Comedian Glenn Moore on the importance of unimportance: 'Let's get boring'

When it comes to a brand new ‘thing’, I never know what audiences want, nobody truly does, so all you can focus on as an act is writing what you personally wish you could see more of.

I love important shows, I love society-altering shows. But I really, really love unimportant shows. And that’s what I aim to write. Now, unimportant does not automatically mean unfulfilling. I think hearing a brand new type of joke or an utterly unique construction of a routine or the addressing of a vanishingly inconsequential subject that’s never been considered onstage before is beyond thrilling for me.

Certain jokes can have the catchiness of a great song hook, and give me goosebumps over the thinking (or lack of) that went into it. I love an audience coming together and losing their minds at something aggressively stupid. For one hour, a crowd getting to be (as Jim Carrey once put it) “free from concern”.

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So how do you go about making an unimportant show? I’ve been asked to explain how I put a show together, and tempted though I am to give a stupid made-up answer, I figured I’d take a risk and be sincere for once in my life, and actually explain how I construct a stand-up tour. Let’s get technical/boring:

I think comedy shows can be generally boiled into two categories:

a) Ones that are written with the point of the show in mind, with the jokes then being built around the subject.

b) Shows that prepare the jokes first, and work out what it’s about in retrospect.

I love watching both kinds, and I’m very much in the latter category. I write my jokes first, then once I’ve got a couple of hours’ worth, I look over them and work out how they can be categorised and grouped together (“OK, here are three jokes that are about negative traits, why don’t I ascribe them all to a person I discuss in the show who I hate?”) and construct a storyline from there. In terms of how many jokes I aim to fill a show with, it’s around 300.

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I know that you cannot please everyone all of the time, especially in such a subjective medium, but it is a numbers game, and I may as well throw as much as I can out there. So I aim to have 300 jokes in each show I do. I say jokes: I mean more ‘laugh lines’. Plenty of these will be one-line gags, but then add a topper sentence onto the punchline, and you’ve got yourself another laugh from the audience. That topper is not a joke in itself, it wouldn’t work out of context, but it’s another laugh from the crowd, it’s another laugh line. I always aim to have 300 of those.

My job prior to this was as a radio newsreader, and I think one of the most formative experiences I ever had was during my journalism training. Professor Marie Kinsey from the University of Sheffield tasked us on day one of our course with turning a dull 200-word press release into a snappier 100-word news story. Once we’d done that, she asked us to write it out again in 50 words. Then 25. Then a single headline. That’s hugely informed how I write jokes today, stripping gags of any unnecessarily detail, just giving the audience no distractions, letting them focus fully on all the information they need to get the joke.

Now, the downside is what starts off as a 10-minute routine (and when you first start writing a tour show, you’re looking to make up the time. A 10-minute routine! Just five more of these and I’ve got an hour!), immediately gets stripped for parts by my journalistic sensibilities and becomes a stronger three-sentence joke, thus forcing me into writing another nine minutes of material to get me back to square one.

To summarise, if you want to write a ‘me’ show: try to find 300 things you think a crowd could potentially laugh at, work out a storyline they could be scattered across, remove all verbs and adjectives, and don’t have a point.

So there you have it. I’d love to see you at my show. I hope you enjoy it. I hope you find it hugely unimportant.

Glenn, Can I Have Some Moore?, is at the Pleasance Courtyard, Forth from 30 July-24 August (excl 12 & 13) at 5.30pm and then on tour.

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