A New Take

Something that I think about a fair amount is comedy. Given that I see myself as a creator of it as well as a consumer, I feel I have an interest in the subject. I think often enough about how to do it. I have read other people calling this "best practices". I run at top speed from any phrase that sounds as much like empty business buzzwords as those do, but I do still think about things like how to construct a joke and what to write them about.

One of the big divides to me is that which lies between the timeless joke and the topical one. When I am writing jokes for Twitter, I think nothing of writing a joke whose lifespan is limited to the same enjoyed by some current event. After all, even a timeless joke committed to Twitter is ephemeral anyway, and it doesn't take a lot of time or effort to come up with any one in particular unless I have to bust my ass getting under 140 characters with a complicated joke.

Writing something lengthier than a tweet, I am more reluctant to commit myself to something which will not last. I would just as soon labor over something that could live forever. If I write a sketch about something that happened in the news, it could be dead in days or even hours. The news event might not sustain itself through the re-write process, let alone hang on until a video can be made or a staged presentation produced.

That's partly a problem of rapidly following through on a script, of course. Anyway, I've probably gone into this area before, but I though of it again just because I decided to submit a package of sketches to a live show in the area that specializes in topical and news-based material. Of course I had to write three new sketches, because I didn't have topical sketches sitting on the shelf. This sort of thing is maybe not my forte, but I'm not entirely hopeless at it.We'll see how it goes. If I hear anything, it will surely be good news.