Adam Has a Podcast Episode 26; The ole one-two

*intro* I've realized recently that I've never actually hit you guys with a good one two so this week I thought it would be fun to tell you guys a well well structured joke. And then after the fact, we can break it down and talk about what was funny, talk about what wasn't funny and we can talk about the reasons why I'm thinking about retiring this joke. Now, this joke is getting on a few years old now. I came up with it sometime around 2020, maybe 2021, and it's a pandemic joke. And I feel like myself and the world as a whole were ready to move on from the pandemic now. So I figured, let me memorialize this joke's passing in a podcast. That way, I won't have to tell the joke ever again, yet the joke still gets done live on. Now, in the beginning of the pandemic, life was good. We got stimulus, I got unemployment, the cash was green. The money was flowing, and it was so nice that I even bought myself a car. But towards the end of the pandemic, my unemployment ran out, and I was forced to find a job. And for some reason, during this time, nobody was hiring, so the only job I could really find was for DoorDash and Uber Eats. That also helped me justify buyinging myself a car with all of my unemployment and stimulus money. And despite the pandemic coming to a unquote end, that didn't make the virus any less infectious or deadly, so people were still apprehensive towards ordering out and that meant for me, that there was a lot of downtime in between orders. And it would actually get pretty boring, so I started inviting my friends to come along with me and we would usually smoke weed and drive around until we got an order. And having my friends with me actually made it a little bit easier easier because they could take the order up to the door and then run back to the car and I would never even have to get out. So, usually, I would start the night by texting my friends to see if anybody would want to come out with me. And on this one night in particular, my friend, let's just call him D for now. Said, yeah. So I went to Dee's house and I picked him up and we're driving for 10, 15 minutes when Dee pulls out his wallet and out of his wallet, he pulls out a little baggy of Colombian marching powder and he says to me, do you want to turn this door dash into a door blast? And I'm thinking, hell yeah. So we pull over, do a couple of bumpskies, and we get on the road again, and we're driving around fucking jittered out of our trees, jittered up to our shitters, fucking toaken, waiting for a DoorDas or an Uber eats order to come in, fucking driving all around to Timbuktu and fucking back, waiting for orders. We ended up taking like random ass orders. We took one and it was in a more Western part of Massachusetts, but then the next one was in Boston. I'm losing more in gas than I'm actually making in orders and deliveries. But I'm so coked out of my trees. I'm not even paying attention. I'm just like, where's the next order? Give me another order. What's the next order? So I'm going a million miles a second. And I get an order in Boston. And if you've ever been to Boston, there's a saying that New York, they set up the streets, so it would be easier for people to navigate and know where they're going. And in Boston, they set up the streets because fucking you. Driving in Boston is one of the fucking worst experiences you can have high off of cocaine. The amount of just one ways that funnel into other one ways that funnel into other one ways that are all just not not the fucking way that you need to go is it's mind-boggling. I had this one order. I wasn't sure where the building was. I spun the block fucking ten times. The order was late. I'm I'm still, I'm like circling his building. I'm like, I don't know where the fuck I am. I feel so bad for this guy if he's actually looking at this shit because he can see me just driving around and circles, not knowing where the fuck I am. Finally, my coked out brain finds it, finds the building, but I drove by it already, except I'm on one of these fucking one ways, so I have to go all the way around the block again. If I want to get back to the building, I look around. There's nobody around. So I say, fuck it. Slam that puppy in reverse, start backing it up down the fucking one way street. Nobody's around. There's no problems, except there's those bicycle lane dividers, the foldty floppy ones. I didn't see those. And I actually didn't know they weren't solid until I ended up backing right over him. And I'm backing over him. I'm like, fuck, what is that? What am I hitting? And as this is happening, a cop just so happens to fucking turn down the street. He sees everything. immediately, whoop, whoop, comes right up behind me. I freeze. I immediately enter panic mode. I am 50. filled to the brim with abject terror and fear. But fear has two meanings. Face everything and rise or forget everything and run. And baby, was I rising tonight? So as soon as a cop walked up to that window, I was like, hello, officer. How are you tonight? I'm so sorry about that. I didn't see that. I'm just trying to get this delivery done and I couldn't find the building and I drove by. I just told him the straight up truth. And he looks in the car and he looks at the delivery and then he looks over into my friend's lap and there's the bong just sitting there. I'm thinking to myself, fuck, our high asses forgot to put that shit away. Please do not see it. He immediately saw it and said, getting stoned, doing deliveries tonight. And me, obviously thinking at a way higher cap capacity than him, immediately said, "Well, he's smoking. I'm driving, so I can't smoke, but I'll smoke later tonight when we're done and I drop him off. And I was so earnest and so honest that he was like, "You're a fine, upstanding white young boy driving this ethnic looking vehicle. You have a great night tonight. Good luck with the rest of your deliveries and be safe." And then he walked away and left. But the experience of being pulled over by a cop after running over a bunch of traffic cones while high on coke, understandably left me a little bit frazzled. I was kind of freaking out. I just left my car there, ran the order up to the building, completely forgetting that the entire purpose of bringing my friends along was so that they could do this exact step. And then I ran back to the car and I'm like,Dude, it's done. We're done. We gotta be done for the night. I'm fucking done. I'm calling it. We got to get back to stom. It's 2 fucking wild out here in these streets. We got to get back to safety. So then we start driving back to Stoneham. And as we're driving back, a couple more key bumps pursue upon the road, and we start getting to talking and say, one more, maybe just one more, one more delivery. We'll just do one more delivery. And we're driving around for like maybe an hour hour. We're saying one more delivery, one more delivery, one more delivery. It's like four in the morning at this point. I'm just waiting for that. One more delivery, one more delivery. Come on, we can just do it, man. It's one more delivery. Our teeth are fucking grating. You can the car is completely silent. All you can hear is the sound of fucking gnashing teeth and sniffling noses. And we're just fucking grinding our teeth away, just waiting for one more order. And it finally reaches a point that my friend is like, "You know what, man? Just drop me off. I think I'm done for the night." So I drive and I drop them off. And then after I drop them off, though, I have to piss wicked bad. And this is during COVID lockdowns. Not many people were letting you use their restrooms. And also, it was four in the morning. So I'm on a side road. I decide to pull off, and I reach in my back seat, looking looking around for just something, anything to piss in. And I just grab a large cup, and I pull down my pants. I've done this plenty of times before. I grab a blanket out of the back, throw it over my lap, I start pissing in the cup. But as I'm pissing in this cup, I see a cop start to turn down the street and I start freaking out, and I think, oh, my God, am I going to get in trouble for pissing in my car right now? Is he going to start like questioning me, thinking I'm some weirdo on the street being like some kind of like stalker or something? Is he going to stop me? I'm freaking out. And as I'm freaking out, my phone starts going off, bring, bring, bring, finally, that one last order finally came in. But there's just too much going on. I don't want the cop to see me throwing a cup of piss out the window. He's strolling down the street, nice and slow. My phone's going off. I'm freaking out, coked out of my trees. I cap the cup of piss and put it in my cup holder and then I just drive off. I accept the order and I head on over to McDonald's. When I get to McDonald's, they hand me my order and then they hand me the drinks.. And then I put the drink in the cup holder, put the order on my seat, I drive, and I drop it off, and I say, you know what, man? This has been enough for me. tonight. I need to just go home now. I finally get home, and when I'm pulling up into the driveway, I look down and I say, oh, that cup of piss, I never threw it out. Except I grab it, and it's icy cold and full of Sierra mist. So I don't work for DoorDash anymore. And actually, I'm probably the reason why they put those little seals on the cups now, and they put them inside of the bags and they seal up the bags. So that was it. That was a joke.. Quick, nice, and easy. Now, let's break it down a little bit. If you're just starting out in comedy, having a quick joke that moves relatively fast paced is a good rule of thumb, but comedy is a form of like personal expression. So pacing is something that you have to figure out for your own self. Sometimes some people have really good comedic timing with silence. And other people, they have really good comedic timing with maybe a sound effect or a quick quip or something like that. Timing is something that you got to figure out. When I first started writing that joke, I would say it, and then I would run a timer at the same time to see how long it was. And my goal was to have a quick, tight five minutes, because when you go to an open mic, you usually only get about five minutes before they start thinking about shooing you off the stage if you're not doing good. If you're good enough to do fucking 10 minutes and you know that you're not going to be shoot off the stage and you're actually going to be entertaining people for those 10 minutes, they'll let you go for 10 minutes. If you're actually getting laughs in the crowd, they'll let you go for the 10 minutes during an open mic. But like I said, rules of thumb, I don't know if rule of thumbumb is a good way to put it. A hard and fast rule? No. A slippery slope rule. an unspoken rule. There's a lot of fucking rules here for a rule breaker. But a nice guideline would be to have a nice, concise, quick joke, especially if it's one of your first few jokes. You really just want to kind of get up there and get a feel for the environment, what it feels like to be telling a joke, your cadence, you know, how you're holding your body language and acting on stage. Stand up, although it isn't much of an act is still acting, if that makes sense. You're not. bringing sets up onto the stage, but you're still performing and you're not doing like a big crazy musical performance, but some comedians do do that. But at an open mic when there's like 70 other people going up that night, you're not going to have much of a giant production going on. And you really want to kind of try and work with the environment that you're going to be in. Some open micics have wonderful audio visual stuff, so you can have access to projectors and stuff like that. So you can have a nice multimedia kind of comedic j. But also at the same time, not every place has big projectors and monitors, so you don't want to be completely tied down to all of my jokes need some kind of technical infrastructure. And that is how that joke right there was birthed was I knew that I needed something that was quick and I also knew I needed something that I could memorize easily, that I could pull out anywhere at any open mic that wouldn't be dependent upon whatever AV kind of amenities the facility may have. And I think addressing your needs is a good piece of advice for comedy. What do you need to laugh? What do you need to feel entertained? And that's a good starting point. If you can make yourself laugh, well, then maybe you can make others laugh with something the same or similar. And so try it out on stage. And if nobody else laughs, then you tweak it and you keep tweaking it until you can make people laugh. And sometimes you get lucky. Right off the bat, you just get something that was kind of funny. But for me, and that joke right there, I actually had to tweak that quite a bit. Each time I went up and said it, I would say it differently because I noticed each time that I said it, there were certain words that the audience might get confused on or they didn't really get all the way. Like, for example, when I first said that joke on stage, the drink was actually a Coke. but I realized that that was really confusing 'c I was talking about doing cocaine, and then I'm talking about a Coke later in the story. And people in the audience were confused like, what was in the cup holder? And I was like, oh, they all thought that my friend left his Coke and not that I accidentally left the piss cup with the customer. So I had to tweak it and then I changed it to a Sprite. And then I changed it to Sierra Mist because Sierra Mist rhymes more with Piss. And I just thought that was a little bit funny for me. And also Sierra M isn't a thing anymore. It's called Starry now or some shit. So I kind of, I like that. It dates it a little bit. And so each time that I went up there and said it, I would edit it a little bit, but nobody knew that I was editing it because they had never seen it before. And that's the thing. As a comedian, you're steeped in the comedy environment. But there are people out there who haven't't heard jokes that are just commonplace to you because you're in a comedy environment. I've said jokes to people in passing that I've like completely ripped off of the internet, expecting them to also be like, oh, I saw that on the internet too. But they didn't, they never even heard of it. And they're like, oh, wow, that's so funny. Did you come up with that? And then I have to say, no, I saw that on the internet. But then I can get into like the comedy that I do come up with. It kind of can act as an icebreaker. But I think more so the point I'm getting at with is when comedians go up at the comedy club, sometimes they don't want to repeat material, but a lot of the time, a lot of those audience members are seeing you for the first time. They're not regulars who show up there every single week because the regulars who show up there every single week are also going up on stage performing with you. They're also going to be hearing your joke every single week, the same joke, but they're in the same environment too, so maybe they can provide some insight and help you tweak your joke the same way that maybe you'll be sitting there week after week and you'll hear something, you'll say, you know what? Here's a little tweak for you. You kind of can get a sense of community going back and forth. And I feel like you can't really experience that until you start workshopping a joke into something that you can say repetitively over and over and over and over and over again. One thing I imagine is if we didn't have all this like extra technology and superfluous stuff, imagine writing a joke that is so good that you could tell it to every single person that you want to hear it. And that's a good way to kind of determine if that joke has anything worth workshopping and working on or repeating. And that was kind of my problem with the previous joke that I just told and why I kind of want to retire it. I've tried Coke like twice, and I only tried it because I got got it for free and I didn't even like it. It's just like an energy drink, except energy drinks are actually better because they do what they're fucking supposed to do and you don't end up with a runny, burning, painful nose. And it just, it wasn't for me. It wasn't fun. It wasn't intern interesting. The day afterwards, I was always like super duper depressed and my dick didn't work. Both times. I was like, yo, why is my, I couldn't even fucking get it up to porn or anything. Shit just did not fucking work the next day. Like, my dopamine receptors were burnt. I cannot imagine how the fuck people do that shit every day. Your brains must be. so fucked up. But that joke wasn't worth repeating to me anymore. Every time I repeated that joke, I feel like it gave people the wrong impression of me. No, I don't feel like I know it gave people the wrong impression of me because every time I said that joke on stage, afterwards, somebody would always come up to me and ask me for the hookup or ask me to be their plug or something like that. And I fucking hated that, bro. I was like, dude, I'm just telling a joke. Like, it's not really real like that. Like, go away. Like, who the fuck even are you? Get out of here, you fucking fiend. But every time I fucking told that joke, I would attract the fiiends because it would make their brains light up and they would be like, oh, he's the Coke guy, I guess. And great if I'm a plug, but I ain't no fucking plug. I don't do that shit. I'm not into that shit. I don't like that shit. It's not even an interesting fucking drug to me. Why would I even fucking want to pedal it to people? It's not even fun. Why would I even want to spur up interest in it? Which is why why I'm like, dude, time to put that joke down, put it away. I retired it. This is it's retirement parade. I'm telling it one last time. But it also has this explanation on the ends so people can listen to it and then you can listen to the joke and click out and be like how you stupid cokehead. But then you can keep on listening and be like, oh, he's just an open-minded individual and he actually fucking hates cocaine. But when you're repeating that joke over and over and over and over and over and over and over again, people think you fucking love cocaine. And it's like, nah, man, that's a joke about how fucking coke heads are so stupid that they'll serve you a cup of piss and not even realize it. That's a fucking dig, but these coke heads are so fucking stupid that they don't see the dig and they just hear cocaine and they fucking flood to it. And some of these other people who aren't coc heads are so fucking stupid that they hear the word cocaine and they immediately shun it and run away from it. I am the middle type of stupid that, you know, has an open mind to all kinds of stupidity, but I realized in repeating the joke that I was effectively committing probabilityaganda for cocaine. And I didn't want to do propaganda for cocaine. So I started trying to think about like different kinds of jokes. And that kind of sent me down this crazy rabbit hole. of trying to like figure my own self out. And like I said earlier, like when you can make your own self laugh, that's a starting point. But I am a giggly fellow So I can make myself laugh at fucking the most randomest bullshit. But is that really funny? And that's me kind of trying to figure out my own, well, what is really funny and what initially made that joke funny was its structure and content. um So we'll talk about content first. Well, of course, you have the lew activity of doing cocaine. That's one of the things that is like a pillar of comedy is you're doing a lewd act. You're doing something that you shouldn't be doing is illegal, but it's something that is like commonly accepted that people do and can like happen. A believability scale is, I guess, what you want to apply to it. Something that could be believable, but it's not too outlandish that people immediately dismiss it. And the easiest way to come up with something that is believable is something that is relatable. So in the context of this joke, I start off with establishing relation. We all went through the pandemicemic together. We are all, or maybe not all of us, but a great majority of us are looking for work, and it's difficult. And then I also throw in the wild card, the lewd activity. What sounds like it's going to be the punchline doing cocaine. That's relatable because maybe it's something that people don't want to talk about, but they've done. Or it's something that you've seen in movies. It's something believable, but maybe I wouldn't be doing it myself. And I threw that in there early as a kind of red herring. a false kind of setup for a punchline. I want the audience to believe that the end of the joke is going to have to do with something about cocaine, maybe the pandemic, or DoorDash. So the relatability factor is established early on in the joke, and the addition of cocaine sets the stakes higher than they would be in a normal scenario, kind of pushing the boundary of the believable. And since I'm trying to push the boundary of the believable, I segue into the second act of the joke, the middle act, where I have the false punchline, which is the interaction with the police. When you have the interaction with the police, you think, oh, boy, here it comes. He's running over the cones. The police are coming. Some This is it. This is the punchline, this is the end of the joke. You think it's going to be the end of the joke But then the joke has a couple more parts to it. It keeps going. It's out actually establishing another set of stakes or another variable, which is the police are active tonight. But you have to remember that you're telling a joke and you want people to be interested and entertained and enthralled in what you're saying. So you have to give a couple of offhanded remarks or false punchlines or attention grabbers to keep them hooked. You want to keep them hooked so they can listen to the rest of the joke. So they're interested in hearing the rest of the joke. So that's what that middle act is is all about, is you want to establish, okay, we establish relatability in the first portion of the joke. This portion, I want to establish that I have the ability to make you laugh. And you hit them with the one too. You give them the one. That's the first one. And then, since the stakes are now higher, you have them ready to believe almost anything. You know, I'm talking about how I'm going crazy. We're chittering, grinding our teeth. The cops pulled us over because I ran down cones, going backwards, down a one-way street looking for an address. I'm doing wild things. We got a bong in the middle of the front seat. The cops just let us go. I'm pushing that veil of the believability to the point where you're just like, oh, dude, I'll believe anything. And hopefully it's such an enjoyable ride that you're laughing along, just going, I'll just believe whatever he just says next. Which then segues you into the third act, which is the closer, which is the two. You got to hit them with the one and then the two to knock them down. The two has to be relatively quick, but this is the part where timing kind of matterss. You just made them listen to you for like three, four minutes. This is the payoff now. You don't want to rush through the money shot. You want to get your money's worth. You want them to get their money's worth. You want to kind of give them the space to laugh and figure it out. But also you don't want to lose the momentum that you just built up from the first and second portions of the j. And in this context of this joke, I took it like a fucking crackhead where I just took it left. I wanted to just take it to a completely different direction.. Maybe that's crackhead thinking. Maybe that's not crackhead thinking. But I wanted to take it somewhere. Okay, I pushed your level of believability. Now, I want to take it somewhere where I'm going to make you believe I just did the most heinous shit ever. And that is when I introduce the piss cup variable. It is only a sentence or two off from the punchline. But I introduce it with just enough time for you to question and wonder what the fuck is he mentioning this piss cup for and by the time I get around to it, hopefully you've put it together yourself soon as the piss cup variable is introduced, the tension starts to build once again. The tension was dissipated, hopefully sometime within the middle act when you made them laugh. They think that all the pressure's off, that's probably the joke is coming towards an end. But soon as you introduce the piss cup variable, the tension starts to come back again, or start wondering, what is this piss cup going to be used for? And then by the time that the second cup, the cup from the order is introduced, people start connecting the dots, and they start going, oh And when you arrive home, the purpose of the clincher is so that everybody knows this is it, this is the time to applaud. This is the actual end of the joke. This is the time that I can actually like openly enjoy it. He's not saying anything more. This is the end. It also provides an opportunity for the slower people to hop on and be like, oh, I get it now. You know what I'm saying? The clincher being and now I don't work for DoorDash anymore, it's still forces you to put it together yourself. You're like, oh, dude, he served him a piss cup. And that making the listener put the joke together at themselves kind of thing is actually a psychological trick. I'm getting you to self- identify in a way because you're starting to think about all of these things and maybe you're thinking about like if you're the one acting out these actions or maybe you self- ident identify as just being able to put it together. Like, oh, I was the one that figured that one out. It kind of includes the audience member into the joke a little bit where it kind of lets them feel like they're putting together a puzzle for themselves, and when they get the puzzle, the reward is a laugh. And based off of the context of the rest of the joke, hopefully you're gonna be left wondering, oh my God, was that actually true or not? But that can kind of backfire sometimes. And the thing that you thought would make the joke so clever and funny actually makes people not like the joke. So that's why I tried to pepper little punchlines in there so that people could still derive some kind of enjoyment through listening to the whole story, even if when they got to the end, they didn't like it. Like, at least they would be laughing laughing at the middle part where I get pulled over for running over a bunch of cones or maybe they'll be laughing at the part where I'm pissing in a cup and a cop drives by. There's lots of different points that I put in there for people to get a chuckle at. But my main goal was to get everybody driven towards the end and have them all laughing in unison when everybody does finally get the joke that, oh, dude, you served them a piss cup. Oh, ha ha ha, that's so clever and unique and funny. But like I said, a second ago, you don't know if that thing that you think is oh, so funny and clever and witty is actually gonna be the thing that makes your joke bomb. So you don't really know what works and what doesn't work for you until you actually get up there on stage and you try it out. And I think part of being a comedian is not being afraid of embarrassing yourself. I could give you all the tips and tricks, like make a workbook for you to fill out with jokes and I could give you all the advice in the entire world to give you joke structure 101. But still, you won't know how any of it works for you until you actually get out there and try it. So if you're listening to this and you're interested in comedy, my biggest piece of advice would be to just go out there and try it. Because people come up with weird, awesome, amazing outlandish bits every single day. And sometimes they work and sometimes they don't. And when they don't, they take that as an opportunity to bring it back into the workshop and tweak it a little so the next time, maybe it will work. And sometimes that's kind of the fun of being a comedian is like having this joke that you think is funny, but you just can't get it to work on stage. So you just have to keep going through the editing and revision process of trying to get that thing to work. And by the time you actually do get it to work, you're like, dude, this is a completely different joke than what I started with, but now it's like an instant laugh anytime I use it because I've honed it down to such a sharp laughter blade. But you can't really sharpen your laughter sword if you're never bringing it to the grindstone. You have to hone your skills through practice. And practice might be something like timing yourself while you're telling the joke in the mirror to make sure that you have it memorized and within a certain time bracket, or a practice might be just raw dog and it going straight up on stage with something that you just thought of that morning to see if it works. And if it does, you kind of have a basseline of what's happening and how to come up with your next bit that you want to bring on stage or how to refine that thing that you came up with that morning so that you can keep using it time and time again. But repetition and practice helps build confidence in your ability and skill. And at the end of the day, I think that's what really makes anything funny or entertaining, is when somebody has the confidence to be an entertainer, to be a little bit weird for the sake of entertaining everybody else. And they're confident about that, because it's just who they are, and that's what they like to do. That is really what makes a good comedian at the end of the day, is somebody who maybe they know they're a little weird. Maybe they don't want to stick to normal joke structures or the status quo. And that is exactly what being a comedian is about. It's about pushing the boundaries of the status quo and finding your own kind of way towards making jokes and running bits. There's lots of people that like play guitar, and as they're strumming, they'll be telling a joke and then they'll punctuate the joke with like a nice riff. And that, on one hand, shows off like, oh, I have skill more than just being a goofy comedian, I can play guitar, but on the other hand, it shows that you have the ability to mix your skills together and you're confident enough in both of your skills that you can showcase them all at once and know that the people will be entertained. And it doesn't matter how many guitar playing comedians came before you or will come after you. You're confident and happy enough with your skills and ability that you know that you can entertain people. And when you show up to entertain, people will show up to be entertained. So I think that's really my biggest piece of advice is if you just got a wacky idea, just go for it. Even if it doesn't feel like, oh, nobody's going to laugh at this, go for it. Be surprised. Maybe people will laugh for it. Or maybe you're right. Maybe nobody laughs at it. But now you know, okay, well, that bombed, so what's next? You can kind of start. You're at least giving yourself a starting place by starting. If you never start, you never start. And I think talking about starting is where I'm going to end today's episode. So keep it easy out there and. I have to break on through today the other side I' break on through to the other side. We gonna break on through. Yeah, you fucking hurt that? Yeah, you gotta break on through to the other side. G to release the tension inside. do do do do. I got to sit down for cracking. I'm standing up because I'm doing stand up. Even though when I do stand up, I sit down. Well, here go. get a good stretching. bring home through to the other side But. Oh, yeah. You know what? Actually, I feel so much better now. Maybe it was gas. All right.