Books

Directed Before & Laughter, Jimmy Carr, Quercus, 2022 

Working title: The Kama Sutra of Comedy by Amanda Baker, Jimmy Carr and Abi Grant
Workbook: Joke Craft

The basics are the basics because with them you can go on to infinity.

50 joke types
Comic Timing (and yes, it can be taught)

  1. We should build a language for comedy – that is specific and leads to a greater understanding of what the ‘craft’ of comedy is.
  2. For a faster rate of innovation, knowing what things are makes you more creative.
  3. Loose terminology leads to dead ends for the majority of comics – so much talent goes to waste.
  4. Comedy is still in the dark ages of development; magical thinking is the rule.
  5. Funny is not binary; there are many kinds of funny.
  6. Art is craft and craft is skill. There’s a reason it takes 10 years minimum to be any good at it. This is about the work you do to get to the 10 years and have a shot at being great. Work hard and smart.

When you have an entire field built on trial and error, happy accidents and guesswork, it leads to magical thinking: you can’t teach comedy, you’re either funny or you’re not, timing is innate, I find it on stage. Knowing what the craft is will be most of the work.

Book Sample

The Esotericism of Timing: What the Illuminati, Aliens, Gods, Goddesses, Bilderberg, The Knights Templar, Freemasons, Catholics, Satanists, and Southern Baptist Evangelists know…   
  
We’ll tell you the secret to ‘comic timing’ right off the bat. It’s 92bpm.  
 
Is that it? Of course not, what’s wrong with you? The secret to timing is the same secret as jokes: It’s all in the set-up baby. 

‘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. “As above, so below.” (That’ll get you conspiracists going.) 

People laugh 30x more when they’re in company. Thirty TIMES more. 30 X 100% = 3000% 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. 
 
Comedy exploits this one principle: humans are suckers for a good pattern. Humans like patterns the way straight women like their men, direct, reliable and muscular. Humans are attracted to order and get spooked by erratic behaviour. The human body rewards its host for accurately spotting a pattern.

The regularity of 92bpm means this is not art; it’s science. And it is. It’s part *biology/part physics. [Footnote: Not my strongest subjects but turns out science does come in useful after high school. Who knew?] I found answers to questions I didn’t know I was supposed to ask, and my first big question in comedy: Has it occurred to you we could invent a laugh? Yeah, that turned out to be juvenile. I was lowballing comedy. Once you grasp the basics of rhythm, you’ll discover how to hijack an audience’s autonomic system and get any laugh you want whenever you want. You’re like the idiot who asks the universe for money and the universe’s response is, sure, but you could ask to travel through space… time… dimensions…   

The first time though will get you familiar with the language while widening your ears. The second time though the learning really starts. What you’ll probably discover is that you haven’t been performing at all.