Unseen Structures

I was listening to one of my go-to podcasts, 99% Invisible, and the guest Elliot Kalan was on to talk about his process for writing jokes. Most people probably would say that comedians are just naturally funny.

How to Write a Joke - 99% Invisible

Have you agreed to give a speech at your best friend’s wedding? Are people expecting this speech to be funny? Are you realizing that engaging in extemporaneous humor and delivering jokes are not the same thing? Have you spent the months leading up to the big day waiting for comic inspiration to strike, but still

99% Invisible99PI

"When he first began working in comedy, he relied almost entirely on inspiration, leaning on his comic talent, waiting for jokes to come to him. But on days when inspiration didn’t strike, he was left with nothing to show for all that waiting around. So Elliot finally decided to develop a system for coming up with jokes on demand — based on his deep understanding of their underlying logic and constituent parts."

Sound familiar designers? We can get lumped into this same myth of waiting around for inspiration to strike – for the Muses. But we don't always have the luxury of time. Sometimes you need to design something in two hours. And the reasons that you can are process, experience (which includes your personal archive) and knowing your audience. Apparently, the same as writing jokes.

Elliot Kalan:

I said to myself, I need to free myself from being chained to inspiration basically, which is something I can't control.

And so I want to have a process where you can take any subject and you can go through the steps of that process and then come out with a joke on the other end.

And one of the things that I want to get across in the book is that you don't have to use my process, but it's good to have a process. And your process should mimic your way of thinking. It should fit your needs, your voice, how you most comfortably write. But whatever that process is, it should be something that you know the steps of so that at those times when you don't have inspiration, but you need to produce a joke, you can do it.

And this idea was partly the inspiration for this newsletter – to think about design as a process that I can go through. The Pudding did a great visual explainer on how Ali Wong structured her hour long special to get to the "laughter climax" 50 minutes in. It's well worth clicking through for the design alone. But it is fascinating.

The Structure of Stand-Up Comedy

The genius of Ali Wong’s Netflix special.

The PuddingJason Wong

And I've been loving these kinds of unseen structures lately. The Pudding piece references the “map of life’s hidden order.” Processes that seem so effortless as to be invisible. So much so that we attribute the result to mythical forces.

Does breaking down the process make comedy any less funny? Or design any less interesting? I don't think so. To quote Elliot Kalan one more time, "the illusion is part of the craft."