Week 4: Stand-up Comedy

I like account planning because I feel it is an amalgamation of a lot of things I enjoy and can do well. I've been told something like, "Find a career in something that you're passionate about and you'll never work a day in your life." I don't believe that. I believe the act of having to do something for a living automatically sucks some life out of you. Work is work, and you will always have days that stink; however, some work is more tolerable than other work. For me, account planning seems most tolerable because much of the work is something that I would do in my own free time anyways. It's not quite as fun, and it isn't in the same proportion of activities, but it is easier for me to make account planning fun than any other job I've encountered.

Which is important, because I believe if you aren't having fun, then you aren't doing it right. But that will be a different post.

I think stand-up comedy is one of my free time activities that has prepared me the most for account planning. I bring this up because my experience of the week was going impromptu to a comedy show in downtown Salt Lake, and it got me thinking about my own comedy experience. I won't pretend I have some great insight into comedy (I've done very little stand-up outside of my college comedy club), but I think the practice has a lot of overlap with account planning.

I've noticed it has a lot of overlap with advertising in general. A lot of my comedy friends are pursuing ad copy writing as a career, another large chunk of them are going into graphic design, and I've met enough former-comic creatives that a failed comedy career seems like a resume pre-requisite for getting a full-time position in a creative department. I'm a little disappointed I haven't seen similar trends in account planning.

To me (and, bear in mind, I'm an amateur in both fields), the most central skill in both account planning and stand-up is lateral thinking--the ability to take something mundane and inflexible and bring it to life with something new, unexpected, and seemingly unrelated. I've never made a breakthrough punch or a powerful strategy statement without a successful lateral thinking twist. From there, as a comedian, you can build out the joke with your presentation and supplemental punchlines (and that is where I think comedy and ad creative have their overlap), but I think the real fun of both processes is that moment of discovery. And I think that is where the real excitement for both stand-up and account planning is for me.

Now, lateral thinking, in my opinion, is also the hardest part of both fields as well. I don't think there is such thing as a "lateral thinking formula" and that is a little scary because I'm trying to build a career out of it. I also believe, however, that it is a talent, and the more practice you put into lateral thinking, the better you'll become. And that is why I think my stand-up comedy experience has proven invaluable to me as I prepare for my career in planning.

The practice of staring at a premise, reworking and rewording it, and talking it through to the real anchor-punch (that's my working term for the strong punch that I build my joke on) has taught me at least some tricks that help spur lateral thinking. Here are a few of them, connected to related jokes of mine, for reference. I'm hoping to build out my list of tricks much, much further. If you have advice for other techniques, I'd love to hear it in the comments.

1) Expanding the world of the premise. For this trick, I look at my premise/insight, and I ask "If this is true, what else must be true?" My comedy example is Cat-god. My beginning premise was that it was extremely lazy for ancient Egyptians to worship cats as gods. It was, in itself, as underwhelming as worshiping a house pet as deity, but then I expanded the world around it. How does worshiping a cat compare to worshiping a more creative deity? This was the result:

2) Building unrelated connections. For this trick, I take one small piece of the premise, and connect it to another idea that is related in only that one piece. From these small, obvious relationships, you can often find deeper, more powerful connections that give new life to an idea. My comedy example is my joke about hiding from an assassin by going to Disneyland. One of my reasons to believe for this premise was that movie assassins are always dressed up way too nicely for Disneyland, so they'd feel uncomfortable, but my joke stopped there. To try and build it out, I said, "Mormon missionaries also wear suits," and that connection unearthed a variety of new punchlines for what became one of my most successful bits. It's long, but you can see how the twist works here:

3) Thinking and sheer force of will. Is this really a trick? I think so. I think most people working in creative industries will tell you the importance of subconscious thinking. Your subconscious, it seems has a lot of untapped creative ability, and the only consistent way I've found to take advantage of it is sheer force of will. You think, hopelessly, on your premise until you're sick of it. Then you walk away, do something else, and, if you've thought on it hard enough, I think your subconscious takes on the task as a favor. Then, surprisingly, it just comes out. For me it often happens mid-conversation. I'll be with a friend, doing something unrelated, and then the finished premise will fall out of my lips. It is very exciting, but it's not something I quite understand. For this comedy example, I have Worm Butts. I had been trying for weeks to write a joke about how weird I think worms are, and nothing fit. I had all but given up until one day, talking with friends over dinner, the whole joke popped out in its entirety:

So that's my current list of lateral thinking techniques. I don't think it is a coincidence it is closely related to my three favorite jokes. I think that moment of discovery when lateral thinking reaches its tipping point is one of the most rewarding experiences a person can have, and it is what gets me so excited about planning and comedy. Hopefully, moving forward, I'll find new ways for my list to grow.

-Aaron