Stand-up comedy and workshop
Part 1 on stand-up comedy and writing
Most of the time, when I watch stand-up comedy, the part of my brain that I can never quite turn off anymore when I read a story—the part that drifts into analysis, no matter how much I’m trying for just pure, unadulterated enjoyment—gets to switch off. It’s not my genre, so I can simply settle in for the humor and wit, without a whole lot of internal critique going on.
Except, well—of course, half the enjoyment is the analysis, and stand-up is a form of story-telling, and so a sliver of the time, I find myself drifting into that mode without meaning to. Mostly it’s a form of curiosity: How did the comic weave together those narrative strands so deftly? Or it’s appreciation for how a set is built—the transitions between pieces, the way information is withheld and given out with precise timing, a surprising word choice, a striking comparison.
When I like a comedian, I tend to go on deep-dives on YouTube, looking up their older sets and inevitably finding earlier recordings in comedy clubs, prior to their big recorded specials. Often, they’ll have the same jokes recorded multiple times, with slight variations. Often, these earlier versions will lack the smoothness of the later specials, instead jumping from joke to joke with little connection between them.
I thought little of this until I came across two articles last year: one from the New York Times on comedian Taylor Tomlinson, and the other on the Substack You’re Invited to Laugh, by comedian Steph DePrez. (I don’t know Steph personally, but we went to the same undergrad and I stumbled across her Substack through mutual friends.) Both articles are about the process of crafting comedy, and while developing a set onstage is obviously different from drafting a story on the page, both articles made me think about fiction writing. Specifically, I thought about the role of workshop: how responses from others can help a writer shape a piece. And I thought about the length of time it takes to write a short story: the weeks or months or even years you can spend honing details and words as you try to get a scene just right.
Workshopping jokes
The Times piece on Tomlinson follows the development of the final joke in her Netflix special Have It All. The anecdote itself stays the same—a phone conversation between Tomlinson and her friend, in which the friend tentatively announces her engagement, wondering if Tomlinson can “handle” the news—but over the course of several months, the story changes in its structure, specificity, and word choice.
The difference between a joke succeeding or failing can come down to word choice, and Tomlinson tests out lines for maximum laughter.
The article shows clips of Tomlinson performing different versions of this joke, and you can hear the audience laughing at each of them. Their reaction is hard to gauge from the audio, but I can imagine this part of the process, expanded out to more occasions: trying version after version of this same story, with tiny tweaks, and using the audience as a barometer. Which one went over best? Did it go over best because it was the best—or was it some other confluence of factors (the venue, the audience itself)?
Over time, you can see Tomlinson introduce the names of her friend and her husband, add details, change words, and, ultimately, call back to an earlier part of the show to reemphasize the theme and title of the special.
By the time the special is recorded, all this labor is invisible. Like a published story, the audience sees none of this—it seems effortless, as though the jokes just appeared in their final form. But there is time and thought behind the construction of each joke, sometimes even the individual words that comprise them. The Times article notes that Tomlinson started with the phrase “so horrified and touched” to describe her reaction to her friend’s announcement, but later changed it to “so sweet and hurtful.” When the reporter asked her about the change, she said that “‘horrified’ has more syllables.” The shorter phrasing was punchier.
In Steph’s Substack post, she talks about a different context—being a new, emerging comedian in Berlin, performing at open mics. But I was struck by the similarity of the process in her post about new comics having a “tight five”—five minutes of honed routine.
Like Tomlinson, she emphasized time and repetition. That it might take months or years to get that five minutes right.
Like Tomlinson, she emphasized the role that the audience plays:
The point of doing mics is to do the same jokes until they are as tight as they can be, as natural as they can look, and you have experienced every possible outcome so you know how to respond to it. You’ve discovered every nook and cranny of the joke. You’ve tried different word orders and turns of phrase. You’ve recorded it and watched the footage from fifteen different nights. You’ve cut the fat. You’ve A/B texted every tangent to see if it’s actually making the bit better. [. . .] if you’re a new comedian working on a tight set, you are going to do the same jokes over and over – for years.
I’m struck by the intimacy of this: that while there is probably a point in time where the repetition gets boring, there’s also a sense of knowing those five minutes so well, and knowing (as well as one can, anyway) how they will land.
Fiction workshops
Open mics for fiction writers are a much less frequent occurrence.1 Instead, the workshop, in which writers exchange drafts and comment upon one anothers’ work, more often serve as the site for feedback and revision.
There are many thoughts on what the creative writing workshop can or should be—many thoughts on its primacy within creative writing curriculum.
Like most pedagogical debates, I tend to think that the extreme views are, well, extreme (i.e., “the workshop destroys writing,” or “the traditional workshop is sacrosanct”) As with most pedagogical debates, I don’t think that many people rigidly hold these views.
But in the middle ground, there is a lot to be discussed: the balance of editorial vs. conceptual feedback, the value and drawbacks of the writer’s participation in the workshop discussion, various structures that upend the typical discussion models.2
I’ll generalize a bit, though, and say that most workshops place emphasis on reader feedback. This might be cased in different ways, depending on the style of workshop, but most models default back to this: the writer has shared a piece of writing, and the readers are offering their response to it.
My workshops in the MFA all used an “unsilenced” model, in which the writer could speak (in contrast to the more traditional model, in which the writer is silent while the rest of the class discusses.) They also required the writer to introduce their piece, with a prefatory email that included questions for the rest of the group, so that the conversation focused on what was useful for the writer at that point in their process. One of my professors also encouraged us to “pause and pivot” the discussion if it was going in an unhelpful direction—again, to avoid spending time on something that ultimately wasn’t going to be useful for us.
All of this is good—all of this was good, in my experience. As a writer, it allowed me to ask questions. It made me reflect on my own work and think about what I needed to ask in the first place. It meant that I could acknowledge the problem parts in a piece where input would be helpful—and also identify issues where input wasn’t what I needed right now. As a reader, it gave my feedback direction and helped me focus my comments on the writer’s foremost concerns.
But thinking about the experiences of stand-up comics, performing and honing their set,s has made me consider another aspect of workshop that is actually less craft-focused, less directive.
Because part of what a writer may need to know, sometimes, is purely descriptive. Most of the time, I prefer craft discussion and analysis—but sometimes, what I want is to listen in while people describe how they felt moving through the story. Part of what I want, sometimes, is just reaction.
Often times, my classmates provided this in their marginal notes. An underlined sentence or little checkmark to identify parts where the prose was landing. A brief comment on a sentence or two that resonated. They might mark a weak portion, too, by noting their confusion or writing a question about a part that didn’t come through clearly. Reading these notes, I sometimes felt as though I was getting little glimpses into my classmates’ reactions as they read—how they’d received the story as they made their way through it the first time.
Perhaps a way of framing this within the worshop is having the readers consider the story as a finished piece. One of my workshops did this, in order to focus our conversation on the conceptual underpinnings of the story. There were limits to this approach—it led us to tiptoe, at times, around making any editorial comments, which felt like a broach in a contract of some kind—but it also led to rich discussion of the story’s thematic concerns. By treating the story as a finished piece, we avoided immediately imagining the writer’s decisions as otherwise. Instead, we reacted to the choices as they were, made sense of the story as it was, analyzed the piece in its current form, and let the writer respond based on our interpretations.
It was a bit like the way an audience treats a comedian’s set on stage. The set isn’t actually finished; it will change the next time it’s performed. And the story in a workshop, of course, isn’t finished either. It’s being workshopped precisely because it’s still in progress. But by treating it as finished, by imagining it done, the writer can often see more clearly what is working and what is not.
A fiction writer does not have recourse to countless workshops; they can’t repeat the same scene for readers in the way Tomlinson did her closing joke or DePrez her tight five. And it wouldn’t be good practice even if they could: fiction is a different kind of art; it’s not meant to feed off a live audience, and submitting a story repeatedly to this kind of feedback can actually be bad. And there’s a difference, too, between responding to pure reaction—the laughter of a crowd—and the articulated feedback of people telling you precisely what they think about your writing.
But in both stand-up comedy and fiction writing, there is value in knowing how an audience receives a piece—in comedy, whether the humor, wit, and pathos hits; in fiction, how a reader moves through the story, whether the emotional beats are coming through, where the concepts are clear or muddy, complex or too simple.
With fiction, much of the working over of a scene naturally happens outside of the workshop—the writer serves as their own audience, trusting their response and instincts. Or they might exchange later drafts with individual writer friends.
But some of this can happen within the workshop too. Discussion can move from “imagining the work as done” to acknowledging that it isn’t, to brainstorming where it can go. The writer is unsilenced, so why not use the space to let them try out some ideas: What about these words? What about this detail? What if the scene was reordered in this way?
I experienced a version of this in another workshop, a few times, where the simple question was posed to the group: What if?
I can imagine a different type of workshop too, one where the writer brings multiple versions of the same scene, and simply asks: Which one works best? Why?
It’s a bit of both-and, in the end: the conceptual and the editorial, a workshop where the story is both treated as done and then acknowledged as unfinished, a discussion that analyzes and reacts to a piece as it is, but then allows it to be reformed and crafted anew.
I’m focusing on fiction workshops specifically, rather than creative writing workshops in general here, since my experience with poetry workshops is limited, and since poetry can be more of a performative art. Also, some of my points about workshop are specific to story/narrative. But it’s possible this could translate to other genres as well.
Matthew Salesses’s Craft in the Real World has several alternate workshop models, none of which I’ve experienced first-hand, but which were intriguing to read about: Salesses, Matthew. Craft in the Real World: Rethinking Fiction Writing and Workshopping. Catapult, 2021.