Books
On Jokes: On Sale on Amazon and in bookshops near you.
Amanda Baker, Jimmy Carr and Abi Grant
What do you get when a comedy writer, a stand-up and a director write a book? Feelings get hurt, bullshit gets exposed, and guesswork stops.
The result? A book for the good who want to be great. For the great who want to be GOATS. For the slightly famous and fading. For the stagnated, the stuck and the defensive. For comics storming night after night while newer acts leap past them. And for the bored – for whom stand-up has become a rinse and repeat chore.
Above all, for stand-ups who know they should be working on *something* – but what? On Jokes is designed to help you figure out where to look, what to do, and how to bring it all together.
Includes the top 50 joke types, the secret of comic timing, why your material needs pace, meter, and rhythm, and basic stagecraft (which despite being basic, is rarely done). And so much more.
This book is a challenge to the comedy hegemony. It contains the basics, the cold, hard fundamentals you need to know.
The craft so you can get to the art.
Our aims are:
To push for a comedic language.
Democratise comic tools
Demystify funny
To encourage innovation.
To know which rules to break.
Funny is not binary; there are many kinds of funny.
But when an entire field is built on trial and error, accidents and guesswork, what you’re left with is magical thinking and glib pronouncements like: “I find it on stage” “you’re either funny or you’re not”, and “you can’t teach timing”.
Well, you can. You just have to get to the ‘work’ which is just another word for ‘craft’.
Art is craft
Ars longa, vita brevis (Translation: Mastery takes time, life is short, better get cracking.)
This is a book for stand up comedians who want to work smart while working hard.
This is a book for obsessives.
Book Sample
‘Comic timing’ refers to a teeny tiny part of what makes something funny. It’s mostly used as a shorthand for when a word is successfully stressed within the punchline, basically, the end of the joke, the ‘effect’ part. And that’s just not how time works – or comedy. Jokes laid out within the scaffolding of rhythm are what makes for ‘funny’ and ‘funny’ is not limited to the punchline. ‘Comic timing’ should really be called comic rhythm.
People laugh 30x more when they’re in company. Thirty TIMES more. Which means most of the people in a comedy audience are not in the habit of laughing out loud, or ever. In fact, most of them are unaware of being even capable of all the distinct laughs they’ll produce on any given night at a comedy club. And they’ll be doing this with complete strangers, because what they’re about to participate in will interrupt their natural timidity and self-consciousness.
Rhythm is the great equaliser. It’s part physics and part biology. It’s one of the few learnable techniques where you don’t have to factor in variables like gender, race, size, attractiveness, frankly, it doesn’t even care if you’re human. You can have zero presence and hack material but if you apply basic rhythm, you’ll still do unbelievably well which is outrageous but sadly true. You don’t even need to use fancy polyrhythms to get big laughs: you just need to apply rhythm in the most basic way.
Live stand-up comedy is the art of hacking into people’s bodies for one purpose: laughs. Humanity should be grateful we’re so myopic. It is a deliberate attempt to get a physical reaction; you are literally interfering with their bodies. So, no wonder they sometimes get offended. This is a possession, and you are the devil. Have some respect.
