him.

[MJEH]

Either that or one of his many writers is a user/lurker of AST and wants to keep his job. It's possible!

I was just about to say that!

Me three!! Wouldn't that be funny?!?!? "The Daily Show" writers get their material from a comedy site??!! OMFG!!! Jon Stewart's writers STOLE my material!!! Funny.

[Brian J.]

I'm not upset about the topical jokes, because those have a short shelf life and I've never told any of those on stage.

The bigger problem is I'm seeing jokes I thought of and hoped to use on stage on cartoons like the Cleveland show or American dad.

In the last year I probably had to throw away like ten minutes of material because i saw it on tv (new episodes, I never saw it before in case you think maybe I saw it and forgot) or another comic doing a similar joke. And it's always my cleaner jokes, so it sucks to lose those.

[MJEH]

Well, it goes to show you that there are people here (myself excluded) who should probably be writers for TV/movies/plays/etc.

[nixonjames]

in the last week i've noticed parallel thinking. i have to rewrite a whole bit i'd just started conceptualizing about hunting deer after watching chris d'elia's set. and i think i had another idea i was gonna work with i heard a local comic do on his album.

but i don't know if that means you have to toss the topic. just continue to unpack the idea til it's only understandable from your voice

[Brian J.]

I watched the pilot for Curb Your Enthusiasm and one of the story lines was about the pronunciation of Caroline and Carolyn. Do you think he heard it from Brian Regan and forgot?

A good tip I can offer about avoiding parallel thinking is to avoid sayings. Sayings like "It is better to give than to receive" or "I was caught red handed". Probably all of the jokes I've written involving sayings have been done before.

[pg13]

A good tip I can offer about avoiding parallel thinking is to avoid sayings. Sayings like "It is better to give than to receive" or "I was caught red handed". Probably all of the jokes I've written involving sayings have been done before.

Dude...you're fighting an unwinnable battle if you think that you can list all of the possible premise/topic choices that you should avoid because they've "all been done before."

All it takes is one inspired comedian to prove you wrong (like Louis CK's "Everything Is Amazing and Nobody's Happy" bit to prove all of the people putting "air travel" on hack lists wrong).

Beyond that...making jokes about "Sayings" (or "reworking cliches") is an important part of joke writing. The classic structure is there--as you're taking something familiar and making a change in a detail, thus creating surprise-based laughter if that change resonates.

The heart of the matter, and what you should really be keeping in mind is not so clear cut--but it is simply "all of the easy jokes on any given subject have probably been done."

So, stay vigilant, write smarter, and don't fall in love with your jokes.

pg--And, typically, the more personal your jokes...the less likely someone else will be able to come up with the exact same ideas you have...--seattle

[nixonjames]

A guy I turn too for writing advice generally says, 'Aim high' and 'Toss the first one'

Then he recommends you work any premise/joke/topic of interest through a 'mill' of writing techniques that bolsters the material. We don't see eye to eye on everything but when I've taken the time to actually do the whole process I don't run in to too many 'heard it before' scenarios.

But you have to push forward, you'll never do comedy if it's all been done before.

[ErikNielsen]

Well, i think there are two main schools of thought on comedy writing.

This guy you know sounds like a proponent of the "grinding" school of writing, where you start with the premise and run through punchlines until you find something. It has its advantages -- if you do the work and have a good eye for a punchline, it's relatively easy to generate a lot of solid material.

The downside, of course, is that the approach can come off a bit disjointed... if you have a premise that can support fifty different punchlines, at least some of those punchlines are going to be good, and a few might be good AND original.

But what you probably also have is a fairly nondescript premise. You may be the only person using Punchline No. 37, but there are almost definitely people out there tacking Punchlines Nos. 1-36 and 38-50 onto the same premise.

So you have to guard against making the joke feel like you've plugged an interchangeable part into a pre-existing framework... if the premise feels too rote, people might be writing you off before you even get to the punchline. (Get back there and reshape the premise after you decide on the punchline, so the joke feels like an organic whole!)

I mean, the opposite is a more intuitive method -- one where you rely on inspiration, start with the funny part and work backwards, etc. Which is more difficult, and it's tough to be very prolific like that. You need to have the joke construction skills to build structure into the joke, unlike the previous approach, which pretty much comes with structure. And of course you need to have the ideas in the first place. (I'd assume, with no real evidence, that a lot of comics start with the mechanical approach and then move in this direction as their ear for finding jokes sharpens.)

I mean, there are plenty of people who do really well with both methods, and of course with hybrids thereof. It's just a matter of what skills you have innately, and what areas of your comedy you need to consciously focus on to do well. (And of what kind of comedy you're writing -- if you're looking to intuit late-night monologue jokes, yeah, good luck with that.)

None of this is all that relevant to the original topic, by the way. Your intuition can throw up an obvious joke just as easily as a systematic approach can.

[Brian J.]

"all of the easy jokes on any given subject have probably been done."

This is what I should have said.

There have been many brilliant and original jokes based on sayings like Woody Allen's "Those who can't do, teach..." or Steven Wright's "Curiosity killed the cat." Where my lazy brain took that same saying and came up with "If curiosity killed the cat, then how is curious george still alive?" Which a million people have thought.

Something I've been doing is typing key words from my jokes into google to see if anybody else has thought of it.

[Dylan Smith]

Something I've been doing is typing key words from my jokes into google to see if anybody else has thought of it.

I try this, too, but sometimes it's difficult. I've been doing a joke that seems too obvious to be completely original, but as much as I search online to see if it's been done, I can't find anything.

"I've had guys tell me they break up with their girlfriends just to have makeup sex, which I think is absolutely ridiculous. Because I don't need an excuse to wear makeup."

The setup is typical, but the joke works.

[mighty hubris]

change "break up" to "fight"

you could probably delete "Because," too