Act 2 — Build the joke machine · Week 16 of 52
Compression
Which words are actually earning their oxygen?
Cut every set you own by a third and see what survives.
Understatement & timing
Nate Bargatze
The five moves
Same rhythm, every week.
1 — Study
One-liner writers. Every syllable is load-bearing.
Watch on purpose. Specific comedians, specific reason.
2 — Deconstruct
Take 10 long jokes and cut each by 40 percent without losing the laugh.
Isolate one mechanism. Name it before you use it.
3 — Write
Rewrite your best 20 jokes at half the word count.
10–25 premises minimum. Quantity buys quality.
4 — Perform
Run the short versions only.
Somewhere live. The classroom is useful; the audience is the laboratory.
5 — Review
Which jokes got funnier when shorter? Which needed the air?
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?