Act 2 — Build the joke machine · Week 14 of 52
Characters & voices
How do you make a person recognisable in four seconds?
Make an audience recognise your mother without naming her.
Writing & work rate
Jimmy Carr
The five moves
Same rhythm, every week.
1 — Study
Character comics and impressionists — behaviour over accuracy.
Watch on purpose. Specific comedians, specific reason.
2 — Deconstruct
20 characters: name the single behaviour that identifies each one.
Isolate one mechanism. Name it before you use it.
3 — Write
Build five characters from your real life with one tell each.
10–25 premises minimum. Quantity buys quality.
4 — Perform
Bring two of them onstage in one bit.
Somewhere live. The classroom is useful; the audience is the laboratory.
5 — Review
Could the audience tell who was talking without you saying so?
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?