Iterations, focus groups, and failing fast — as seen from a comedic perspective:
Ze Frank discusses his show and says he doesn’t worry about writing things down for it. Instead, he iterates often and lets that process pare the content down to just the good stuff.
I don’t write these shows. I just say them. But I’ve usually said everything 15 times. While I’m doing it, all the extraneous garbage comes out.
The Humor Index discusses movie audience research and shows some of the problems you get when you try to base a product on focus group results. Example: Fart jokes test through the roof but how many people really want an entire movie with nothing but fart jokes?
Steven Wright says he expects 80% of his new jokes to fail.Flatulence jokes tested really well, too. [“School of Rock” writer Mike] White may have little problem with a certain amount of gross-out humor, but when is too much too much? “Any time someone rips one, the audience goes nuts, and that’s slightly depressing,” White says. “Even when they like it, you’re like, I didn’t make the movie for you. I don’t want the audience to tell me what I want to do. I want them to like it, but I want to lead it.”
The audience still won’t laugh at a joke unless they think it’s funny. I know that because I try out new jokes within my show, I slip some in here and there, and ever since the beginning, I’ve had a one-in-five, or one-in-four ratio. For every four or five I write, one will be good enough to stay in the act, and that’s still true even now…It’s a little awkward, but the only way you can get the new stuff is to go through that. It’s not horrifying, it’s just awkward, and you’re disappointed it didn’t work.
john
on 17 Nov 06nice article
Dave Woodward
on 17 Nov 06I guess Ze Frank does have a day job. I’ve always wondered how he feeds himself. Although he says one text ad makes as much as ”... an entry level hooker in Washington, D.C.” I’ve never been to Brooklyn, can one survive in Brooklyn on the income of an entry level hooker from D.C.? If a cat craps in his litter box and you’re at the office, does he meow?
Scott Meade
on 17 Nov 06Steven Wright has a great strategy – though 80% of his jokes fail, he does not have an 80% failure rate in his act. Just by trying out a few jokes here and there – he learns. You have to experience something to know how it works out. There are ways, like what Steven does, to do this without betting the farm or failing spectacularly.
IT development shops (esp. corporate shops) try to act like IT efforts are a hard science that can be planned and predicted up front and that any deviation from that plan is marked a failure. IT shops too often fail to recognize that – just like commedy and arts – there are all sorts of variables and nuanced interactions that you cannot capture in a project plan. When I was an IT manager in one of the country’s largest telecom companies, I was always frustrated that upper management would send me packing any time I expressed any uncertainty about whether a design or code or schedule was going to work out. There are just things one does not know and in that environment everyone was just afraid to try something because if the “try” did not turn into a “done”, it was seen only as a failure.
The thing I love most about Rails is that it lets you try small changes to an application without making that change a large effort to which you are forever commited.
On top of that, I love Rails because it lets me create a whole application and if it has no takers or turns out to not meet the need, no problem. I can just put it on the shelf and not worry about having spent too much time on it. In the time it takes many shops to do the market research, focus groups, schedule management, project management, etc – our new small shop can put up a demo app to share with stakeholders and say “How’s this!?”. If one out of four attempts at this fail, I won’t be discouraged because my investment into the effort was small.
Adam Keys
on 18 Nov 06I’ve always thought humor is like batting in pro baseball. If you can hit it 33% of the time, you will go to the hall of fame.
The caveat I find, much like word processors, is that its a different 33% for any given combination of people. One audience may respond well to fart jokes, but if you switch just one person, you might need to take it up a notch. Or even lower.
John S. Rhodes
on 19 Nov 06Some of the lessons here:
1. Almost nothing is perfect the first time.
2. Flaws Are Gold, Mistakes Are Gems http://www.webword.com/moving/flaws.html
3. Even the best and smartest people fail.
4. Planning for failure is a smart strategy. http://tinyurl.com/yylte6
5. Fart jokes are funny, in moderation.
- Captain Obvious ;-)
Kevo
on 20 Nov 06The Onion is making headlines recently. Hard to believe it’s 18 years old.
Here’s a link to a story from last week’s Sunday Times (UK) http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,2095-2459565,00.html
dm
on 20 Nov 06I saw a showing of the American Masters episode on Bob Newhart over the weekend and saw a little more “getting real” in a comedian. David Hyde Pierce had a segment saying that Bob was funny because tried to do the least possible for laughs. I didn’t write that down, but there’s another segment in an interview on NPR from last year:
This discussion is closed.