And furthermore...

Alright, probably about time to explain what I meant about not digging Joey's methods. We've only had three classes so far and I've only been to two of them, but what we've gone over is very stereotypical sources of finding and creating humour.

The first exercise we had was to make the list. We were told not to be funny, so I tried to stick with a fairly honest and straight forward approach. And now that's the material I'm supposed to draw from to write my first jokes. There's definitely some stuff to work with but when looking over notes I've taken down or topics I've written about in the past, it's not usually about me. When it is about me, it's a long drawn out story, like what I wrote about my knee surgeries. I'd rather talk about something random that I think is funny than something about me which I don't find as funny. Here's a quick sample of topics that I've jotted down because I thought it could go somewhere:

- When Keifer Sutherland was in jail they said he was an exemplary prisoner and never complained about having to wash dirty underwear. In passing, they said he also worked in the kitchen...

- The option to have automatic parallel parking on your Lexus costs $4000. You know what I can do for $4000? Parallel park your car. Whenever you want. Same goes for the $15000 machine in my office that folds papers into envelopes and breaks down every week...

- I think it'd be really fun to give your kid an accent. It'd take dedication, but it'd be totally worth it. I just can't decide between Pirate or Christopher Walken...

- Why is a vest the only piece of clothing that has been successfully bulletproofed? Do we seriously not have the technology for bulletproof sleeves?

- Jesus was the world's first great magician. If he was alive today, he'd probably be some crazy celebrity magician with a cheesy fake name, like Criss Angel or something less obvious... (Uh, I actually have a lot of stuff written about Jesus... moving on...)

These are not exactly the type of things that bother me or are obvious about me or etc, etc. Perhaps this means that I'm more of an observational comic. Not that there's anything wrong with that. I'm still trying to carve out exactly who I want to be on stage.

The problem I'm running into now is that Joey wants us to stick to the list we wrote. And our rants. And creating a proper setup and punch line. I'm working at it, but it's tough to be inspired when you don't think the material is all that funny to begin with.

On the bright side of all this, you can't learn to run without learning to walk. All of these techniques I'm learning will hopefully form a good base to get comfortable with. Then once I am feeling good, I'll definitely be messing around with the formula we're being taught. I don't especially like following instructions either, so I'm already trying to figure out some kind of "Punchline Jeopardy" where the punchline becomes the setup and, well, you get the idea.

And once I'm through with these topics, they will probably be classified in "Things to avoid". I might even try the same thing over again using 3 not obvious things about me, 10 things I like, am amused by or love and 5 positive characteristics. After all, gotta be yourself.