RedA joke can get a laugh and still leave its writer feeling strangely absent. The wording works. The timing works. But the person speaking seems to belong to an earlier version of you.
George Carlin’s move toward countercultural comedy around the beginning of the 1970s offers an unusually useful example of a performer working through that problem.
A change that took time
Looking back in an interview with Terry Gross, Carlin described two ambitions that had become difficult to reconcile. He had an anti-authoritarian outlook, but he also wanted the kind of mainstream entertainment career he associated with movie stars such as Danny Kaye and Bob Hope.
For years, he pursued that career through material suited to the audiences and venues in front of him. Eventually, he felt the distance between his private attitudes and his public act had become unsustainable. He recalled changing course gradually, over two or three years.
Read Carlin’s account in the Fresh Air archive.
Think about those two or three years. A creative change can look wonderfully obvious once someone has succeeded. While it is happening, there are decisions to make, habits to question and new material to try.
One useful reading of Carlin’s transition is that a comic voice develops through those decisions. What interests you enough to keep investigating? Which phrases belong naturally in your mouth? What have you been leaving outside the act?
Following an interest further
Carlin’s 1972 album Class Clown included the routine commonly known as “Seven Words You Can Never Say on Television.” The National Comedy Center places it in the history of comedy and censorship.
Speaking to Gross, Carlin connected the material to his longstanding fascination with language and dislike of arbitrary rules. He also discussed the rhythm of the words and their arrangement. The subject carried an argument, while the sentences still needed to work aloud.
For a writer today, that suggests two useful questions to ask together: What do I actually think about this? And what makes this particular sentence worth hearing?
An opinion gives you somewhere to start. Specific language gives an audience something to follow.
Give the change somewhere to land
Carlin also emphasized the ordinary work of keeping material. In his Television Academy oral history, his advice to younger comedians includes writing ideas down and organizing them.
Watch the interview, including Chapter 7.
A collection of observations lets you notice your own recurring interests. Perhaps you keep returning to apologetic signs, workplace rituals or the confidence of people who have misunderstood something completely. There may be a voice developing in those repetitions.
Try this with a short piece you have already written:
- Underline a sentence you would happily say in conversation.
- Circle a sentence that sounds borrowed from your idea of how a comedian should speak.
- Rewrite the circled sentence using a detail or attitude that matters to you.
- Read both versions aloud and listen for the difference.
This is an original exercise inspired by the questions Carlin’s career raises. It leaves room for a small, useful change today.
Sources and further reading
Over to you.
What changed in your writing when you began using words or opinions that felt more like your own?
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The practice prompts on the Red Blog are original editorial exercises. Red’s Studio has its own exercises in the private preview.