Why I was Posting A Joke Every Day
This was in response to a question about what went into my Joke Every Day project
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I’d say that when you start a project it takes a while just to figure out what you want it to be, so you have to establish stability before you can experiment or tweak it. The first couple of months my focus was just on setting things up and keeping myself going, I remember being amazed after the first month that I’d managed to keep it up that long, but now it’s been five times that long and it was still those first 30 days where it was the hardest, just since it was unclear that I’d manage to keep it going.
As I’ve gone along I’ve tweaked both the concept of the project quite a bit. I started out saying I was going to get the thing up by midnight of that day but that just proved unfeasible, I also didn’t know what to do with the more info section but now that has taken on a fairly standard structure. On the other hand I’ve experimented more since it started with more silly jokes or more video editing (jokes 113 and 103 come to mind).
Most importantly I started just saying “I’m gonna do a joke every day” and then it turned into “and that joke is going to be written within that week and hopefully on that day,” which forced me to make some other changes like doing material that is more political or more responsive to the world around me or what I’m going through at any given moment. Day 85, in retrospect, for instance I was driving home and mulling over a girl I’d gone out with and then I was like “well fuck, I gotta do a joke. How do I take this frustration and express it in the form of a joke.” I see comedy as not a question of just finding funniness in the world but of filtering things through your comedic lens (which of course does in part involve looking at the world and going ‘ok so what’s absurd about this?’), and the project has definitely made me sharpen my lens.
It’s also sharpened my sense of performance and timing. Just watching yourself do it day after day and doing multiple takes you start to see how small and subtle the difference can sometimes be between hilarious and not funny at all. Trying to reflect on things on a regular basis in the more info section also helped me, since I come from an analytical background, the analysis definitely helps me understand that joke and then apply that knowledge elsewhere. It’s changed my delivery both by making me focus on how often I use phrases like “uh” or “um” and try to edit those out and by making me more prone to deliver things straight and let the joke speak for itself (you’ll notice that in my earlier videos there’s a kind of cocky attitude which really fucks up the delivery, I’ve tried to cut back on that hugely since that time. I first noticed that because my girlfriend at the time had been watching them and pointed it out to me and good lord was she right).
The other thing is that I started doing improv classes at the beginning of April, and now I’m doing 2 classes and an improv troupe every week. Joke 80 was on April 14th, so while we both know that correlation doesn’t give causation, it does stand to reason that what I’m doing in improv is giving me more tools to put in my comedic toolbox and that is improving the quality of my delivery as well.
I’m still working to bring this stuff to the stage. I started this project because I always had so many extra jokes that I didn’t have time to memorize for shows and I wanted to put them somewhere and force myself to keep developing new jokes — When I began this project I had recently started a really intense full-time job so I was looking for something structured to keep my feet in the writing pool. Now I’ve finished that job and am working on blending the work I do outside of this project with the work I do inside of it. I still have trouble picking out which ones I want to work on onstage and I can only memorize a small percentage of what I put up here. It has helped though and I’m doing much more straight stand up without the guitar or easel now than I was before I started this project.
I think as with most things, it’s just a question of time and practice, and this keeps me honest on both accounts, so it’s only natural that I would improve over the course of doing it. Still, it’s nice to hear it said.
