Sex, Drugs, Puke, and Profanity - Staples for Sailors, Crutches for Comedians
This was written in response to a question about a specific joke. I won’t share the joke since it’s not mine to share, but I think the general advice is applicable.
With regards to your joke, it’s not really up my alley, but that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t try it out, as I am not an arbiter of universal taste. My guess is that the logic isn’t entirely clear as I’m not quite sure if you mean you are ———— or ————, one of which is fairly common and the other of which is deeply troubling and, to me, kind of gross.
My very general advice is that you should push yourself to write jokes that don’t involve too much gross-out humor or overly sexual humor. The reason I say is because these things can sometimes cover for writing problems and get laughs that are not exactly “deserved” (if there’s such a thing). What I mean is that people laugh when something is funny, but people also laugh when they are uncomfortable, and you don’t want to be getting only uncomfortable laughs and thinking it’s for funniness when it’s really for uncomfotableness, because that eventually wears thin.
On the plus side, if something is gross that means it is emotionally or visually evocative, and that’s something you do want to have in your jokes, and ultimately I’m not saying there shouldn’t be gross or sexual jokes or you shouldn’t write them, it’s just that this can be a crutch for joke-writing, to always do that so it’s a good thing to avoid for a while while you figure out joke logic and structure, and then you can come back to it as it just becomes one of the numerous tools in your toolbox, and not the only or main one.
Ok, hope that’s helpful. Writing jokes, like writing anything else, is a numbers game. The more you write, the more chances there will be for brilliance to poke through. Just like with mining you gotta dig through a lot of worthless rocks to find gold.
