[Watch the video interview on YouTube here]
Film Courage: John, how are comedy and batting practice similar?
John Vorhaus, Author/Artist/Screenwriter: How are comedy and batting practice similar?
I think a lot of people have this idea about comedy that they’re just going to find jokes everywhere and magic will happen over and over again.
But nobody would take that idea into playing baseball, professional baseball, even wreck league baseball.
If you want to get good at it, you’ve got to put in your reps.
You have to get in the batting cage and take your swings and work on your approach and your methods.
Comedy is the same way.
There’s a lot of things you can do with a joke that just require a way of thinking about the joke that takes some practice.
In the sense that batting practice is to a good batting average, joke practice is to good joke production.
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Film Courage: And just when you sort of fail or succeed publicly. So, if you hit a home run, you’re cheered.
If you strike out, there’s no hiding from it.
John: Well, if we’re going to extend the baseball metaphor, baseball players know, batters know, that they fail two times out of three.
The best batters fail two times out of three.
A great batting average is 300, 330, which means you get one hit every three times.
So failure is kind of baked into that.
And with comedy, it’s the same way.
Your jokes don’t work all the time.
From the Comic Toolbox, my famous rule of nine.
For every 10 jokes you try, nine won’t work.
And at first, that looks like really bad math.
Like, why do I have to suffer defeat nine times?
But here’s a way out of that. I
love this and I’ve used this all my life.
If you have one joke, you have to invest 100% of your ego in that one joke.
And if that joke fails, you experience ego death because you get no place to fall.
But if you have this idea that you only have to get it right one time out of 10 or one time out of any arbitrary number, then you’re kind of…(Watch the video interview on YouTube here).
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BIO:
John Vorhaus is best known for his comedy-writing classic, The Comic Toolbox: How to be Funny Even if You’re Not. He has taught and trained writers in 37 countries on five continents at last count, and created TV shows of his own in Nicaragua, Romania and elsewhere. His writing credits include dozens of teleplays and screenplays, plus seven novels and some two dozen works of non-fiction. His latest book is the little book of STANDUP. Vorhaus is a graduate of Carnegie Mellon University and a member of the Writers Guild of America. He lives in Southern California and secretly controls the world from JohnVorhaus.com.
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