Joke Refinement Quotes

For comedians, we're all kind of tweeting our thoughts instead of spending time developing them. You can gauge how good a joke might be by how many times it gets retweeted, but it takes discipline to go back through the tweets and then develop jokes from them.

I try to write three jokes every morning, although I don't know what they are. I write them as fast as I can, then I put them away for a month. So I couldn't even tell you what they are, or if they're good. I just assume they weren't.

My jokes have definitely changed. 'SNL' has helped with that, because when you're on 'SNL,' you have to kind of pay attention to the news. I feel like my material has gotten smarter now.

You can trust a Neil Simon script. Every dot. Every dash; that pause means something. He takes all the jokes out, practically.

Then I will tape the sets and even though I'm not very successful sometimes I will try to cut out the fat and put the jokes closer together.

I have become a giant fan of the testing process, especially with a comedy. I mean, they tell you what's funny. It's almost tailor-made for people who shoot the way we shoot, trying a million different options and versions of things. Because the audience doesn't laugh at a joke, we put in another joke. If they don't laugh at the next joke, we put in another joke. You just keep doing them and you can get the movie to the point where every joke is funny, if you have enough options in the can.

I don't take anything from the podcast and bring it to my act, because I feel like that's been burned, unless I feel like I can really develop it beyond two or three jumps beyond what I said on the podcast.

I also try to think of ways to articulate the joke more economically.

You know how hard it's been to write material? Because to do stand-up comedy, it takes time for the material to develop. So you'll come up with a joke, you'll tweak it, you'll work it for six months, you really fine tune it, and now you've got a good bit. Well, with Trump, every day there's something new coming out.

It's a great lesson about not being too precious about your writing. You have to try your hardest to be at the top of your game and improve every joke you can until the last possible second, and then you have to let it go. You can't be that kid standing at the top of the waterslide, overthinking it...You have to let people see what you wrote.

My specialty at 'SNL' was doing triage. There was always a great need for someone to say, 'Make this funnier. Give me an ending for this. What's a better big laugh for this towards the end? What's a better physical joke in this?' And I just really, over time, honed that specific thing so well.

I never do a whole new set of new material. I do one new joke at a time, and I wedge it in between two good jokes. Or if it's a long story, I don't do it in L.A. or New York; I do it in Kansas and Omaha, all these places I'm going this weekend.

Every now and then you'll say something that didn't quite work. But the important thing is, as a comic, you try to learn why it didn't. And then you adjust and figure out how to either make it work or just abandon it because it's just not funny.