You have a bit you like. You know there’s comedic potential. You have a laugh at the end. But it’s not killing; the stretches between laughs are too long; it is not dense enough. This is how most bits are born, including the ones that end up killing. So, how do you find the laughs?

How to Get a Laugh Every 15 Seconds

A seasoned comedian will watch a set with missing punchlines and intuitively see things like:

• “Here, you could do an act-out.”

• “Here’s an opportunity for a pull-back-and-reveal.”

• Etc.

The standard advice is to aim for a laugh every 15-20 seconds. What do you do when you’re not that good at “seeing the jokes” yet? You practice seeing and applying the most crucial joke structures, explicitly, one by one, until they become second nature.

There are a lot of joke structures, from simple “rule of 3” jokes to complexly choreographed dances across transgressive lines. But some of them stand out for how central they are to virtually all stand-up. Focusing on these has made me much more intuitive at finding the funny in any premise or story.

My prognosis is that if you master around 5-7 key joke structures, you will be spoiled for jokes.

There are three joke structures in particular that every beginner stand-up has to master early on, either consciously or unconsciously, because they are central to virtually all stand-up. Let’s crack them today!

Three Joke Structures Every Beginner Stand-Up Has to Master

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I assume you know that tags are important and how they work! If you’re like “What’s a tag??”, I explained them in Unreasonably Easy Ways to Make People Laugh That Comedians Use!)

Luise Wolky

Unreasonably Easy Ways to Make People Laugh That Comedians Use

To most people, the idea of going on a stage in front of people and making them laugh seems petrifyingly difficult. You look at the greats like James Acaster, Sarah Silverman, or Mitch Hedberg (if you prefer a more dated reference), and you just think, I have no idea how they do it. You’d have to be a genius. Take a joke like this…

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2 months ago · 203 likes · 10 comments · Luise Wolky

1. Juxtaposition

This one is so fundamental that it’s almost hard to describe in general terms.

Watch this clip until the first big laugh. (Tiny transcript below.)

_{“Has there ever been a dumber generation of idiots more susceptible to fake news than these fucking baby boomers? Literally believing everything they see on the internet. You literally have people in Honolulu right now auto-driving their Tesla Cybetrucks as they vape out the window and their phone AI is trading cryptocurrency. Meanwhile, you have baby boomers—they can’t even right-click.”}

The idea/observation of boomers not being able to right-click is funny. But what really sets this punchline up to kill is the juxtaposition: First describing the Zoomer crypto traders in their cybertrucks, then, bam, stupid boomers.

Why does this work?

Comedy often comes from surprising, emotive, or crazy stuff. The bigger the better. Juxtaposition helps exaggerate the surprise/emotion/crazy, making it seem bigger and therefore funnier than it perhaps is. So, juxtaposition is an extremely general tool.

This seems especially true for storyteller comedians. Audiences expect a story on stage to meet quite a high bar for drama, by virtue of it being told on stage. The dramatic notes that your friends laughed at when you told them the story might not get the same reaction under such heightened expectations. That’s why, unless your story is actually tectonically batshit, on-stage storytelling takes quite some skill.

Juxtaposition is one tool to draw out the dramatic notes of your story more sharply.

Watch this clip and notice the juxtaposition(s):

_{“And um [laughter] the second lesson they taught us was uh don’t let anyone steal your gun. Your gun is your wife. Oh, I remember our wedding day. I was the most nervous young groom, and she was the most automatic assault rifle.”}

When telling this to a friend, just the idea of the military saying “the gun is your wife” might get a laugh. But it got nothing from the audience! You can see the juxtaposition of “nervous young groom” with “Automatic Assault Rifle” was necessary here!

Generally:

If you’re expecting a surprised or emotional reaction from the audience, but you’re not quite getting it, see if you can juxtapose harder.

2. Faces and Act-Outs

I hope you are already fully on board with how important these are. In case not, I will simply quote here from a previous post of mine.

On facial expressions:

[R]idiculously simple. A big facial expression often takes a mild chuckle to a full laugh. Is the punchline about something shocking? Make a big old face of shock. Disgust? Pride? Embarrassment? Make a face. Once you start noticing comedians do this, you see it all the time … (Maria Bamford does great facial expressions. A Helen Bauer short.)

A lot of comedy is about attitude.

Humor comes from emotion, and a big facial expression helps with that.

On act-outs:

Same idea, just bigger. Almost any action that’s part of a punchline gets funnier if you physically act it out on stage. Why? No clue. In this set, Fern Brady literally just walks sort of gingerly after mentioning a cat. Also, comedians usually act out dialogue with different voices, facial expressions, etc. Watch this Jen Brister clip—it just wouldn’t be as funny if she told it straight.

The good news is that faces and act-outs are probably the easiest joke structure to train yourself to “see” intuitively.

Try doing them basically every time a person, attitude, or action is mentioned! Try doing a voice even if it’s just one person saying one line. Try doing a voice even if it’s just some abstract imagined person speaking, e.g., Taylor Tomlinson saying “This is Lisa.”

3. Callbacks

A callback is anything that references something that happened earlier in your set. I didn’t think of it at the time, but they would have deserved a place in Unreasonably Easy Ways to Make People Laugh That Comedians Use. People are willing to laugh almost simply from recognition that you’ve made a callback.

I don’t have that much insightful stuff to say about making callbacks except: do it all the time. If you have a good bit, exploit that and make a callback later! You can make a callback to almost any punchline, and you can put it wherever in the set you need a bit more laughing momentum.

Let’s now get into the most important part of the post—the exercise!

Good Job!

My prognosis is that if you master around 5-7 key joke structures, you will be spoiled for jokes. If you’d be interested in a part 2 on the three next-most important joke structures, please let me know in the comments!

This is a guest post, by the way; hi, I’m Luise! If you’d like to read more from me, here’s my most popular post to date:

Luise Wolky

Unreasonably Easy Ways to Make People Laugh That Comedians Use

To most people, the idea of going on a stage in front of people and making them laugh seems petrifyingly difficult. You look at the greats like James Acaster, Sarah Silverman, or Mitch Hedberg (if you prefer a more dated reference), and you just think, I have no idea how they do it. You’d have to be a genius. Take a joke like this…

Read more

2 months ago · 203 likes · 10 comments · Luise Wolky