Expert: Matt McDonald - 11/29/2007

Question
I have a question:  I really want to be a comedian, what kind of research do comedians do for jokes, and etc?  Other information would be great, thnks!

Answer
I really want to be a comedian, what kind of research do comedians do for jokes, and etc?  Other information would be great, thnks!


>what kind of research do comedians do for jokes, and etc?

It depends on what you would consider research. Many comics would tell you they don't do any at all, because they don't make trips to the library, or read books/magazines, etc in order to form their jokes. I don't know that any would use the word "research" for any part of their process. For most comics, the process is about writing and re-writing. However, most comics do have some sort of material-development process that begins with "data collection".

For example, I would often go places to people watch, like the airport or malls, because it would usually spur my inner dialogue and help me develop premises. Most of the other comics I worked with had similar methods. On the other hand, if you want to be a political comic, you would obviously have to be diligent about keeping up with developments, and that would probably require some measure of true research.

So the method is often dependent on the comic, his/her style and what helps him/her think. Every comic develops their own writing regimen, with some being very loose and unstructured and others very purposeful and structured.

Additionally, I think you can consider stage performances of new jokes to be research. Often times you'll write a new joke or bit and think it's perfect, and then when you do it on-stage, you find a problem: it's too long from setup to punchline, it's too wordy to actually tell correctly, the cadence is off, etc. So then you have to take that and use it to hone and refine the joke. It might take 5, 10 times on stage before you're ready to pronounce the joke complete and decide whether it's good enough to continue using.

Finally, comics often help each other write, and that process can take a lot of back-and-forth structuring, reworking and changing of a joke. So that might be considered research in the sense that you're working in a group. But I think that's a bit of a stretch.

The vast majority of a comic's work is in the arena of writing - the act of finding premises usually comes about as a result of observation and rumination on those observations.

>Other information would be great, thnks!

I'd recommend reading my lengthy overview of how to write jokes and prepare for your first performance. I think it will help you understand what I've described above in terms of the writing process and how that might jibe with the concept of research. Here's a link:

http://en.allexperts.com/q/Jokes-Comedians-1535/started.htm

I hope I've helped!

Matt