Jonas Polsky

by Jonas Polsky

You can’t make this stuff up! Or can you?

Many stand up comedians shun the telling of jokes, preferring instead to relate true stories about their real life experiences. I don’t know everything about comedy, but so far I’ve never seen a comedian get an applause break for being honest.

Here’s something you may not know. Comedy is fake. Everything in comedy is an exaggeration, half-truth, or outright fabrication. The notion that everything expressed in stand up should be “true” is not only misguided, but can have a negative impact on a developing comic.

True stories can be bad for comedians, because without the artistic license, most stories don’t have comic “beats.” A funny story generally builds to a single punchline at the end. The risk of telling a story with only one punchline is that the audience has no opportunity to laugh until the end. If you spend two minutes telling a story that bombs, you’ll have to unravel another tale praying that this one will get a laugh.

“Never let the truth stand in the way of a good story.” - Mark Twain

Here’s the biggest problem with only telling true stories, it’s not sustainable. The hilarious events in your life are finite, and will decrease in frequency over time. Why is that true? Because you are aging. People generally begin stand up in their early twenties; high school experiences are still fresh in their mind, or they’re enrolled in college.

The bulk of most comedian’s stories occurred during this time period. Teenagers find themselves in laughable situations, saying the worst things, and having the wildest nights. As they grow up, move out, get jobs, they are going to have fewer tales of getting high and walking to 7-11 in the snow on Christmas Day. One of many terrifying results of adulthood is that you will generate fewer stories to tell onstage.

Great stories are typically predicated by poor judgment, as you get older your judgment will improve and keep you out of trouble. If you’re still twisting your ankle after a keg stand, or mooning a state trooper at Denny’s in your mid-thirties, you’ll have stories, but the bad news is you’ll be a loser. Although they may resist, ultimately comedians have to grow up, just like everyone else.

Many young comics want to tell true stories to emulate their comedy heroes, but what makes you think the stories they tell are true? Take David Sedaris for example. He’s sharing real experiences from his life, but simultaneously lying through his teeth. Sedaris does not have a photographic memory, nor was everything that ever happened to him compelling. He’s drawing on true events, and filling in the boring parts with whimsy. That’s what comedy is.

A comedian looks out at a dull and oppressive landscape, and the mind turns it around to make something funny. Then it becomes a joke.

What happens to a comedian when the stories that used to be so plentiful in their youth, begin to dry up? They continue strip-mining their daily lives in desperation, or may intentionally do something ridiculous for the sake of walking away with a “story.” It’s an existential question, but if you enter a situation in the hopes that something hilarious will happen, are you influencing strange events, and if so, will the resulting story still be “true”?

Now not only does a comic no longer have material to perform with, they’ve spent more than a decade not learning how to write comedy. When someone wants to hire a comedy writer, they don’t ask to hear the person’s craziest story, they request a writing packet.

I once heard Margaret Cho say she went to get a Brazilian wax, “for the story” and proceeded to wander through some hack observations about the experience. Despite being true, they were about a tenth as funny as jokes you could write about waxing, without actually having done it.

Steven Wright is a perfect example of the opposite of “honest” comedy. Nothing Wright says has any relation to the real world, or events. It’s completely made up, and some of the most ingenious humor stand up has to offer.

Louis CK revealed on Conan that a bit about a passenger complaining on an airplane, was actually him projecting, and reacting to his own feelings in the third person. Comedy can be based in fact, but don’t be afraid to punch a story up when needed. It can be as simple as “what I should have said” becoming “so then I said.”

Comedians and comedy writers are in demand, interesting-edians on the other hand, are not a real thing. If you’re waiting for something funny to talk about onstage, your boring life will hold you hostage with tedium. Fortunately, made up jokes are everywhere, all the time.

No one is going to attach you to a lie detector when you perform stand up. Go onstage and say the absolute funniest things you can think of, whether they happened, or not.