Stand-Up Adam Cayton-Holland on Hitting the Comedy Jackpot

Joel Warner & Peter McGraw: Describe your comedy-creation process, as well as your revision process.

Adam Cayton-Holland: I used to try and force it. Like go spend an hour a day writing. But that just led to shitty, forced jokes. When I have a funny thought or conversation with a friend, I’ll usually jot a note down in my phone — a premise, or a ridiculous situation. Then I’ll go back and hash that thought out with a cup of coffee at a cafe so as to be a complete and total cliché. Then I take it to the stage, where revisions sort of occur naturally. Editing the stuff that doesn’t work out. Tagging the stuff that does, etc.

JW&PM: Can you give an example of when one of your jokes failed badly?

ACH: I have a million examples. Most of the time a joke fails because you haven’t put in the ground work to really make it good yet. You just took a sloppy premise up there without a punchline conclusion. But most of the bombing horror stories are usually circumstance: a shitty setting where comedy should have never been happening in the first place, an audience that does not want to sit and listen to the type of performer in front of them and a scared performer hating his way through 30 minutes for a paycheck. It’s like a perfect storm of everyone not wanting to be there. Like Vietnam.

Stand-Up Adam Cayton-Holland on Hitting the Comedy Jackpot / By Joel Warner and Peter McGraw / July 25, 2012 / wired.com