So you’ve worked and worked on
some killer material. Great! But you’ve got to REMEMBER the joke in order to, well, get people to laugh. I have a couple of memory techniques that I use.
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Say it out loud FAST.
Run through your jokes fast, so that you can get them down to one second, but rather it sort of ingrains the joke in your head. THEN when you say it at regular speed, in front of an audience, it rolls off your tongue as if you’ve said it a million times. . .which you might have done if you said it fast.
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Sleep on it.
Sometimes you can get ahead while sleeping. I knew someone who was doing research on sleep and memory. I don’t know what her research found, but my personal research has shown that if I go over the new jokes right before I go to bed, then I seem to remember them the next day. Maybe they roll around in my brain unconsciously for 8 hours while I snooze, who knows. But it works – and it’s an easy thing to try, anyway.
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Group things together.
If I’ve got 3 jokes on the event, and 3 jokes on the industry, and 3 jokes on the food, then I just make sure they’re all together. Simple, but sometimes you forget the simple stuff.
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End with a word that reminds you
of the first word in the next joke. If you’ve grouped similar things together, then that should be easy!
I’m also reading
“Moonwalking With Einstein” which is a book about how people do it when they win those memory contests by reciting 5000 decks of cards in perfect order in like an hour. It’s cool and I think they might just have something there.
Half of the battle
is writing a good joke, the other half is delivering it. If you can remember it, then you can deliver it!
Jan