Two Kinds of Writing

I’ve been struggling to write material—that is, material for stand-up comedy, which I’ve performed at open mics for much of the year, peaking (or cratering) with a series of showcase spots at the Edinburgh Fringe in August.

I’ll relate my Fringe experience another time. My topic today is writing, though the term suggests more unity than we find. I am used to writing words for people to read: books, essays, Substack posts. With notable exceptions, I tend to be quite fluent, and I generally enjoy the task. “Writing material” is utterly different—so different, in fact, that we should coin another word.

If I had the imagination for it, I would. Short of that, an SAT analogy: writing is to reading as ______ is to watching stand-up comedy. Between writing and reading, there is editing and publishing. Between ______ and the audience, there’s practice and performance.

When I write for readers, I begin with a more or less definite idea, break it into parts, put them into words, and type them out. I use language to get from A to B, premise to conclusion, start to finish, evidence to interpretation. Then I add, subtract, and rearrange until I have something like a finished work of prose.

______ isn’t like that. If you begin ______ with a “premise,” you rarely have a definite conclusion in advance. It’s better not to. And the words don’t just articulate given ideas. Almost every comic composes by speaking aloud, or in inner monologue. Some do it by improvising live on stage and never write a word. They memorize their stuff. But even those who write things down tend to engage in improv to an imagined audience: riffing on a premise for as long as they can, trying to mine its comic potential.

As evidence of this, take the first seven-and-a-half minutes of James Acaster’s Make a New Tomorrow, the 40-minute bonus feature that accompanies his phenomenal stand-up special, Cold Lasagne Hate Myself 1999 (both frustratingly paywalled). I choose this excerpt not because it is exceptional, but because it is the opposite. For 7 minutes, 30 seconds, Acaster talks about squash, in the British sense of “squash” defined by Webster’s as “a sweet concentrated liquid made from or flavored with fruit juice, which is diluted to make a drink”—also known, confusingly, as “squash.”

Acaster’s premise is that squash can be too diluted or too strong. That’s pretty much it. With that, he fills seven minutes, thirty seconds, as follows:

• 0:00—Acaster asks how old you are when you start making your own squash. Maybe 7? Until then, mum is in charge of squash. Someone in the audience yells “10”—which is tragic.

• 1:30—Acaster concludes that age 7 is right: a 6-year-old squash-maker would be precocious; if an 8-year-old’s mum made them squash, he would bully that kid.

• 2:15—Acaster pulls no punches: his mum’s squash was too weak; “hardly a complicated recipe, mum!”

• 3:30—He has squash at another kid’s house. It is very strong. When he is able to make his own squash, it is 95% cordial and tastes revolting—"but that’s the price of freedom.”

• 4:35—Acaster made squash recently, for the first time in a long time. As an adult, he does not have squash in his house, unlike his audience, “a parade of absolute dorks.”

• 6:30—The squash was for his nephew. Acaster was out of practice and unfamiliar with the innovation of double strength squash—punchline: “I damn near gave that kid Type 2.”

This is median Acaster, sustained by attitude and verbal pungency. But it represents, to me, a K2 of comedy.

To produce anything like this, I would have to overcome the habits of a professional lifetime. When I write, I tend to focus on things that matter, not trivia. But with ______, triviality is fine; in fact, it’s funny to give exhaustive scrutiny to what is ultimately trivial.

Forget significance—even the impulse to make a point or answer a question, to get from A to B, runs against the grain of stand-up composition, on display in Acaster’s 7:30. The comic’s intellect lingers, not to get anywhere, or prove anything, but to create or discover the synapses that connect the unconnected, the swerves, exaggerations, and reversals. You have to squeeze out all the juice you can, and concentrate it.

If my fatal flaw is being too project-driven, desperate to complete one thing and get on to the next—a trait that led to a premature midlife crisis—it is at odds with stand-up comedy’s love of being-in-process. You can make arguments in stand-up, and tell stories, but you are doing so in a medium that does not, by nature, need to reach a substantive conclusion. It can meander, spiral, explode.

The logic of stand-up is not, as such, the logic of linear narrative, or of means to ends. More often, it’s the logic of association, of emotion, of personality. In an early chapter of his book, To Show and to Tell, about the craft of literary non-fiction, Phillip Lopate riffs “On the necessity of turning oneself into a character”:

The problem with I is not that it is in bad taste (as college composition courses used to teach), but that fledgling autobiographical writers may think they've said or conveyed more than they actually have with that one syllable. In their minds, that I may be swimming with background and a lush, sticky past and an almost too fatal specificity, whereas the reader encountering it for the first time in a new piece sees only a slender telephone pole standing in the sentence, trying to catch a few signals to send on.

His advice is practical:

• be plausible, but not predictable;

• emphasize your quirks;

• share details of your background, where you are from how you were raised;

• in order to be amusing, you must be self-amused, and not self-hating;

• self-curiosity is key.

This is good advice for stand-ups, too. There are exceptions to every rule, but it’s hard to write or perform stand-up unless you are self-amused—unless you find yourself funny and want to be around yourself, unless you are good with how you look and sound on stage, happy to be there, seen and heard. And while it is too much to say that stand-ups cannot be self-hating in their heart of hearts, self-hatred is an obstacle to ______.