How about something more mundane? How about, the secret to good comedy writing is just to sit down for an hour a day, and do it. And how about that hour a day being your first energy of the day.  How about an hour a day before you check your emails, your Facebook and your Twitter accounts. How about using your morning energy, your first flush, your get out of bed and face the world vigour to write your comedy.

We have two computers in our house, one big one connected to the internet and one stand-alone laptop. I use the laptop to write. I use it even though it’s less comfortable, because the moment I put the big computer on I cannot help but click the internet connection. My hand does it automatically. And once it’s clicked I think, ‘What harm can checking my emails do?’

Tons.

This is the harm it does.

It takes your creativity. You are inputting irrelevancies to your brain. You write witty responses to your friend’s updates. You are saying to your brain: This is important. This is what I’m using my morning energy to do.

Try this experiment. Just for one day. Get up and do an hour’s comedy writing before you check your emails. Use a non-internet computer or don’t switch on your hub or just do it long hand.

This will have various effects.

1)                 Your main creativity will go into your writing. Do this for a few days and you will find yourself waking up ready to work. Waking up with ideas.

2)                 When you do check your emails, after you’ve done you work, you will enjoy it more. You won’t have that nagging feeling that you should be doing something else, that tingling, churning guilt of another wasted day.

3)                 You will find yourself writing shorter emails because your creative energy has already been used up. In fact this exercise helps you realise how much energy you were putting in to your cyber life and why, when you sat down to write your jokes afterwards, it seemed so hard.

If you haven’t written for a while and have got out of the habit, sitting down for that first hour on that first day can seem really difficult. I promise you, if you force yourself – and I mean really do it, write out ideas, spin off anything interesting – things will start to flow, and you will feel so pleased with yourself.  A good way to start is to go through all your old note books and pick out anything half decent to work on.  This will get your brain cranked up and then you can add in a new subject or two.  In fact working on more than one topic at a time can really help, especially if you are easily disheartened. Just put everything you can into the subject at hand and then when your brain feels like it’s exploding, simply move subjects.  Do the same with that one and then move on again. Eventually you will arrive back at the first subject. You can look at the work you did previously it will seem much more interesting to read through your own notes.

Think of this, the reason you find it easier to interact with your friends on the internet is that all their Facebook statuses and tweets are providing the setups for you. By keeping copious notes of your own thoughts, you are providing you own setups.

Being a comedy writer means learning to roll with the punches, accept that you’ll have what seem like ‘good’ writing days and ‘bad’ writing days.  Some days you are only writing setups, you are only doing the prep, but without those days you couldn’t  have the good days.

So how about thinking that any day you put in at least an hour’s comedy writing is a good day. You are doing all you can, and no-one can ask more than that.

Comedians joke that they only work 20 minutes a night, adding an hour a day to that isn’t much is it? And make sure you use your first energy of the day, it’s one of the greatest gifts you can give yourself as a comedy writer. All the other things I have mentioned here will fall into place when you give yourself not only the time but the mental space to write.

‘Okay, I’ve got one,’ shouts my partner.

‘What do you get if you cross Santa with a duck?’

Ooooh. Thinking, thinking, thinking.

‘A duck with Claus?’ I say.

‘Nope.’

‘A bill from Father Christmas?’ says someone else.

This gets an ‘Ooh, that’s good,’ from the rest of the table.

‘Nope,’ he says again. Finally he has to tell us.

‘A Christmas quacker.’

‘Ahh,’ we all say in unison.

This is a fun Christmas game, and obviously we’re just looking for a few old puns but the truth is that the same joke that gets a groan if read out from a cracker can get a huge cheer or clap if someone round the table guesses it or tops it.

What we are clapping is the excitement of seeing someone come up with jokes on the spot or at the ‘speed of thought’ as I like to think of it. On Have I Got News For You Paul Merton often gets huge laughs for wordplay that he has come up with on the spot. The same joke laboured over by a new act with a forced setup would probably not raise a smile.

I was thinking about this while watching a programme about Bob Monkhouse recently. Rather than train himself to go off on tangents and ad-lib, his skill was remembering and reciting thousands of gags. The audience could tell this and many thought he was a cold, smarmy performer (many did like him though, as he topped both the most loved and most hated celebrity poll in the same year.) Watching him, he does lack the warmth and lovability of someone like Paul Merton and I personally wouldn’t call Bob Monkhouse a genius.

Yet the main difference between the two is that while Bob Monkhouse’s brain was looking or the perfect stored joke. Paul Merton’s mind looks for ways to play off the words and sentences that are actually being said to him.

Recent theories on why peoples lives flash before their eyes when they are drowning is that they are that they searching for the answer to their predicament. Both Merton’s and Monkhouse’s brain’s are searching, but for different things.

Also, Bob Monkhouse isn’t taking a risk when he tells his joke, it’s a stored joke known to be funny – which is perhaps why he’s considered smarmy. When Paul Merton starts saying something he doesn’t know whether it’s going to work. That could be a huge risk but his safety net is that if he does say something unfunny he has the skills to get out of it. Watch Merton mug to the audience if they groan at one of his jokes. Immediately they start laughing again. That’s a powerful comedic package.

Eddie Izzard also falls into this category. When he was a full-time touring stand-up he had a way of working the fact that he was going into the unknown into his act. He simply used to tell audience that he’d reached the end of the road with an idea by standing on stage staring into the distance saying, ‘No, no there’s nothing more there.’

Usually the audience would clap, yes clap, not because there was nothing more there but because of the joy of watching a performer take an idea to the limit in front of them (and perhaps his ability to know where to stop). All people who write comedy do this to some extent in their own home. Izzard made the most mundane thing seem magical because he was creating right in front of them rather than relying solely on written material.

Basically, people love a risk-taker (in comedy anyway, not so much in banking) So how can we start to learn this process? The first step is a willingness to walk into the unknown. When I was learning to compere I used to write jokes on the major news stories of the day using my formulae. But once on stage I tried to loosen it up by asking the audience what they thought of a subject first, safe in the knowledge that I had my joke to fall back on.

I would also rehearse the joke in a ‘chat style’ and work out ways to bring it in naturally so the audience didn’t see the gear change between adlibbing and telling jokes. This didn’t always work, I have to admit, but by then acknowledging it – ‘I wrote that earlier, it seemed good in my lounge’- I was back to being real with the audience. What I noticed over the years was that the more real I was, the more I could risk because the audience sensed it.

The second way of starting to walk into the unknown on stage is to learn to deal with hecklers. When I was a stand-up and I got a heckled I would immediately repeat the heckle back to the person. This bought me thinking time, to twist their words, to decide whether to riff on it or to match it to a previous situation or to go with a standard put down.

When you are on stage with the adrenaline flowing and the audience shouting, your brain reacts so much faster anyway. What’s more ,if you don’t deal with the heckler, the audience won’t like it anyway, so really you have nothing to lose.

These are very first steps towards learning to be a spontaneous performer. To be a joke writer you need to train your mind to come at subjects from every angle. If you want a chance at being called a comic genius you need to be able to do this at the speed of thought in front of an audience and crucially to trust yourself to do it and to know when to stop.

You can’t do this overnight but you can take your first steps and when you achieve it, it is wonderful for both the performer and the audience.

This article was originally published February 2011 on Chortle.co.uk