How to Write Stories as Jokes
A lot of young comedians consider themselves "storyteller" comedians. But most young comedians say, “I’m a storyteller comedian” as an excuse for why their jokes take longer to get to the punchline. That tells older comedians that you haven’t figured it out yet.
You’re up there to tell jokes, not stories. Jokes are the priority, what the jokes are about and how they’re told is secondary.
For most comedians, stories should be a natural part of your jokes on stage. That doesn't make you a different type of comedians as much as it is where you source joke subjects.
Why You Should Tell Stories As Part of Your Set
Stories are memorable. Historically, stories are how humans passed on lessons, memories, traditions, etc. through parables and poems because it is easier for us to remember and relate to stories than straight details.
Stories are inherently yours. A lot of one liners or little observational jokes can easily be stolen or riffed on by other comedians. That’s a big unspoken fear these days keeping y’all from posting reels, etc. But if it’s a story from your life, it’s a lot harder for someone to steal, because it’s yours.
REMEMBER THIS IF NOTHING ELSE:
You’re telling JOKES; the story is just the subject of the JOKES. If you were telling a STORY that was funny, that’s different and doesn’t belong on a comedy stage. The JOKE is what it is, the story is what the jokes are about. What you tell your friends when you’re out drinking is a STORY that is funny. It doesn’t belong on stage in that form.
General Rules
I repeat this all day every day when I'm training creatives in all the different industries I work in: learn the rules before you break them.
Comedians, the younger amateur ones in particular, love to say, "There are no rules in comedy."
Nah, there are.
Just like any art form, there are foundational guidelines, "rules", and fundamentals that you need to learn if you want to get good. Comedy doesn't get to be the exception to that.
Sure, these rules and fundamentals can be "broken", but only with intention and only after you learn how to follow them. Otherwise, you just look like you don't know what you're doing. Breaking rules with intention shows that you know what you're doing and have skill.
Stories on Stage Still Must Follow Joke Structure, Even If Loosely
Joke structure is simply: Setup, Punchline, (Tag), (Tag)
That structure can get a little messy with stories, since stories are a series of jokes. Sometimes the previous joke is the setup for the next punchline and tags. That’s fine. It still needs to be there, even if sometimes it's a little more blended together.
And get to the punchline quickly! A loose rule in comedy is that you should be getting a laugh every 6-10 seconds. Stories are no exception. If one of your jokes needs a longer setup to get to that punchline, it better be for a bigger payoff, or you’re wasting everyone’s time, so revisit the setup and see if you can add in a joke. Just because you’re telling a story doesn’t mean you get to take forever to get to a punchline. The audience is there to laugh, don't disappoint them or worse, bore them.
Paint the Picture In As Few Words as Possible
Comedy is an art of economy. Give it exactly what it needs, no more.
Make Sure Your Stories Punch Up
If your story is about someone else, make sure you’re punching up. Crowds will not like it if it feels like you’re making them laugh at someone else’s misfortune in a bad way.
Delivery Matters
When you’re telling the story, it’s a performance. Some of the lines might not be punchlines on paper, but it’s how you build tension and release it in your delivery that makes it funny.
Some stories require physicality and act outs. Record yourself and practice this a lot.
You’re Not Going to Be Fact Checked
You can fudge the details in the story, as long as it doesn’t hurt someone or won’t come back to bite you. It’s a performance, and most people understand that. So if you have to mix around the events timeline or change how something was said, small detail changes are generally okay.
You can also leave out details. Please, for the love of god, do not give all the details and context of the story. Keep it to exactly and only what is needed for the JOKE, not for the story.
2 Methods For Writing Stories as Jokes
These aren't the only two ways to write stories as jokes, but they're two methods that have worked for me, so I'm sharing them.
- Write down the whole story, line by line, then go through and craft a joke from each line or add a joke after each line.
- Write Down The Elevator Pitch For Your Story And Build From There
Method 1. Write Down the Story Then Punch Up
This is the easier way for comedians newer to comedy or newer to telling stories on stage. You tell the stories to friends all the time, so write that down, each sentence on its own line.
First, cut out all extra details. Be brutal. If it doesn’t directly support the punchlines or get a laugh, get it out of there. Do NOT let your ego get in the way. Kill your darlings.
Then go through and underline (or highlight) any punchlines you’ve naturally written in. Then circle (or bold, etc) any tags naturally written in.
Note how many lines there are between all highlighted punchlines. The big gaps between highlighted punchlines are where you put in the work.
Start adding in jokes. Typically an easy way to do this is to find a way to compare each line to something else that makes it funny. A simplified example: "This person did this thing. That's like this other person doing this more ridiculous thing."
This is an easy way to start writing stories as jokes for the stage, but it's not the best way to go about it. The next method I'm going to explain is the advanced way to do the same thing.
Method 2. Write Down the Elevator Pitch Then Build With Intention
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Write an elevator pitch for your story
- Break the details down into key points line by line
- Find a general funny premise to sum up the key points
- Start building out the bit as a series of jokes pulled from the key points.
- Establish the premise early on in the series of jokes.
- Conclude, ideally, with a closer that sums up or calls back to the general premise.
- Work it Out on Stage
If you really want to start getting good at writing stories for the stage, they need to have an overarching premise that you use to tie the series of jokes together. This is the harder way to go about it, but it creates better bits. With this method, you'll have a general premise/theme to work off of, and a natural way to guide the audience through the details, with a solid payoff.
To explain this method, I'm going to break down how I used it to write one of my jokes. I'm not saying this joke is the ultimate story joke ever. I'm giving you this joke because this is the method I used and I'm able to give you the nitty gritty details to how I worked out this joke using this method until I had a solid bit that does well every time.
I think we don't share the behind the scenes of comedy enough with each other, and I want to show you the work I did to get this story stage-ready, including the bits and pieces that got cut.
It started as a short funny story I tell my friends and and I turned it into a minute and a half bit from the below method.
First, to turn it into an elevator pitch, I imagine I’m out with people and in this case, my friend says, “Didn’t you date a guy who was going to get the shocker tattooed on his side?”
So now I only have a short amount of time to tell the story.
1. Write The Elevator Pitch
“Yeah, my high school boyfriend and all his football buddies were going to get matching shocker tattoos. I told him no way so he got a cross tattooed on his chest instead. I feel like his wife he’s married to now should thank me for that.”
The story has a lot more detail than that, and I'd usually tell it in more detail to my friends, but that’s the elevator pitch. It's so good to get into the habit of being able to sum up your jokes as much as possible, because oftentimes, that's how I've found the premise and moved from "intuitively funny" to "formulaically and repeatably funny".
2. Write The Key Points Line by Line
I took that and wrote each point out line by line. You can add back in some details here as key points, and continue to add or subtract details as you work on the joke.
- High school boyfriend wanted matching tattoo with all his football buddies
- They decided on the shocker tattoo
- Most of them were virgins
- I told him no
- Instead, he got a cross tattooed on his chest
- Now he’s married with kids
- His wife should thank me
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2 of the football guys actually got the tattoo, both have kids now
3. Find A General Funny Premise
Is there a general overarching funny premise you can pull from the key points? Why is it funny that my high school boyfriend almost got a shocker tattoo?
I pulled out: I kept him out of prison by telling him he couldn’t get that tattoo.
This is the premise and general theme for the bit, now, that I can shape my punchlines and tags around.
4. Start Building Out the Bit As a Series of Jokes
Look at each line and figure out if there’s a way you can turn each key point into a joke or decide if it stays just as setup. Ideally, every single line will be turned into a joke.
5. Establish the premise early on in the series of jokes.
This is where I had a friend tell me I take the fun out of comedy by being too analytical, but frankly, I'm not wrong.
Writing bits is not unlike writing papers in college or school. You still need something like a thesis statement, to establish the theme of what you're about to talk to the audience about.
A good thesis statement sums up the conclusion you're about to draw, and a great thesis statement in comedy alludes to it without giving away the twist. An insane example of this is Dave Chappelle's special, Equanimity, where he gave away the punchline at the start. That's a very transparent example of this, but all he was doing was establishing the premise as a thesis statement before leading you through his argument for it.
For this particular bit I'm breaking down for you, I expanded the premise further so that it fit into my queer themed bits in my set and made it a joke. So at the start of the bit, I say, "It's a good thing girls don't come out liking girls until later in life because it's our job in high school to date the boys to keep the boys out of prison".
6. Conclude With a Closer Joke or Call Back to the General Premise
This takes work and practice to do, but ideally, your bits all have a conclusion that helps them to feel complete and finished for the audience. Give them a big payoff for going through the journey with you. And the best way to do this is for it to tie together the overarching premise you were working with throughout the bit.
This takes practice, but if you're intentional, it makes for exceptional bits.
7. Work It Out On Stage
You won't really know what jokes stay and what details need to get cut until you work it out on stage. Stories are interesting in that, unlike some other jokes, it's sometimes harder to predict what an audience is going to like about a story. One thing I know is that they rarely laugh at the parts that my friends laugh at when I'm telling the story casually.
The Breakdown of My Story Bit
Here we go. This is the bit. I do this bit now word for word on stage because I worked on it for 6 months. I have just what I need in it, nothing more. I'll explain what was shaved out afterwards.
This is a very short story. I have longer stories I've used this method on, but I'm not going to belabor the point with a massive story. This same method works for longer stories, as well.
Want to see me performing the bit so you understand the delivery? There's an okay version up on my Instagram. I have my issues with the clip, again I'm not saying this is the perfect joke and I'm super pro at this. I'm just giving you the behind the scenes for the process. I've since refined the joke since filming this clip. And that's comedy, we can always improve. You can watch it here >>
I've highlighted and underlined the punchlines and highlighted and italicized the tags below.
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It's a good thing most young girls don't find out they're into girls until they're older. Specifically, this is a good thing for guys because in high school, it’s our job to date the boys to keep them out of prison. I know that for a fact, because I did the lord’s work in high school. (1) I kept my high school boyfriend out of prison, I know it. And I told him no. Because the matching tattoo they all wanted to get was the shocker on their side. (2) First of all, GAY. Second of all, if you get the shocker tattooed on your side at 18, you're doing time before you turn 30. Guaranteed. (3) Then what does that look like when you get out of prison? (4) You’ve got a new girl and she asks, "What's the meaning behind your tattoos?" “Oh these? They mean "Two in the pink, one in the stink, 3 in the clink, baby." My ex is married now and I want so badly to just slide into his now wife's DMs like, |
(1) Kind of a tag. It gets a laugh if my delivery is on point, delivery is key for stories. (2) Small laugh from delivery, I look at the audience with a “You see what I mean” look. But typically there is no big laugh on this reveal because they are waiting for me to provide the twist, this is still just the setup. This is where a lot of younger comedians go wrong. Telling the story as-is is not enough, you need to punch it up. The funny is not in the details the way it is in a story. The funny is in your interpretation of the details. I CAN'T STRESS THIS ENOUGH BECAUSE I LEARNED IT THE HARD WAY, TOO. Comedians need to present the strange/funny scenario, but then give the comparison or meaning behind why it’s funny. It’s not enough on stage to just give the details, even if with your friends telling the story, the details get a laugh. WHY is that detail funny? You provide that answer. (3) Observation/meaning to why this is funny plus finished establishing my funny premise, now I can dive into it. (4) Comparison to something absurd, answering why this story is funny. I use a hypothetical absurd example. (5) Completes the story arc by calling back the initial premise that it’s a good thing girls don’t come out as liking girls until later in life. Even though it's not a recognizable "callback", it is proper closure to my bit. |
Now here's the fun part that you don't get to see with most comedians' jokes: all the details that ended up on the cutting room floor.
In my key points above, there were a lot of details that arguably do make the story funny, but they never worked for the bit. Ultimately, I scrapped these details for the same reason: they didn't add to or enforce my established overarching premise in a way that made the bit funnier.
Details I Scrapped:
- That most of the football guys were virgins. The idea of boys who've never had sex before getting the shocker tattooed is funny, but it strays from my premise, and I could never get it to hit as hard as the rest of the story, no matter how many different ways I worded it.
- That he decided to get a cross tattoo on his chest instead. The joke I wrote for it would get small laughs, but they never measured up. Is it still a type of prison tattoo? Yes, and I made that comparison to fit the general premise. But at a certain point, you can just say too much about a simple story, and that's how it started to feel. This isn't a complex story and it doesn't need to be a 3 minute bit.
- I nixed that he has kids now. The idea makes it funnier, maybe, but not enough.
- I also nixed that some of the boys actually got the tattoo. That’s fucking hilarious to me, but it didn’t add to the joke on stage.
Comedy is an economy of words. Don't say too much. Some of these details do make the idea funnier, but can I get to the big laugh quicker? There's a careful balance where sometimes getting to the punchline quicker with fewer words can help it hit harder.
Be brutal with the edits. Logically, you know that there are a lot of details that make the story funny to you, but feel the crowd. If one of those details in your story doesn’t hit as hard as the rest, nix it. BE BRUTAL. SHAVE THE FAT.
You always want to leave the crowd wanting more. You don’t want to make them tired or feel like you’re taking too long to give them the payoff. Plus, when audience members come up and tell me they think this story was funny, I get to say, “Yeah, best part is there are two of those football buddies out there walking around with that tattoo right now.” Not only do they think that’s funny, but they have a little secret they get to walk away with.
Some Comedians and Specials to Watch
Nearly all pros use stories as subjects to their jokes, but some comedians stand out as "storytellers". Some obvious ones come to mind like Dave Chappelle in his later years and Hannah Gadsby, but look. You aren't anywhere near their level if you're reading this blog. You have no reason to be studying those specials to learn how they did it. They're breaking a lot of fundamental rules because they have shown us that they can crush at the fundamentals over the decades they've been doing comedy.
When you're in your first decade of comedy, it's important to get good at the fundamentals. The below comedians are pros, but the specials I've listed are fundamentally sound. There's a lot to learn that can be used at any level of comedy.
Ali Siddiq: My Two Sons
This special makes me cry... That said, he's amazing at getting consistent laughs and reactions through the whole thing. I like to point out Ali Siddiq as an example of how to use delivery and physicality to help your stories land. You can just watch the first 5 minutes of this special and see what I mean.
Specifically, it is simple yet masterful when he has worked his way to one side of the stage without you realizing, all so he can then march back across the stage to the too-tall mic stand for a laugh.
Mike Birbiglia: My Girlfriend’s Boyfriend (And anything of Mike’s after that)
Mike earned a lot of recognition in the comedy scene at large for this special because of how the entire special is one long story that he weaves through creatively, until he leaves you with an amazing, emotional payoff.
I'd watch this special closely for how he embeds a number of small stories in his main story and takes you on a journey, but throughout it, there is one overarching theme and premise that he brings home at the end.
I believe you can stream this special on Netflix.
Have Any Tips For Turning Stories Into Jokes
Drop them in the comments below! We'd love to hear 'em.
