We often hear many different versions of the phrase, “turning a bad situation into a good one,” but what if we’re not looking to have “good” come out of a situation? What if we want to turn the worst situations we could get ourselves into comedy gold? Every comedian in history has been someone who has gone through adversity and sometimes it makes you question how they’re even on stage making jokes.
Real life is unavoidable and so are the failures, regrets, and missteps that come from life. Even Thomas Edison had thousands of failures. Just the simple act of sitting there doing nothing means you’re failing at getting ahead, so there’s no point in trying to avoid the inevitable.
While most people would be laying in bed wallowing in depression over failure after failure, they get up in front of a crowd and have people laugh at their pain. What are some real-life shortcomings that you can turn into comedy gold?
Real Life Failure
Whether or not we want to admit it, the dating world is rife with failures. With about five-hundred different dating apps, half of which are just hookup apps, there’s bound to be plenty of stories of first dates crashing and burning. Dating can be extremely frustrating, and that’s when things fall into place. What about when they are a trainwreck? After the smoke has cleared, they’re the stories you tell to friends, or on stage in front of hundreds of people. Before you decide to give up in your mid-thirties, move to Tibet, and become celibate monk, try to think of how you can turn your dating failures into comedy gold.
Here is a real-life example:
Example: Bad Date
You finally matched with a girl who swiped right with you on Tinder. She was a beautiful blonde who was ultimately out of your league, and you question if she may have made a mistake. You agree to meet up at a local coffee shop because it’s the only decent first-date place between the two of you besides a hole-in-the-wall Japanese restaurant suspiciously run by Chinese people.
The scent of pumpkin-spice assaults your senses as you step into the coffee shop, but all your senses besides sight are shut-down when you see her sitting in the corner with beautiful silky blonde hair barely touching her exposed shoulder top. She was a hundred times more beautiful than the photo on her app. You walk up to her and introduce yourself as the person she matched with, only for her to take one look before making a face like you’ve offended her and her ancestors.
I guess that’s the last time you take a picture of your dog and you to use it as your profile picture; cropping it enough to show all of your dog but only some of your face.
How To Turn That Into Comedy
There’s so much to process in that story alone. There are so many different angles you could take with this. The first is making a joke about how guys still think women will like them if they have a dog. From the dawn of sitcoms, there are endless stories of how a guy will go through great lengths to show the girl that is great with animals.
Maybe it’s their womanly instinct kicking in that tells them all dog owners are dependable and loving men. The other angle you could take with it is your looks. Comedians are the definition of, “I have a great personality,” because you need to rely on your trait of being funny to make up for the fact that you’re too short (Kevin Hart), overweight (Gabriel Iglesias), or straight-up unattractive (everyone else.)
If you’ve ever seen any of their routines, you’ll notice about 25% of their bits are ripping on their looks and how much they’ve failed in life because of it.
Real Life Regret
Everyone experiences a little bit of regret. “I should have stayed fit after High School,” “I shouldn’t have gotten myself into so much credit card debt,” or “I should’ve stopped smoking when I was younger,” are different examples of regret, and it doesn’t stop there. Think of every path you’ve taken in life and how it got you there.
Did you say something you probably shouldn’t have that severed a relationship with someone you valued? Did you not spend enough time with someone you loved before they passed? I know they all sound like morbid situations to be in, but you could turn any form into regret into relatable comedy.
Here is an example:
Example: Credit Card Offers
The minute you turn 18, your mailbox starts flooding with credit card offers from predatory loan companies looking to take advantage of your financial ignorance due to your high schools putting more focus on teaching you the difference between a circle and a triangle than personal finance.
They know you’re about to go off into college as a fresh-faced young adult looking to impress new friends with a round of drinks or take that girl out to a fancy hipster coffee shop instead of the reliably-priced Starbucks. You get one credit card for now because you want to “build up your credit,” but immediately max it out in a couple of weeks. “I’ll just stop spending and pay it all back,” you tell yourself until another credit card offer comes in the mail. Your credit is still somehow decent enough to raise the credit limit of your current card.
Ten years later, all of one month’s paycheck is going into paying minimum payments as you’re swimming in interest fees. You check the account to see after paying back hundreds of dollars; you’ve only paid $30 after interest.
How To Turn That Into Comedy
Credit card debt, student loans, etc., are all relatable failures that over half of your audience will understand. Unlike a dating situation where the audience laughs at you because your looks are ruining your chances of ever carrying on your family name; this kind of comedy will have your audience laughing, but mostly at themselves.
It’s the kind of laugh where they’ll be sweating while they’re laughing because in a couple of moments during your next bit they’ll start sinking in existential dread. Hopefully, after your show, they’ll go home and make some smart financial decisions. If you’re going to rip on debt, then you can do at least a good fifteen or twenty minute bit on the rising cost of college alone forces, fresh-faced financially-ignorant young adults, into taking student loans.
On paper, it might sound like a bit that’s been done to death, but unless something changes in the United States, then it’s something that will always be relatable.
Real Life Tragedy
What’s the amount of time you have to wait before you can make a joke about a tragedy? A quick google search on the topic revealed a large window between 36 days and 22 years. However, it hasn’t even been 22 years since 9/11, and I’ve already seen bits done on a tragedy that killed thousands of innocent people and launched a decades-long war.
With all the recent murders, storms, and mass-shooting happening in this country, how long until you can start using satire in your bit to make a point?
If you’re not an established comedian, you may want to test your audience’s reaction to a milder tragedy like a smaller tornado that took out a field of cows. The image of cows flying around in a circling gust of wind like the Wizard of Oz, except the cows are going to come back down as ground beef.
Yes, it may have ruined one farmer’s livelihood for a while, but they’ll recover. After that, start going bigger by taking out more people in ways that weren’t caused by other people. Once you have an established enough audience, then maybe it’s time to start satire by making light of terrible situations that could have been avoided if we didn’t have greedy politicians.
How To Turn That Into Comedy
You’re going to start coming across a generation of people in your audience who are going to be adults who haven’t lived through the September 11th attacks. They don’t know how tragic it was, so they’re most likely going to laugh at any jokes you throw on the subject.
School shootings are terrible situations, but if you’re at the point where you can risk uncomfortable laughter, then maybe test a fake situation before using a real one. Unfortunately, we’re the only country that has to have law enforcement come into our schools and pretend to shoot up the place for active shooter drills.
Uncomfortable topics can be comedy gold just remember that sometimes you tread in places that make people more angry than uncomfortable. Not everything is a joke and there are some topics that are off limits.
The comedy of real-life failures comes from relating to the situation. Relatable comedy is something along the spectrum of observational comedy because of how observational comedy relies on circumstances the comedian would deem familiar to the audience. In a world where all our failures are projected through the void of social media, it’s as easy as just opening Twitter to get a week’s worth of material.
Turn your bad days and experiences into laughs. Remember that the formula of comedy is tragedy plus time.