Oh, hi. didn't see you there. Well, welcome to my home office, I thought we would move here for the lesson on writing. You see comedy and writing, and especially everything about comedy really is an infinite grind. And writing is no different. So, what I wanted to talk about when we jump into this writing lesson is the practice of continuously writing.

You know, Jerry Seinfeld once said that he was walking to the club One day, he was walking to a comedy club in New York, and he passed a bunch of guys on the street who were working, they were just workman working on the road in New York. And it occurred to him right then that he was like, You know what, these guys get up every day and they go to work. So there's no reason I can't write every day and go to work. So for the next bit of your time between now and when you get up on stage and do your five minutes I want you to be writing every day. It's a practice that is really good to get into for a number of reasons. But what I want you to do is set aside 30 minutes a day and write for at least 25 of those minutes.

So maybe you sit down, you set your alarm clock on your phone for 30 minutes, five minutes you take to john kind of just chill out, take a deep breath, maybe get some coffee, and drink a little bit of it, get your brain working, maybe you you know, look at your phone for a second watch a funny YouTube video, set it down. And then for the next 25 minutes, you do nothing but write, you write longhand, you can write on your computer, whatever it is, I want you to write for 25 minutes. And what I want you to do is get a calendar. This is my little planner here. You can use whichever one that you'd like yourself. But what I do is I write in here and I marked down every day when I actually write when I actually sit down and get it done.

I mark it down and as I go back through my calendar, I can actually see all the times that I continue to write. It's not only rewarding because it makes me feel like I accomplished something But getting into that habit is really good. Both because establishing a habit of creativity can serve you in the rest of your life, but also because it's encouraging to feel like Oh, you know what, I got a lot of stuff going on. And once you start building up a lot of different material, you're not going to use it on stage. In fact, mostly in most comedians use a very small fraction. Now, Mike Birbiglia, the comedian is famous for saying, you can write 100 jokes, you only use one onstage, that's about true.

And we'll talk about that a little bit when we get into punch line specifically, because there's a reason for that. But you're going to write a lot of material and you're not going to use a lot of it. But sitting down for 30 minutes is actually really effective and really, particular when you sit down, turn your phone off, turn it on to airplane mode. Get into a quiet place where no one can disturb you. I like to play jazz music, or for some reason the Beastie Boys I play a lot of play a lot of the Beastie Boys. Anyway, what I want you to do is get into this habit because it takes your brain about 15 minutes to actually get into A creative task, which means if you're sitting down for 30 minutes, you're actually only getting about 1510 minutes at the most of actual real creative time.

But that's okay, because that's better than zero. Now, if you want to sit down and do this for more than half an hour, if you want to sit down and do it for an hour, that's totally fine. I would encourage you to take a break every hour if you want to do it for more than an hour. And I would encourage you to do it for at least 30 minutes, don't do it for less sit down 30 minutes 25 of which you write non stop. It doesn't all have to be funny. It can just it just has to be your thoughts and ultimately, your unconscious brain, your non conscious your subconscious mind, however you want to think about it.

Your deep brain is going to produce things that are funny because your intention is to sit down and be funny. So eventually you'll come up with something and you'll know it when you come up with it. You'll laugh out loud. You'll you'll hit it you'll think about it. You can write about anything. It'll be a conversation you had the other day something funny pull out your little pocket notebook that I talked about earlier.

Write down some notes. I have a couple here that are just kind of ridiculous that I want to make sure I build out further. One of them is the key to devaluing your stuff is getting basic white girls to like it. There we go. Is that funny? I don't know if it's that funny, but it could be something that I want to explore.

So I would take that. And then I would write down with my notebook. And we'll talk about this in a second. And now I would use the 30 minutes to explore it. Sometimes I'll build a list, which is another thing we'll talk about. Sometimes, I'll sit down and I'll try to maybe come up with a whole bunch of different specific things to write about.

Sometimes I just free write I free associate, I just continue to write about things. Sometimes I ask questions, and I'll continue to write questions about something. But the idea is to get into a process of 30 minutes a day where you write so establish that get account calendar, and keep track of the times you're spending writing. mark it on your calendar every time you do it, and spend at least 30 minutes, set your alarm and turn off your phone. If you want to do it for more than that. That's totally fine.

But do it for at least 30 minutes, get into the habit of writing. You're going to produce really good stuff and whether or not you end up using it for stand up. You'll use it for something. It's never a waste.