Writing Comedy V.S. Performing Comedy
By Luis Prada
Think our lives are glamorous? Well, you’re right. We’re internet comedy writers! We’re swimming in the pussy! We’re so rich we’re chauffeured around in Rolls Royce’s that our chauffeur aren’t even driving. They’re driving another Rolls that tows the Rolls we’re in. That’s two Rolls Royce’s with one driver and one passenger between them, all moving down a road paved with golden jokes.
Of course, if you believe that stupid statement above you’re extremely gullible.
Writing comedy on the internet for a living is a weird thing. Just the simple fact that I get paid to be a jackass boarders on the absurd. But beyond that, writing comedy that isn’t being performed live is strange. This strangeness has everything to do with the reaction your work generates. When I write something and slap it on the internet, I have no immediate way of knowing whether or not it was actually funny. This would be the plus side to being a stand up comedian, or an improv comedian – if you said or did something funny, the audience in front of you will let you know immediately. As a stand up comedian, you come up with something funny. You offer that something to the audience and instantly you get a response – laugh out loud hilarity, mild chuckles, a kind applause that’s kind of like a “Good job. Now move on to the next one quickly,” or complete silence. From the moment that joke is done you know how it went over with the crowd.
In that way doing stand up is kind of scientific: you take the stage with a joke. This joke is your hypothesis. You then present this joke to the audience. It’s then the audience’s job to confirm or deny your hypothesis – was that funny? Yes or No? Whatever the answer, you take this information in and you use it to either take the joke back to the laboratory to work on it some more, or you move on and use it again in the next club with the bigger audience, because you know it’s a joke that will work.
Pictured: Scientists Chemically analyzing “Two Jews walk in to a bar…”
This is a luxury internet writers don’t have; especially if you’re writing for a smaller site like Funny Crave. We don’t feel that immediacy of that laugh. Hell, we don’t even hear the laugh. All we have are comments. Some days I’ll write one of my daily articles and that article will be something that I can say I’m proud of. Obviously, we put so much stuff up that it can’t all be gold, but when we each have those one or two things we’ve posted that week that we think is pure comedic brilliance. But, of course, we don’t always have this hypothesis confirmed.
In this sense, writing internet comedy is like texting a girl or guy you like. You send off your text, maybe a request to hang out when you both get out of work. What usually follows? Anxiety.
Will she text back?
Did she get the text?
Why is she taking so long?
Is she weighing the pros and cons of being in my presence?
Do I smell?
Why has no one ever told me that I smell like garbage; and why is it that everyone that never told me seems to have told her?
Every moment that your phone goes untexted from the other person is a moment that you think the worst. The problem here is immediacy. If he/she doesn’t text you back immediately, well, he/she must fucking hate you. We’re so used to getting direct responses face-to-face that we lose our minds when we have to wait for someone to put their idea in to words, and then type out those words, and maybe fuck up a few words so they have to backspace a little and make sure they don’t sound like an idiot, and so on.
Our jobs are kind of like that, but just imagine sending out that text in to a sea of people, most of which don’t give a shit about you, and others out there don’t even understand the basic premise of your text: “You want to go to the movies with me? Fucker, I don’t even know you.”
We’ll post up that aforementioned great article on a Monday and days will pass until we ever get even a sliver of validation…or condemnation (it all depends on who we were making fun of and how far removed the person reading that article and leaving a comment is from the subject we’re making fun of). Sometimes, a brilliant piece of funny gets lost in the shuffle and it’s gone forever in the fierce jungle of content that is the internet. All us internet comedy writers are left to think is “Wow, that one must have sucked.” And it may have. But there could have been someone out there that thought it was every bit as pants-shittingly hysterical as we thought, but they didn’t leave a comment, so in our minds even our best material isn’t good enough. And all because of the lack of personal and immediate feedback.
Shut up, Loser
I speak about this from personal experience. I’ve written tons of stuff for Funny Crave and there are a few golden nuggets of awesome that I consider truly great. There aren’t many among those that have comments on them. Again, this probably has more to do with the fact that we’re not that big a site, but the same basic idea applies. If I post that great little article on Monday and it goes uncommented for days, I feel it’s a failure. Not a depressive I-have-to-reevaluate-my-life kind of failure. Just a small pebble of a failure. But if just one person leaves a comment saying, “That was alright” my reaction will be “I AM THE LORD OF FUNNY!!” as I drop to my knees, toss my hands in the air in a V (for victory), thinking I’m that end all, be all of comedy because some guy I’ll never meet said that I’m kind of amusing; moderately smirk-inducing; that what I wrote is kind of like a thing that’s funny, only not as much. For that I feel I like I won the World Cup…by myself…against Brazil. So, to use my fifth or sixth analogy here, it’s like a horror movie: it’s not the surprise of the monster jumping out from nowhere that gets you, it’s the mounting tension leading up to it. That’s what drives you insane.
A lot of this has to do with ego. I don’t think anyone would be spouting out jokes in any forum if it weren’t to satisfy that need in us to make someone else laugh. Comedy is a selfish thing. I want to make you laugh because it validates me. Your joy in that moment of laughter is secondary to my ego saying “Mmmm. Delicious! Feed me a wagon full of laughter from a dick joke!!” And then I tell a dick joke, people laugh and my gluttonous ego burps with pleasure. But if there’s no one to laugh at my jokes (dick or otherwise) all I’m left with is my ego yelling “Feed me with chuckles and hyperbolic comments about how a given article is the ‘funniest thing on the internet!’” and I can’t deliver so he gets pissed and crank calls my id and it’s all just a mess.
In the end, though, it’s all worth it. This is a truly strange job, but then again, I assume that’s what everybody that’s getting paid to do what they love thinks. I’m sure there are times when a football player will take the field and have a moment of clarity as he breaks things down real simple-like: “Holy shit. I get paid to catch a ball, and then run somewhere with it. There’s something wrong with the world where this is allowed to happen.” And then he puts on his helmet, catches a ball, runs with it to a second location that isn’t very far from the place he was just standing, rinse, repeat, then he walks out a millionaire. We’re not millionaires, but if we ever become millionaires off of this bizarre world of comedy writing I can guarantee you we’re going to pay people to laugh at every joke and tell us how awesome we are, and say ridiculously exaggerated things about how funny we are.
Wednesday, May 5, 2010 4:26PM
That was alright.
I've been following your site on your RSS feed on Google Reader for half a year now, and I've consitently enjoyed your articles. They're surprisingly good, and I find the majority of find them truly funny. I always assumed you guys have legions of commenters here, on the actual site, so I was never arsed to come post a comment.
Apologies.
Maybe you should truncate your RSS feeds, and all us passive consumers will be forced to come to the actual articles and subsequently be tempted by this here comment box each time.
Wednesday, May 5, 2010 4:48PM
Shit, I'm addicted to collecting RSS feeds and I didn't even know we had one. Thanks for letting us know, Wyrd. And thanks for the kind words, and for assuming we have legions of fans. I think I just blushed.
Wednesday, May 5, 2010 6:37PM
I completely understand what you're saying. But the funny thing about it is most Cracked writers are the same way (I myself have written stuff for Cracked…in fact, it's the reason Funny Crave exists). In our Cracked writers lounge we have dozens of writers that basically talk about the same thing I posted above.
Personally, I don't believe there are many people out there that truly don't care what people have to say about what they do. But my write up above is specific to comedy. What good is a joke if there's no one around to laugh at it? if you tell a joke in a forest, and no one is around to hear it, is it funny? Maybe to you, but is it funny to anyone else? You'll never know until you get the out of that forest and tell that same joke in a city where there are some ears to hear it.
Wednesday, May 5, 2010 6:46PM
I'm going to be honest, I don't understand this article at all. Everything I write is immediately hilarious. Except for like 3 really shitty articles.
Wednesday, May 5, 2010 4:39PM
Holy shit, we have an RSS feed? We'll hop on that and see what we can do.
Wednesday, May 5, 2010 4:48PM
Shit, I'm addicted to collecting RSS feeds and I didn't even know we had one. Thanks for letting us know, Wyrd. And thanks for the kind words, and for assuming we have legions of fans. I think I just blushed.
Wednesday, May 5, 2010 10:00PM
Touche salesman. I think most people are just completely retarded and do not understand written language I mean there are a shit ton of books people COULD read but they would rather see the movie instead and if they are not LOLing literally it is not funny to them. I personally love intellectual humor as well as a good dick joke and respect you can write and can do so well enough to be writing for a website.
Wednesday, May 5, 2010 10:31PM
Touche salesman. I think most people are just completely retarded and do not understand written language I mean there are a shit ton of books people COULD read but they would rather see the movie instead and if they are not LOLing literally it is not funny to them. I personally love intellectual humor as well as a good dick joke and respect you can write and can do so well enough to be writing for a website.
Wednesday, May 5, 2010 6:22PM
Luis, what you wrote reminds me of something I read on Cracked.com which is where I found this site…
"This is the guy who makes a new thread, knowing he's just written the absolutely perfect post. A post that should be heralded across the Internet for its beauty, comedy and insight. It is such a good post that the guy is checking every five seconds to see if there is a new response. If he gets a response he quickly dashes out his own reply that will appear half a second later.
If there are no responses to his perfect post then he will wait an eternity of five minutes before replying to his own thread with, "What, nobody has a comment? Helloooo???"
If you want to read the whole article here ya go…http://www.cracked.com/article_17522_6-new-personality-disorders-caused-by-internet.html
Now I'm not saying you are as bad as this but relax… Wouldn't you rather have no comments at all then to have people on here telling you either how much you suck and occasionally have one "hey this was funny" or you couldn't have a shit ton of comments that are for a got dang dating website or some bullshit…
Wednesday, May 5, 2010 6:28PM
What is this Cracked.com of which you speak? Surely we've never heard of such a place.
Wednesday, May 5, 2010 6:46PM
I'm going to be honest, I don't understand this article at all. Everything I write is immediately hilarious. Except for like 3 really shitty articles.
Thursday, May 6, 2010 12:18AM
9 Comments!
Even allowing for the fact that Miranda doubled up there; never have I seen such an impressive count. Sure ScenicAnemia could pull those sorts of numbers, but upon closer inspection, they were often padded out by Grady's detailed descriptions of whatever odorous discharge he was experiencing at the time. Whatever happened to that guy?
The cumulative total of 0 further comments in the 4 other FunnyCrace articles I have opened today would suggest that this is not just a symptom of increased traffic to the site.
Thus, I am lead to believe that Miranda must be either:
a) Luis' mother
b) Adam's alter ego
c) Fortey's lover
d) all of the above. (In which case, please post video evidence – I would digg the shit out of it)
Thursday, May 6, 2010 2:47AM
I have posted three, maybe four, comments on this website. While that certainly seems to beat the average reader's posting rate, it's pretty small considering I check your site at least once a day.
To be honest, most of the posts aren't solid gold nuggets of funny shat out of George Carlin's ass. But almost all of them make me smile. Most of them make me giggle. A few of them make me laugh loudly outright (or LLO, as you internet kids say. It's LLO, right?) A few of them make me feel like I wasted my time.
The net gain is that you made my day better, made my life a little sillier, and made me smile a little more than I would without your site. And you accomplish that with dick jokes and comparing my personality to nuts and fruit juice.
That last sentence alone aughta make you feel pretty damn good about what you do.
Thursday, May 6, 2010 4:29PM
Faaaaaaaaaaaaaaake!
Friday, May 7, 2010 7:20AM
@adam
gaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaay!
Friday, May 7, 2010 4:47PM
As a stand up comedian I can tell you that in some ways writing for the internet is more immediate. There are jokes in my act that are written and tweaked for months before they make it on stage. All the time I'm just hoping they land. Then I have to drive or fly to another part of the country and deliver them to a bunch of drunks. Sometimes they kill, and sometimes they don't. I write for the internet as well and at least after I write something I can post it immediately and at least SOME of my readers aren't drunk. I guess what I'm saying is the grass is always greener. squibcrib.
Friday, May 7, 2010 3:00PM
I can tell from your reply that clearly, you follow Funnycrave diligently. Thanks for your support.
Sunday, May 9, 2010 3:38PM
See, I love this site, but every time I read a funny article and see there are no comments at the bottom there, I'm torn. I could comment on the article, but I usually won't have much to say. I've always stubbornly held out that the comments section is reserved for people who wish to comment on the article. I could not simply write "lol" and click submit, because I have a nagging feeling only jackasses say lol, and I don't want everyone to know what a huge jackass I am. On the other hand, sometimes I'm reading these articles at 9:30 in the morning and still drunk, so if I comment I run the danger of submitting walls of text. When I do that, I'm forced to feel ashamed of myself later (in the usual way- crying in the shower). So, what do you want from me? Shame or jackass? I suppose I already know the answer to that- it's both, isn't it?
I'm not really being coherent here (on account 'a da' drinkin'), all I'm trying to say is you guys are awesome, I appreciate all your articles, and the only reason I don't comment more often is because I don't want to embarrass myself in the presence of your magnificence. I will try harder next time.