On Trusting Your Comedy Instincts

Who can you trust? Who has good taste?

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Alright, onto today’s post, inspired by some reader correspondence about a recent post…

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Reader Comment: On Taste

I wrote a story a few weeks ago about whether, and how, you should use other people as a guide to what’s funny.

The gist was: “Start with your instincts. Trust your instincts. You know what’s funny.”

Here:

If I Find It Funny, Will Other People Find It Funny?

But there’s still a handful of good questions about who else we should trust, if anyone, as an external barometer of good, funny writing.

A reader, Barry K, wrote to me with this interesting comment:

When you say “Trust your instincts,” what I understand by that is to trust what you think is funny, and emulate such writing and writers. This principle applies to learning from others how to write, period. When you say, “Do you instead think about what ‘the general public’ finds funny? Sounds like a recipe for bland, generic writing,” true enough. But the general public is in fact pretty bland and generic. - Barry K, Comedy Bizarre Reader

When I say trust your instincts, I’m starting with something basic, something more primitive than looking to other writers who you find funny.

I mean that when you write a joke, a comedy concept, a funny line, a raw idea—you’re confronted with whether it’s any good. You’re sitting there in solitude, at your desk.

And my contention is that there’s no substitute for relying on your gut: Do you like it? How much do you like it? Does it make you laugh at all?

If it feels good and funny, that’s great evidence that it is.

Trusting your instincts means treating your gut as the first and final authority on taste. When you’re alone and working on your craft, it’s best tune into that part of your soul that already knows what you love.

You are the emperor of your comedy empire.

Does that mean your taste is the only thing that matters, and that you should ignore everyone else? Not at all.

Barry is right: When you learn how to write, you look to writing that you like—writing that feels tasteful and excellent. And you learn from it and try to emulate it, to a degree.

This is the path of all beginners. If you want to get better, it’s unavoidable. We find things we admire and we learn from them. We take little elements and we make them our own. This doesn’t mean lifting some other voice wholesale. Hopefully not, anyway.

It just means osmotically absorbing little elements of great writing and integrating them with your own taste and craft. This kind of learning is also how we grow our taste and make it better.

Reading J.L. Borges and P.G. Wodehouse helped me to evolve my taste.

So, “trusting your instincts” means a few things:

1. Treating yourself as the ultimate arbiter of what you like and enjoy in writing and comedy. Relying on your gut.

2. Finding writers and comedians you love who make work that speaks to you. Then learning from them, and using their writing to evolve your taste. And osmotically absorbing bits and pieces of that writing into your craft.

And we should add:

3. Learning from and working with other writers whose taste you admire and respect. Finding peers who do good work.

Are these ideas in tension? Is it in tension to look to others but also rely on yourself? Not at all.

A great improv comedy teacher of mine, Miles Stroth, said it a little differently, but this idea always landed for me:

Off stage, improvisers have to be thinkers. On stage, go with your gut. - Miles Stroth

I love the idea because it distinguishes our craft itself where intuition guides us and our “off stage” growth where we think, learn from others, and evolve our taste and ideas.

So, you should learn a lot from those who came before you (the good ones) and from peers who are on your path (the ones you vibe with).

But your taste is the final authority.

Okay, now the next part.

When Barry say, “But the general public is in fact pretty bland and generic,” I think that’s part of the problem with looking to the general public as a tastemaker.

Big question: Is mainstream pop culture any good? Eh, some of it is. Some of it is not. I feel no need to be an elitist who looks down on everything popular. That’s stupid and self-defeating. Some writing, comedy, music, and art is popular because it’s good. Some very wide success is totally deserved. The universe blesses us with a very occasional Jim Carrey or Denzel Washington or Shakira.

But I also feel zero need to pay attention to everything popular. Sometimes the masses are dumb and wrong and bad.

There are very few sitcoms worth my time—too many of them of them are stupid and leave me cold. But I’ll always carve out time for the few killer exceptions like The Good Place or Seinfeld, both of which have great comedy writing.

I’ll decide on a case-by-case basis, thank you very much.

So, the general public having bland, sometimes bad taste is part of the reason why mass opinion is not the best barometer of great comedy.

But there are two other reasons. One is that mass opinion is not one thing. “What’s in!?” is so often a question with a hundred conflicting answers.

When you look across sitcoms, podcasts, YouTube channels, TikTok comedians, screen writers, New Yorker articles, stand up specials, and on and on, there are popular trends, sure, but “popular taste” is many things. Especially now, when the internet offers manifold options, a million and one flowers to choose from.

The risk of catering your writing to the “general public” is not just that public taste can be generic and derivative. It’s also that the task of catering is conflicting and incoherent: which public are you catering to?

Are you catering to the ones who like Seinfeld, or the ones who prefer Friends? They are often different groups. Some find Friends wholesome and funny and Seinfeld kind of mean and cold.

Or do you cater to the people who think Jack Handey’s The Stench of Honolulu is genius-level comedy madness, or the ones who think it’s incoherent drivel? I’m firmly in the “it’s genius” camp, but read the Amazon reviews (if you want a quick dose of depression). There are lots of 5-star reviews, but also way too many 1-star reviews from clueless people that just don’t get it. Which of these groups counts as “the public”?

Well, obviously both are. There really is no “one public” to cater to.

That’s why your taste should guide you.

The final reason to disregard popular taste is that what currently exists cannot tell you what is merely possible but not yet actual.

The comedy of the past and present is by definition the shit that other writers have already dreamt up.

If you want to be original, dream up something new. Be bold. This means tapping into your idiosyncratic taste—the part of your DNA that’s unique to you—and creating something that hasn’t existed before.

Following what “the masses” like can only ever be a guide to doing what’s already been done. And where’s the beauty and fun in that?