Sunday, September 04, 2005

Rejoice!

I found them! I found the notes! 20 minutes of material recovered. The damned paper was with me all this time, just got tucked away in a corner of my knapsack. Am paranoid about losing it again so am quickly transcribing it here. This is exactly the text I have written on it, will explain below the red text:

KARACHI PARTY SCENE
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-Men dancing together
-Couples breaking up
-Stoned Karachiites

PAKISTANIS AT AIRPORTS
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-Staring in the departure lounge
-Cellphones on plane
-Airhostesses who don't give a shit anymore

SHALWAR KAMEEZ
----------------------
-Awkward clothing
-Wind blows

So this are, ofcourse, just raw notes broken down according to Subject and related material.
I don't have the jokes for these worked out yet, infact they are quite far from actual usable material. But that is the (relatively) easy part. The tough part is thinking of topics and subjects. Now that that is out of the way I can start free-associating. It's a trick I learned in improv. You take a word and just start listing all the possible associations you can come up with. Once that is done you have a whole bunch of possible approaches and linkages to the main topic. Very very useful. Then you start using that info to attack the topic from a whole bunch of angles. Sometimes that means more free-association, this time with the words from the list you just made. If you are lucky, and your brain is working in the way you want it to, at the end of it all you will have a punch-line. Then all you have to do is come up with a structure for the joke. How to lead-up to the punch-line.

I like to pay attention to the rhyme and rhythm of the sentence as well. I saw a comedian on T.V. the other day who had some funny stuff, it was just delivered badly. Poorly constructed sentences and no cadence to his delivery. This isn't that different from any other kind of public oration, in that, it's about more than just talking aloud. How you say something is as important as what you say.

1 Comments:

Blogger Abbas Halai said...

i attended the muslim comedy fest. thought of you guys. was one funny show. check out russell peters some time also if you get a chance. i think badmash.org has some of his vdo clips.

1:03 PM  

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