Am I on the right tracks?

Hi guys, I posted on here a while ago with my first attempt at writing a stand-up routine, and although I got some good feedback and advice, I threw all of what I wrote in the bin and started again. Basically, I was just wondering if anyone could go through this and give any feedback? Very different to what I wrote previously, and it's only about a minute, maybe two,and probably needs a bit of editing in places, but I'm much happier with this than what I wrote previously. If anyone could give me some criticisms or feedback on this, I would appreciate it, just to know that I'm really not going to make a complete tit out of myself. Thanks in advance.

I'm 23 years old, and fully aware that I'm older than I look. It's both a blessing and a curse; I get cheaper bus journeys - bonus, but I also get asked for ID in Tesco when I'm only buying a sratchcard. Apparently, "You should never ask a woman how old she is" is not an appropriate response.

I'm quite a predictable person sometimes. Like when I'm playing Rock, Paper, Scissors, for example, I always go for the same option. Nothing beats a good cup of tea.

I do have a nickname as well, which stems from when I was helping my dad do the washing up once. As all good nicknames do. He was washing; I was drying and putting away, and I double checked with him that there were no more dishes left, and he said "Yep, that's your onions." I said "What do you mean, that's my onions?" He said "that... shallot." So because my name is Charlotte, which apparently sounds a little bit like shallot, my dad hasn't called me anything BUT Onion ever since. He told me the other day that he couldn't wait for me to have kids, just so that he could legitimately say "Introduce to your off...spring...onion."

I also think there's too much music around now. There is litterally a song that can be related to any situation, any mood. I was thinking about this the other day when I was in my kitchen and I had my iPod on shuffle, and I didn't know whether to laugh or cry when I heard the Streets song Dry your Eyes mate. I opted for crying. I was chopping onions at the time.

If Apple bought the Millennium Wheel, would the individual capsules that you stand in be called London I-pods?

There's some nice ideas in there but it's all a bit wordy, for me it's taking you too long to get to the meat of the jokes.

Take this line for example;

"I'm quite a predictable person sometimes. Like when I'm playing Rock, Paper, Scissors, for example, I always go for the same option. Nothing beats a good cup of tea."

This could be edited to become;

"I'm quite predictable, for example when I'm playing "Rock, Paper, Scissors" I always go for the same option. Nothing beats a cup of tea".

Brevity is the soul of wit, audiences can have short attention spans so try to give them something to laugh at as quickly as you can and then keep them laughing every 10-20 seconds.

Also, in my experience, rhetorical questions don't really work as jokes, unless you have a clever way of putting them into your set without them seeming clunky. I would rewrite the last line thusly;

"Apparently Apple are looking to sponsor the Millenium Wheel so in future it'll be known at the London iEye and the individual capsules will be called iPods".

Good work though and keep writing and more importantly, re-writing.

(Oh and lastly, never actually throw anything away, keep hold of it somewhere so that you can come back to it, later, with fresh inspiration)

Hi Tony, thanks for the feedback and advice, I really appreciate it.

Strangely enough, the London iPod joke did start out more as a proper sentence, but I thought having it as a question would make it shorter and get the joke across quicker!

I was quite pleased with the Rock, Paper, Scissors joke, because I'd managed to shorten it down from being at least twice as long as what I wrote here, so I was weirdly annoyed when I saw that you'd shortened it even further, but annoyed at myself more than anything for not spotting such an obvious flaw.

The Onion nickname joke will probably be edited slightly more to either get another joke in there somewhere if I can, or shorten it if possible, whichever seems better. Having said that, I'm hoping that the fact that it is 100% true will help with the laughs.

I'm still working out the wording of the music joke, and I've got it written down in about 10 different variations trying to figure out which way it works best. Probably not the way I wrote it here.

I guess the best way of testing the material is to get on stage and try it out, but the nerves make me want to get everything absolutely perfect first.

You're right about the legnth of the jokes.
I have a 5 minute set in a couple of weeks and have managed to get it down to just 500 words.
Having suffered the experience of standing in front of 30 people, for 10 minutes, while my sharp witty stories are transformed into a dull rambling dialogue before my very eyes has taught me one thing. Keep it short then at least if it bombs, you have the next part to move onto quickly.
With long jokes, because there is so much to remember, and because you are new to it, you'll be so focused on just about memorising your lines that unless you really know your script back to front, you'll struggle to make any sort of decent delivery
Im hoping this gets better with experience!

Good luck with the writing/stand-up

Paul.

Thanks Paul. The word count idea is quite a good one actually, I've managed to get what I originally posted here from 256 words down to 179 in the last couple of days. That includes a slight extension on the London iPod joke as well.

The problem I'm finding now is that because I'm looking at what I've written in so much detail, it's starting to get to the point where it's not funny to me any more, and a part of me is thinking: if I don't find it funny, nobody else is going to. It really is taking every ounce of willpower I have not to just throw it away and start all over again (following Tony's advice ). Does this happen to anyone else?