Act 2 — Build the joke machine · Week 11 of 52
Tags
How do you stay inside a laugh instead of abandoning it?
Get three laughs where you used to get one.
The five moves
Same rhythm, every week.
1 — Study
Watch comics who get three laughs from one premise.
Watch on purpose. Specific comedians, specific reason.
2 — Deconstruct
Find 20 tags. Mark how long after the main punch they land.
Isolate one mechanism. Name it before you use it.
3 — Write
Take your 10 strongest jokes and write three tags each.
10–25 premises minimum. Quantity buys quality.
4 — Perform
Run them and hold your ground after the first laugh.
Somewhere live. The classroom is useful; the audience is the laboratory.
5 — Review
Did the tag lift the room or reset it?
Watch the tape. Log what the room did, not what you felt.
The Comedy Genome
Tag what made you laugh.
Tag every joke you studied this week. After a few months the pattern stops being an opinion and becomes your comedy DNA.
Your twin asks
Eleven questions, every week.
- What made you laugh this week?
- What did the audience laugh at?
- Where did you lose them?
- Which jokes feel most like you?
- What are you afraid to say?
- What's the funniest version of this?
- What would Pryor do with this?
- What would Carlin attack?
- What would Hedberg remove?
- What would Rock repeat?
- What would Bamford make uncomfortably specific?