As I said yesterday, the next few posts will cover the creation of a 7-minute comedy set. I've shared a lot about making original gags, but feel that the time is write to talk about crafting a longer piece of comedy.
I've chosen a duration of 7 minutes because it's not too long for an audience to sit through, but its long enough to provide a vehicle for every creative gag-making method you may wish to use.
Hopefully you’ll stick with me and enjoy the process.
A large percentage of successful humour is down to finding exactly the best phrasing for every single one of your jokes. Exploring and playing with words is fun, but it’s also necessary if you want every single line you write or utter to sparkle with wit.
If you spend time fine-tuning the exact words in your set, you can expect to be twice as funny as if you just use the first words you think of.
This series of posts started yesterday with the choice of ‘baldness’ as my initial theme. You might care to look back at that post if you missed it.
One by one, we’re going to be using all our tricks and reference books to generate ideas. We'll stockpile any words / phrases / ideas with potential and put them together later when we’ve finished the idea-gathering / brainstorming process.
Let’s continue, then, with mining the Rhyming Dictionary for possible nuggets.
Yesterday we looked at rhymes for ‘hair’. Today we’re doing the same, but with the world ‘bald’.
As it happens, there are far fewer direct rhymes of ‘bald’ than there are of ‘hair’. In fact there are only 3 useable ones, namely:
Scald, walled and piebald.
But we know there are verbs like ‘call’ which will rhyme with ‘bald’ when an –ed is added.
To find those, I’m going to look up ‘call’ in the Rhyming Dictionary. This gives us:
Called, galled, hauled, mauled, appalled, crawled, scrawled, drawled, trawled, enthralled, sprawled, stalled, snowballed, mothballed
So, by extending our initial rhyme-search beyond ‘bald’ to words rhyming just with the first bit, 'bal...', we come up with 14 more words we can play with.
The following is the idea stockpile so far.
air-head, air-liner (eye-liner), airspace, airlock, airborne, aircrew, airport, aircraft, airiness, airspace, airstrip, airtight, airworthy, airy-fairy,
(International) Hairspace
A hairport: a place where wigs come in to land
heir: this is very near to a direct pun with 'hair' Prince Charles, hair to the throne
chair: filled with horsehair
bare, bear: better to be a bald human than a bald bear
or even a thread-bear
hare: I was about 20 when my hair hared off
Tony Blaire (weapons of mass destruction?)
prayer: my brother's bald, dad too-my hair never had a prayer
wear: if you're going to wear something, wear hair
warfarenightmare: a hair-loss bad dream
funfair: the opposite of a hair-nightmare
compare the compere.com: a website selling hosts/presenters
au pair: I knew I had no chance: hairless, I'd be au pair-less
fanfare: keeping this - it might lead to something later
square: ditto
swear: ditto
Scald, walled, piebald.
Called, galled, hauled, mauled, appalled, crawled, scrawled, drawled, trawled, enthralled, sprawled, stalled, snowballed, mothballed
I've chosen a duration of 7 minutes because it's not too long for an audience to sit through, but its long enough to provide a vehicle for every creative gag-making method you may wish to use.
Hopefully you’ll stick with me and enjoy the process.
A large percentage of successful humour is down to finding exactly the best phrasing for every single one of your jokes. Exploring and playing with words is fun, but it’s also necessary if you want every single line you write or utter to sparkle with wit.
If you spend time fine-tuning the exact words in your set, you can expect to be twice as funny as if you just use the first words you think of.
This series of posts started yesterday with the choice of ‘baldness’ as my initial theme. You might care to look back at that post if you missed it.
One by one, we’re going to be using all our tricks and reference books to generate ideas. We'll stockpile any words / phrases / ideas with potential and put them together later when we’ve finished the idea-gathering / brainstorming process.
Let’s continue, then, with mining the Rhyming Dictionary for possible nuggets.
Yesterday we looked at rhymes for ‘hair’. Today we’re doing the same, but with the world ‘bald’.
As it happens, there are far fewer direct rhymes of ‘bald’ than there are of ‘hair’. In fact there are only 3 useable ones, namely:
Scald, walled and piebald.
But we know there are verbs like ‘call’ which will rhyme with ‘bald’ when an –ed is added.
To find those, I’m going to look up ‘call’ in the Rhyming Dictionary. This gives us:
Called, galled, hauled, mauled, appalled, crawled, scrawled, drawled, trawled, enthralled, sprawled, stalled, snowballed, mothballed
So, by extending our initial rhyme-search beyond ‘bald’ to words rhyming just with the first bit, 'bal...', we come up with 14 more words we can play with.
The following is the idea stockpile so far.
air-head, air-liner (eye-liner), airspace, airlock, airborne, aircrew, airport, aircraft, airiness, airspace, airstrip, airtight, airworthy, airy-fairy,
(International) Hairspace
A hairport: a place where wigs come in to land
heir: this is very near to a direct pun with 'hair' Prince Charles, hair to the throne
chair: filled with horsehair
bare, bear: better to be a bald human than a bald bear
or even a thread-bear
hare: I was about 20 when my hair hared off
Tony Blaire (weapons of mass destruction?)
prayer: my brother's bald, dad too-my hair never had a prayer
wear: if you're going to wear something, wear hair
warfarenightmare: a hair-loss bad dream
funfair: the opposite of a hair-nightmare
compare the compere.com: a website selling hosts/presenters
au pair: I knew I had no chance: hairless, I'd be au pair-less
fanfare: keeping this - it might lead to something later
square: ditto
swear: ditto
Scald, walled, piebald.
Called, galled, hauled, mauled, appalled, crawled, scrawled, drawled, trawled, enthralled, sprawled, stalled, snowballed, mothballed