When do you give up on a joke?

What it says on the tin. How much effort do you put into writing a joke before you realize that no matter how topical it is, or how certain you are that the audience will get it, or just how funny you're sure it is, you just need to let it go?

Do you work on it over time and hope for the best? Do you put your bad material on your Facebook and Twitter like some comics or do you bury it and never look back?

Any examples would be appreciated too. I'm not going to steal them, I just want to know that I'm not alone.

You seem to be implying that you tend to concentrate on a single gag, but surely the best approach is to work on several different jokes, then cut out the worst ones. So regardless of how good it was, you give up on the joke when you've got an even better one .

Well I've been writing quite a few but I guess I tend to concentrate on some more than others. So maybe that's my mistake. Focusing too much on one joke when I have others that were just as funny but not as much work?

Difficult questions is what do you mean by a joke.

Basically Noggett is right you want to generate as much stuff as possible. Then go back and edit and edit and ditch that which doesn't work.

Unless you're referring more to big stuff, pages or so of your routine.
Then ditch it when it isn't funny. I took out a page from my standup after a year and I still can hardly believe only I find it funny.

Quote: sootyj @ 24th January 2014, 4:32 PM GMT

I took out a page from my standup after a year and I still can hardly believe only I find it funny.

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Interesting - do you fancy posting it so we could see what (and possibly why) didn't work for you.

I never really wrote it down and no it's just a duffer.

It's not even I'd joke about anymore.

The past is a foreign country they do things diferently there.

Quote: sootyj @ 24th January 2014, 4:32 PM GMT

Difficult questions is what do you mean by a joke.

View original

Well here's one example. I posted this in the "Tell us a joke" thread and I took the suggestions a couple posters gave and worked on it some more.

The explanation is this. In my high school there used to be an on campus daycare. It was in the vocational center and there several classes held there including early childhood education, home economics, etc. Mostly it was for teachers and staff, but a few students who wound up pregnant for one reason or another also had their kids enrolled so they could focus on school as an alternative to dropping out completely. The running joke around the school was, "Go ahead and have a kid. We've got you covered."

Something that also happened around that time was the nurse's office began making condoms available to students. Eventually by the time I was in the 10th grade, the daycare closed down.

So there's the explanation. Here's the joke I have now that I've been working on for a couple days. I still have other jokes, but this one is challenging because I'm trying to get the right amount of information across without giving them the two paragraphs I just wrote here.

{I}One sad bit of news is that my high school is finally regretting some of the more controversial decisions they made back in the 90's. For example they used to have an on campus daycare center that steadily lost more funding as a result of the nurse's office providing free condoms.{/I}

This is just one example of a joke I'm having some difficulty with.

An example of a joke I had to completely drop was from my very first set. I was talking about how cheap my cellphone was and that it didn't even have a "silence" feature, just a "Someone might give a crap about you now" button.

I was writing this set in a community college course taught by a veteran comedian and she told me to drop that particular joke among a few others. I followed her advice and it didn't hurt me in the long run. But could that joke have a future in another set, or was I right to let it go? Should I try it on an open mic crowd or was I write to cut it from my act and never look back?

Does any of that make sense?

I wouldn't drop it, I'd edit. One of the biggest skills for a gag writer is what I call word knocking, literally taking out every word that's superfluos.

At my school most of the girls were knocked up before their SATS.
The school had a day care faccility, took about encouraging the slags.

It got so bad our high school prom was a daddy daughter dance.

Our biology lessons, covered pregnancy and birth live in class, they used to cover conception but then Mr Johnson went to Jail.

Man my school was so bad I was ranked out for being a virgin, in second grade.

Mr smiths Sex ed made me laugh at school mainly because his tash used to tickle.

Write 10 jokes, try them out on stage, listen back to the gig and then, being quite harsh, grade each joke as A) killer - big laugh, B) a laugh but not massive and C) no laugh.

Any A's can go straight in your set, B's need to be rewritten or used for the time being and C's should be parked somewhere until your writing or performing skills improve and you can try them again.

Never throw anything away but if it's not consistently getting laughs then it shouldn't be in your set, if you keep it in your set then you are being self-indulgent (something we are all guilty of).

I've had jokes I wrote years ago and thought were hilarious bomb when I did them back then but when I've brought them back into my set recently, all of a sudden I can make them work because of how much I've improved as a performer.

Over time you should be replacing C's with B's and B's with A's until you have an entire set of A material, by which time your standards will probably be higher and your A material will now become B, etc.

And keep writing fresh material, you will improve with practise and it gets easier and easier. Store all your half used ideas and be ready to zip them out when the time is right, to restructure.

Also some times you can write 50 bad jokes, but 51 is good.

Tony, I like your exercise very much and I'll give that a shot. Thank you as well Sooty and Nogget. Hopefully the thread gains interest because I'm definitely receptive to more advice.