Cutting Material
Listen: Apple Podcasts | Spotify
Transcript:
As a creative, it often feels like your brain is constantly popping out ideas. New alleyways to chase into. Get lost in some new maze. “This is interesting…ooo! But so is this! What if I did that?
It’s a wonderful problem to have. Better than having writer’s block.
I feel very lucky to rarely run into writer’s block. It seems like there is ALWAYS something new and interesting that I want to investigate, read about, write about, think about, talk about…
The difficult thing is deciding which ideas are worth pursuing when time is limited. When you have lots of appealing options, how do you choose?
I remember listening to Tina Fey’s audiobook, Bossypants. She talks about how when she was a producer on SNL her job was primarily reining in the other creatives so that they had a defined endpoint to their work.
Lots of comic performers and writers just want to keep going and going, escalating and escalating, exploring one chaotic avenue after another. Being a producer, it’s like herding feral cats.
You have to end up with something concrete that normal people can wrap their heads around, instead of continuous ethereal possibility and potential. “What if we went in this direction with the sketch? What if this happened? That’d be interesting! That’d be funny! And then we could flip it and do this!”
A producer is there to force the creative shapeshifter to become something. To solidify into something more specific.
It’s hard to gauge what that more specific thing should be though. Art is always reaching after something beyond the concrete. Art signals out at something else other than what it is, but it still has to be something. It has to be something obvious and accessible and graspable, but at the same time have the potential to signal more depending on how the viewer takes it in.
So art needs creativity in order to say something new and interesting, but it also needs production - something that concretizes it and keeps it rooted in the present time and place.
And as a stand-up comic, you have to be your own creative and your own producer. You have to make decisions - basically have arguments with yourself - about what aspects of the writing and the performance you should keep and what needs to be cut away.
And trust me, so much needs to be cut away. Like, most of it. Most of it needs to end up on the cutting room floor. People don’t have the time and patience for most of your weird ideas.
I might have had more writer’s block when I first started doing stand-up, but 8-plus years in my struggle is definitely more on the production side than on the creative side.
I have hundreds of pages of Google docs filled with writing. Probably around 500 or 600 pages at this point. Maybe more than that. It just keeps growing. It’s spread out through a bunch of Google docs. Which sounds insane. But if you break it down, that’s only writing around a page and a half each week. That adds up over the years.
So that’s hundreds of pages of creative writing about topics that I find interesting and engaging and goofy and weird and funny…but the catch is, for me, 5 minutes of stand-up is only about 1 and ⅓ of a page of writing (Double spaced, Times New Roman, size 12 font, for anyone who cares.). And I have to work out my jokes in 5 minutes sets.
So now you can see how much of stand-up comes down to an intensive whittling down of ideas and material into the bare essentials. What is absolutely necessary to say into this microphone to get a laugh to connect with a random audience who doesn’t necessarily share the backdrop of all these related ideas that you find so interesting and engrossing?
Cuz the laugh is necessary for the art form, but you’re also hoping that the audience connects to the underlying ideas and emotions. It’s not just about the laugh.
You have to cut enough that you can keep the laughs coming consistently. You can’t have extra words interrupting the laugh pacing. Stand-up is fast-paced. It’s not an essay. The laughs gotta be there.
But you can’t cut so much that you lose the broader picture you were painting. People don’t just want to laugh at comedy shows. They wanna feel something. They wanna experience something. They want a fresh perspective. A unique take. A light bulb moment. Something a little edgy or scary. Something heartfelt and sincere. Comedy is all over the place these days. There’s so many flavors.
Early on when I started as a stand-up, I definitely held onto ideas too long. If there was something I believed in, I would hammer at it for longer than I should have to try to make it work on stage.
There are a bunch of reasons for that:
I didn’t have the confidence in my abilities as a comic that I now do. When you lack confidence, it’s easy to get defensive. “I’m right, they just don’t get it.” Very common ego defense mechanism. You hold onto your artistic creations because they feel too precious for you to let go of. It’s kinda like how you freak out about the first kid you have, but if you have six kids and one goes flying off a trampoline, you don’t panic in the same way.
I also didn’t really have as refined of comedy taste as I do now. I watched a ton of stand-up and comedy in general before I ever tried it myself, but it’s safe to say in the years since I’ve started doing stand-up I’ve consumed comedy at a much higher rate than I did previously in my life. I’ve seen a lot more. I’ve done it enough myself. I know what’s good and what’s not, much more than when I started. It’s easier for me to judge myself accurately, so cutting material doesn’t feel as much like a potential mistake.
In that same vein, I am way more aware of how things are going on stage these days. When I first started, I was lucky if I could simply remember what I wanted to say on stage and do it in the correct order. Now, once I’ve got a bit down, I’m much more attuned to how the audience is reacting - the subtleties of different reactions. I used to get off stage, and I could barely remember what happened. Now I can pull out my phone and immediately make edits to the bit based on what happened in the moment while I was on stage.
So, what stays in the bit, and what gets cut?
If it gets a laugh, it generally stays. That’s a pretty easy rule. Unless, that laugh doesn’t fit in with the flow of the rest of the bit. You gotta watch out for that.
It is annoying when you think of a funny line that works. Or an act out that’s really fun. And then you do that line or that act out, and you find that it disrupts the main throughline of what you were doing. You try to finish off the rest of the bit how you did before, and now that part doesn’t work as well as it used to.
Now you got a decision. Do you cut the old part, do you cut the new fun part, do you try to rearrange the order to make them both work? Which part is most essential to what you’re trying to accomplish on stage? Sometimes the bigger laugh isn’t the right choice, sometimes it is. Maybe you use one on some shows and the other on other shows. You can flex it. These aren’t hard and fast rules. It’s a complicated alchemy.
But that’s criterion #1: It has to be consistently funny for audiences. That may seem like a “Duh” thing, but you’d be surprised how many comics, myself included, have a nasty tendency to leave chunks in bits that don’t work because they just have a strong feeling that it should work. Happens all the time. It’s not easy to kill your darlings.
Criterion #2: Does it move the story forward? What do I mean by that?
I don’t tell stories much on stage. That’s not really my style. But I do have themes. I have topic areas that circle the drain of particular ideas.
So when I say, “Does it move the story forward?” I’m asking myself if any given section of the joke helps fill out more of the emotions or ideas I’m trying to express to the audience. You might have the world’s greatest fart joke, but you don’t put that in a bit about mental health, relationships, family, work, growing up, etc… UNLESS it adds something to the audience’s understanding of your perspective on that topic. Fart jokes are versatile. I’m certain there are great mental health fart jokes out there, but not every fart joke is suitable as a mental health fart joke.
Those are my big fancy general guidelines to cutting material. Pretty simple. Ultimately the question is:
Does it get a laugh?
Is the audience connecting with it in a way that helps move the story forward?
Audiences will clue you into that second criterion too. There is a difference between comedy shows where audiences are laughing on cue at the punchlines and comedy shows where the audience is locked in on the edge of their seat curious about where things are going.
If you watch the audience at any given comedy show, you can see the difference. A lot of times it feels very mechanical between comics and audiences. Say joke. Laugh. Say joke. Laugh.
Then there are the shows where it feels a little more intimate, a little more unpredictable, and there’s more anticipation in the air. That’s when you know criterion #2 is being met. The audience is following the story, not just chuckling on cue following a pattern.
My other rule for creative production is that when I do get stuck, I have to do something different. I’m not allowed to repeat the same experiment as many times as I used to in the past. I have a little note on my desk (I actually have lots of little notes on my writing desk.) But one of my little notes says: Don’t repeat the same patterns/strategies.
So, in the past, I would probably try to work on 5 minutes of the same material for a full month of going out to mics and shows.
These days, that’s generally overkill. I’ll do a new bit about 6-8 times to work it out initially. That’s enough to get a read on which parts are working and which aren’t.
Anything that isn’t working gets cut and put in a separate Google doc labeled “Excess Leftover Bits.”
I’m a digital pack rat. I never fully get rid of anything. May use it for inspiration later. Who knows.
Then, the parts that worked get put in a Google Doc that has my jokes organized by theme or topic area.
Then it’s back to the stack of stuff I haven’t tried yet to try to get a new 5 minutes together.
I go through that process of working through a new 5 minutes about every 2 weeks. If I keep half of that material, that’s an hour a year, which is a pretty decent clip to go at for producing jokes.
Do that for 8 years, you end up with 8 hours. Maybe you only use half of that. Still 4 hours. You get the idea.
I can say from experience that it gets much easier to part with your material the more of it you produce. Sort of a paradox. If you create a lot, you run into the reality that you have to cut stuff because you can’t perform all of it. So, you naturally pick your best stuff. If you keep after it consistently being creative, the problem of playing producer can actually solve itself pretty naturally.
The creative who can’t stop coming up with new ideas eventually forces the producer’s hand.
The creative may want to say anything and everything, but the producer can appease the creative by saying, “Look, we only get to talk for 5 minutes either way. Why not make it the most impressive 5 minutes you have, even if you like that other 5 that we have to cut.”
And, if you ever hit writer’s block, you can circle back to that junk 5 minutes that wasn’t working that was still ever so precious to you.
That’s my grand advice to creatives. In comedy or any art form, just keep appeasing your creative side. Keep making stuff.
The more you create, the more your inner producer has to work with. Having lots to choose from makes it sting a little bit less when your inner producer rejects some of your inner creative’s work.