Yes you read that right. After years and years of being sort of anti-standup (thank you 1990's for that legacy), I was cast in a role that encouraged it. In fact, it required it. The Comedy Roast of Scrooge was a skewering of Charles Dickens' famous miser, administered by most of the major characters from A Christmas Carol. Then Scrooge does his roast of everyone, including the audience. Hilarious in idea, but the actual process was such an intense prep with only 3 rehearsals, and as many days to write a set for the first time.
How to write a standup set in 3 days
Subtitle: You probably can't, but it's possible in 5
Day1
I came in thinking "oh I can do this" with the addendum "by opening". Thankfully, I didn't have anything to do on Day2, because the feedback at the first rehearsal was "you have work to do, by opening" since I had nothing yet written. By midnight, I had my first draft: wordy, over explained, low payoff on the joke: not a great combination, but at least a start.
Day2
I starting writing from the moment I got up. I got to the point that I was trying out jokes on Rob every time we communicated during the day. He was not impressed. The rest of the day was culling and refining. I finished my set just in time to get to rehearsal and find out that it was a boring 13 mins, and it needed to get down to a hilarious 7.
Day3
I took the morning off, but started back on it just after lunch. I spent nearly 5 hours culling, rewriting, using a thesaurus for word choice, cutting, recutting. I got the set down to a good series of laughs at 9 mins, but at rehearsal it was still too wordy. And it was clear the tact I had taken was too soft, it needed to be quicker, shorter, more for the throat. I felt angry, hurt, betrayed, scared. I went to bed telling Bob Cratchit jokes and trying to figure out how to grill Jacob Marley one little bit harder.
Dayoftheshow, y'all
I woke up telling jokes, everything had a punch line. That continued while in the line at Starbucks for a eye-opener. I called Rob to confess my fear of failure, and it continued there. I fired up my old laptop determined to start over, cutting out nearly every original joke I had and ending with 7 jokes on a really blank page, almost all about Tiny Tim. I sat down and wrote every new joke I could. I added at least 25 new jokes, only to cut more than half. Then I did that again. Now I had an interesting set, but it needed order. I flew through and sorted them out to a solid two page set. But there were still a few clunkers that I held on to for prides sake.
At performance, I pulled it off with a lot of charm but it was still slow and too long.
Refinement
Ok so this is now Day5 for those that are counting. Maybe you can do it faster, given that Day1 was largely wasted. All my previous days experiences made this day a blast and made it easy as pie. Firstly, I had a performance with an audience under my belt, so I knew which jokes didn't work. If I couldn't get the joke out quickly -- if I stumbled too much on the delivery or if I couldn't deliver on the punchline, it was marked for cutting. Here are my suggestions:
- Focus on the goal to give your audience a great time.
- Nothing is sacred, don't hold on to anything.
- Be a mercenary about editing the setup. The goal is to get it down to the fewest number of words to get the punchline.
- Be kind to yourself: start with a goal of two mins of solid jokes. Then build up. Don't try the other way, like I did; it only caused more work in culling.
