Why Farm for Jokes? (Or Inspiration Is for Suckers)

For the past 17 years, I’ve made a living purely through writing jokes. This is obviously an affront to all logic and decency. In a rational universe, jokes about Spider-Man and poop should never have allowed me to achieve home ownership. But it’s also a testament to the system I’ve developed for writing funny jokes quickly and reliably.

(How to Write Funny Dialogue.)

Writing jokes is the most fun thing in the world. It is also excruciating torture. In other words: It’s writing. But the difference between joke writing and non-joke writing, is that joke writing is held to an incredibly high standard: It has to make you laugh. If you don’t literally lose control of your physical body’s reaction to the joke, then that joke hasn’t done its job. While you can enjoy a tearjerker that produces no tears, a horror novel that doesn’t make you actually scream, or erotica that doesn’t automatically bring you to climax, nobody is in the market for humor that doesn’t make you laugh.

The high pressure on humor writing means high pressure on humor writers. Too much pressure to rely purely on those moments of inspiration when a great idea or a hilarious joke suddenly appears in your head, as if it was a gift from the Idea Fairy in exchange for your tooth (the Idea Fairy also wants teeth, she just doesn’t always wait for them to fall out naturally). How often does brilliance strike you spontaneously? If you’re anything like me, a professional joke writer, very rarely. The better option for a joke writer is to develop a deliberate, step-by-step writing process. I call mine “joke farming.”

I’ll admit, there are few less fun phrases in the English language than “deliberate writing process.” Maybe “multi-day colonoscopy,” but just barely. But I’ve found that the time I put into developing a repeatable, deliberate joke process has meant exponentially more ability to craft jokes on demand, when I need them, and exponentially less time waiting for inspiration to strike. It’s easy to feel blocked when you’re waiting for an idea to hit you. It’s harder to feel blocked when you have a step-by-step process to lead you out of the wilderness and onto the path to a joke. Just think about how much easier it is to assemble Ikea furniture when you use the instructions. But unlike the furniture, the jokes you write will survive multiple moves.

My personal joke farming process is an attempt to imitate the steps my brain goes through unconsciously in those times when inspiration does hit. After all, it’s not really the Idea Fairy giving me those ideas, it’s the strange, shadowy, secretive back half of my brain. My brain must have its own method of coming up with jokes, so I tried to reverse-engineer it into a process the public, cooperative, front half of my brain can work through. Basically, you can break my process down into three big steps.

Every joke, like every piece of writing, is trying to communicate something: a feeling, an idea, an experience, a message. Before I can write a joke, I need to know just what it is that I’m trying to communicate through it. I write it out for myself in the most straightforward, least funny way possible. If I don’t understand what I want the audience to understand, then how’s the audience going to understand it? It’s okay if the point isn’t funny. Making it funny is what the next steps are for.

Jokes don’t communicate ideas by just stating them out loud. If they did, they wouldn’t be jokes, but statements. And nobody wants to go see a stand-up statementian. Instead, jokes communicate their ideas by almost stating them—and then leaving out just enough to force the audience’s brains to put together the pieces and “get” what’s being said. It’s that moment of sudden comprehension, of “getting” the joke, that makes us laugh. If you wanted to treat it like math, you’d say a joke is 1-2-3-4-6. What makes the audience laugh is when they fill in “5,” even though you didn’t say it.

We bring the audience to that moment of understanding by communicating the idea of the joke through a premise—literally the little story that you tell about the idea of the joke. In my book Joke Farming, I give the example of a joke asking why we say “walking the dog” when we really mean “take the dog outside so it can go to the toilet.” The idea behind the joke is that common phrases often obscure what people are ashamed to say out loud.

However, it’s not funny to say, “Common phrases often obscure what people are ashamed to say out loud.” It’s funny to say, “Why do we say, ‘I need to walk the dog’ when we’re really saying, ‘The dog needs to take a poop?’ Whose embarrassment are we avoiding here? The dog’s? Because the dog doesn’t seem to care who knows it.”

This is a pretty big step, and there’s more involved here than I can fit into this space. It would take a whole book to describe it. That’s why I wrote one! But the most important thing to remember is that jokes aren’t just written, but constructed. They operate by not-quite-scientific principles that underly every type of humor writing, and they can be analyzed, understood, and applied without taking the fun out of humor. If anything, I think they make the humor more fun. You will laugh at a well-constructed joke. But once you know why it’s well-constructed joke, you’ll enjoy understanding the work that went into it.

Any writer looking to create jokes can benefit from analyzing their instinctive imaginative process and turning it into a deliberate writing process. Doing so won’t break the magic spell that allows you to write jokes. It will help you to write jokes faster, better, and more reliably, which will lower the stress you’re feeling and, in the end, make it easier for you to feel inspired when you’re writing jokes!

The way to start is by thinking about how you think. This may feel difficult at first, like trying to look down at your own mouth or defending the electoral college. But if you put in the time to understand how your brain finds inspiration, it will save you the time you’d otherwise spend waiting for that inspiration to be found.

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