Comedian Akaash Singh bombed early and took two years off, then studied the first five minutes of specials by Chris Rock, Dave Chappelle, and Bill Burr, transcribing every line and marking laughs. He extracted patterns about punchline placement and bit structure, then shifted his process to recording every set and reviewing clips with other comics to see what lands.
Chapters
What's your process for like writing jokes? And then I know it's kind of like trial and error, isn't it? Like you don't know if a joke's really going to land before you test it, or do you kind of have an idea at this point?
Well, you know when you got a good idea, and sometimes you're wrong too. I sometimes— you— a lot of times it's just how do you deliver the idea. Yeah. First of all, I bombed. I told you the second time I did stand-up, and then I didn't get back on stage for like a year and a half, almost 2 years after. And it was a school thing that like my friend was doing 20 minutes and I was like, oh, maybe I could take some time off your hands, but it wasn't— if the opportunity wasn't right there in front of me, I don't know if I would have gotten back on stage. So yeah, you're not being a pussy. Yeah, it sucks so much, especially early, because you don't know that you can just get back up and do it again. Like, you learn that, but you don't really learn it. Yeah, um, but, uh, there's like, um, I was really unfunny for a couple of years. Like, I started comedy in LA, and I was funny out there in that, like, I would do these cute jokes, and I would kind of say what I wanted to say, like, by sneaking it into the joke. And then all these cute little jokes, and they did well. And then I remember moving to New York, and, you know, you see Bill Burr, you see Patrice, whatever, and I was like, that's what I want to do. I want to say what I want to say and make that funny. That's a whole different thing, though. And I didn't know how to do it, so I would just bomb for like 2 years straight, and then I started studying other comics. There's another idea I got from Andrew, but like he said, I studied openers of every comic. I would like study it and figure out why it was funny. So I would study the first 5 minutes of all my favorite comedians, and I would write down the entire first 5 minutes of their specials. I did 2 Chris Rock specials, I did 2 Chappelle specials, I did Bill Burr, I did Patrice, I even did comics. I like, I didn't ever love Louis as much, but I knew people loved him and he was good, so I did that. I did Aziz, who I didn't love as much, but I knew he was big, so I studied. I was like, you learn from everybody. I think I might have been Seinfeld, maybe. But every time they got a laugh, I figured out why. I like put a star, I wrote down their facial expressions, their hand movements, and every time they got a laugh, I put a star by the laugh and then said, why was this funny to the audience? And then from that, I kind of learned a formula to it. Not that it's super formulaic, but you learn like, okay, well, I've talked long enough, I need a punchline here. Like if I'm talking on stage, working out a joke. Okay, I could probably do an act out here. Okay, I could probably do X, Y, and Z here. And you just kind of figure it out. And that's how I learned. It's not as formulaic as improv, but there is a system to it. My comedian friends and I used to ask each other, hey, is this funny? And then we would say this thought. And then I noticed at some point fairly early on, like 4 or 5 years in, it shifted from is this funny to how do I make this funny? Hmm. And that's a whole, 'cause you can make your idea funny, you just gotta figure out how to package it. Typically the writing is I'm on stage, I'll do the bit, we'll talk to comedians after, or I'll know what hit and what didn't. I also record every show so I can go back, sometimes go, hey, send me that clip, that segment from that show. I want to see how that— like, what I said there specifically.
