Make Your Comedy Writing Fresh With These Audits

Is your writing stale and repetitive (to you)? Here are some left turns to try...

A quick reminder that Weekend Writers’ Room returns this Saturday, March 21.

You can pitch jokes, premise ideas, and other comedy ideas and get feedback. Hope to see you there!

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Today, I want to talk about getting stuck in your own patterns. It happens to the best of us.

Perhaps your writing feels repetitive lately. Perhaps you feel like you’re hitting the same voices, characters, themes, ideas, jokes, or whatever—over and over.

Or, perhaps you just feel like you’re riding along a big plateau.

This is all pretty normal. But I’d encourage you to try throwing a specific monkey wrench or two into your comedy writing comfort zone.

Here are five audits you can do with your writing, and five corresponding monkey wrenches you can chuck at it.

1. Voice audit: emotions and tone

Voice in writing, and in comedy, is a broad idea that encompasses a few things. First, obviously, it includes first vs third person perspective and variations thereof. We can call this, somewhat boringly, “literary voice.” More on that in the next item.

But voice also includes, broadly, what your narrator sounds like, or what your writing sounds like. Another way of putting it: What are the most common emotions and tones you adopt on the page?

Is your writing normally angry? Sad? Upbeat? Flat? Goofy and silly? Whimsical? Dry and droll? Matter of fact?

Is your voice closer to your normal speaking voice? Or is your voice really far away from your normal speaking voice, always endowed with some whacky character perspective?

What’s the dominant emotional tone or vibe to most of your writing, if any?

Make a list of the few most common emotional or tonal voices you use. Then list tones or emotions you rarely if ever adopt, or that your narrator rarely if ever adopts. Try writing a couple of pieces in those alternate, rarely used voices. You will learn a lot from this.

2. Voice audit: literary voice

Here are some of the main literary voices:

• First Person: The narrator is a character in the story—in fiction, often a protagonist—and speaks with “I.” Advantage: intimacy and immediacy. Shows us what the narrator knows, believes, and experiences. Comedy advantage: it’s voice-driven and character-driven, and great for getting laughs from an interesting, funny character or from an unreliable narrator.

  • Variation: First person plural: “we.” And interesting and infrequently used twist on first-person.

• Second Person: The narrator addresses the reader (or a character in the piece) directly as “you.” Advantage: Immerses the reader. Reader feels like a character or protagonist int the story. Can also create a sort of instructional, or hypnotic feel, like a guided meditation. Rare in fiction, but definitely a voice to play with in comedy, sometimes.

• Third Person Limited: The narrator uses “he”/”she”/”they” and sticks closely to one character’s thoughts and experiences. Advantage: Offers a balance of intimacy (like in first person) with some narrative distance.

• Third Person Omniscient: The narrator uses “he”/”she”/”they” and knows everything about all characters, events, thoughts, histories, and future possibilities (an all-knowing, god-like perspective). Advantage: More flexibility to explore multiple characters and settings, often with a more objective or authorial tone.

A lot of humor writing is done in the first person, or in a sort of generic third person—that perhaps feels closest to third person omniscient.

An easy audit: examine the literary voices in your writing for the past 6-12 months, or across your whole body of work. It should quickly be obvious whether you, say, tend to just stick to first-person voice-driven character pieces. If so, try writing some pieces in the third person, where the comedy is driven less by the narrator’s funny voice and more by the funny logic of the world itself.

3. Format audit

Are there specific humor formats you use more frequently in humor pieces? For example: First-Person monologue, list of jokes, listicle, short story, personal essay, etc.

Here are a few examples of formats in prose humor:

• First person character monologue: A super common humor format. The entire piece is a monologue delivered by a specific character. Example: I’m The Guy In The Photos Wearing A Bee Beard by Bev Potter.
  

• Inanimate object monologue: A twist on the monologue. The author shows us what an inanimate object might sound like, if it could speak. The object doing the monologuing can be anything from a piece of furniture to something entirely abstract like a meme, a scientific theory, or the square root of pi. Example: I Am a Giant Peach and I Am Here to Draft All the Jameses by Amanda Pastunink.