Act 2 — Build the joke machine · Week 9 of 52
Premise mining
Where does raw material actually come from?
Capture 100 premises in seven days without writing a single punchline.
The five moves
Same rhythm, every week.
1 — Study
Comics who mine irritation, confusion and obsession.
Watch on purpose. Specific comedians, specific reason.
2 — Deconstruct
Reverse-engineer 20 bits back to the one-line irritation that started them.
Isolate one mechanism. Name it before you use it.
3 — Write
100 premises this week. Quantity is the assignment. No judging.
10–25 premises minimum. Quantity buys quality.
4 — Perform
Read your 10 favourites aloud, unwritten, and riff.
Somewhere live. The classroom is useful; the audience is the laboratory.
5 — Review
Which premises still interest you 48 hours later? Those are yours.
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?