Structuring Stand-up routines

Hi All,

I'm new to this so not sure if I am posting in the right section but, here goes.

I've been writing alot of one liners for sometime now (of varying quality) and would like to write a stand-up routine but I'm really struggling. The problem is most of the jokes I have so far written fall into the 'wordplay' category and are somewhat unrelated. Other jokes are ones I have thought up around funny things I have seen but, I really have trouble taking them further. I know that Tim Vine and Lee Mack seem to survive fairly well with the one liner format but, would really like to try something with more of a story feel to it like Mickey Flannagan or Eddie Izzard.

Any tips or comments for furthering ideas would be gratefully received.

Thanks,

Jason.

Hi Jason.

Thread about joke writing: https://www.comedy.co.uk/forums/thread/20115/

Thread about putting a 5 minute set together: https://www.comedy.co.uk/forums/thread/18267/

Good luck!

Hi,

I don't have any experience myself, but I have a friend that does and all he did was write about one thing and see where he could go from there.

Dara O'Briain says in his book that all he does is write down all his jokes, gets really drunk, tries to put them together and feel bad because he can't do it. Then when he wakes up, he see what can make him laugh through his hangover and THAT's the stuff to keep.

Good luck, hope that helps!

A lot of people say the way to do it is select your topic. Write down everything you can think of related to that topic. Take all those headings and write down subjects that relate to those. You should have about 50 ideas by then. Now write a gag for each of the headings. Mercilessly edit those gags until you have the best 20. Read them out loud and discard those that are difficult to say or are not funny. You'll have about three good gags. Go back and start again.

Thanks for all of the tips, some really good advice there. I'll have a work through some routines and then post it in the critique section as I suppose that would be the best place to test that my material is any good/original??

Thanks Guys.