Please check out my book “The Angel’s Claw” on my web page or on Book Baby!  Everything in my novel was learned on stage as a Stand Up Comedian: emotion, timing, fear, panic, energy, story.                                                 This is the 6th instalment of “Stand Up Writing.” Some of these have been posted as pages.

1) We began with the premise “picnic”  2) Discovered the emotions we had about the premise. 3) We organized thoughts and statements about the premise. these become the PUNCH LINES  4) We Questioned and Answered thoughts about the premise and we did this from different perspectives around the circle. 5) We looked at key words or PUNCH WORDS in our premise “picnic” : wine, blanket, basket, food. . .

In the 6th instalment I want to talk about TAGGING. The mechanics of joke writing has a lot of slang terminology like CHUNK. Chunk is another word for joke or series of jokes. TAGGING means to expand or replicate a joke. The idea is “if you have a great player on your team why not make more of them?” We’re taking a joke we wrote and staying in the joke, studying it and hopefully, creating more from other points on the circle. Lets TAG the joke we came up with yesterday.

“I’m a prude when it comes to picnics, no wine. I hate the constant, ‘it’s raining, there’s too many bugs, the duct tape hurts, why do you have a shovel?”

We can change words in the original. What happens if I change prude to old school? What happens if I add cheese before wine? What happens if I change perspective? From a first date to lets say, the 10th year of marriage?

“We don’t go on a lot of picnics anymore now that we’ve been married for 10 years. A picnic for us is a drive through and (?)  What tags did you come up with? I’ll share my TAGS tomorrow.