I tried to make the punchline as close to the setup as I could. And I thought that was the perfect thing. If I could make the setup and the punchline identical to each other, I would create a different kind of joke.
Usually the beginning of a story that people hear a lot. For example, "My girlfriend is upset about her new haircut" or "My dad keeps losing his car keys." And then I just think of different ways the story could end. "My girlfriend is upset about her new haircut. I don't understand why she's crying. I'm the one who has to get a new girlfriend." Then I try it out on stage. I don't do a lot of re-writing. My jokes either work or they don't. The trick is just to write a ton of jokes.
I never really write the jokes. I just sit down over a week or two and try to figure out what I want to talk about. Once I narrow that down, then I start working on the material, like "How do I make this stuff funny?"
I get just as much of a thrill out of constructing a good sentence that gets a laugh at the end as I do from a joke.
I did so many open mics. I would write jokes on Twitter constantly, and then slowly, over time, open mics turned into shows. If you can get a joke to work at an open mic, it's a good joke.
Working at the magic shop really gave me a sense of comedy because it was all jokes.
I always think about my jokes as like I'm driving down a street, trying to go into all the culs-de-sacs along the way. I'm just taking a thoughtful, weird journey.
For comedians, we're all kind of tweeting our thoughts instead of spending time developing them. You can gauge how good a joke might be by how many times it gets retweeted, but it takes discipline to go back through the tweets and then develop jokes from them.
I actually credit Twitter with fine-tuning some joke-writing skills. I still feel like I'm working at it.
Inserting my personal brand of humor is something I have at times had trouble doing - but I feel like I've been learning about it a little more, how to do it, and how it helps my songs.
Writing and telling jokes is my favorite thing to do, and I want to be able to do that forever.
If you play Mark Twain and he's not funny, you are definitely not playing Mark Twain. That was the biggest challenge, in some ways. Writing and performing jokes that can come out of that brilliant delivery system he constructed: the friendly, avuncular truth-teller.
With silly stuff, it's seventy-five percent confidence. I always tell people that it's because I'm nervous about getting that next laugh and I need to hear it. I always want to condense a joke.
There is nothing - nothing - like writing a great joke and having that joke kill onstage.
Melissa and I both say we don't write very good jokes.
I try to write three jokes every morning, although I don't know what they are. I write them as fast as I can, then I put them away for a month. So I couldn't even tell you what they are, or if they're good. I just assume they weren't.
It's very hard to write humor.
I get so happy when I write a joke. It's a very satisfying, liberating feeling.
Every joke is an experiment. When you sit, alone, and write a script, or just a joke, you really have no idea if it will succeed.
Anything where I get to write a lot of jokes and have a lot of creative control - that's all I want.
It's fun to deliver material on live TV because it's more off-the-cuff, but I like writing better. You really can measure the joke, think an extra second and nail the right reference.
I regard the writing of humor as a supreme artistic challenge.
Everyone can write jokes and makes things clever.
I realized, in removing or rewriting these jokes, that often the jokes weren't done or that I was using, for me, the curse words as kind of a crutch. So then I just started writing.
I would be an idiot to say comedy is easy, but it does come naturally. It never feels forced.
