📘 The first step to getting good is being embarrassingly bad
Learning to write jokes, an abundance mentality, and the immense value of encouragement
Previously on “The Dad Story”: I am a validation-starved nerd who loves comedy and those things tend to be helpful for social media content creation. Also: in March 2017 I got an email from entrepreneur Vinit Bharara asking to talk.
7 months later, on a cool October night, I was having dinner and drinks with the Some Spider leadership team in Manhattan. I distinctly remember stepping out of the restaurant to go back to my hotel, walking through a sea of people (all with a permanent scowl, the quintessential NYC RBF), looking up at the mid-town buildings, thinking, “I am an executive at a media company. How did this happen?”
Even typing that, I cringe. “An executive.” What a douchey thing to say. Was I really an executive? Yes, it was literally in my title. Executive Editor. So I’m gonna leave it. It’s accurate, but more importantly it illustrates how incredibly out of place I felt and still feel. Imposter syndrome turned up to 11.
Artistic rendering of me trying to fit in at a dinner with media executives
I was simultaneously excited, anxious, fired up, and terrified. A great combo for any new fulfilling life experience, I’ve found.
It was my first day on the new job. The Dad would launch one month later, and I had absolutely no idea what I was doing.
“I am an executive at a media company. How did this happen?”
In 2013 I was hosting my brother from out of town. I was looking up something we could do. I stumbled upon a post about an open mic night at a local comedy club. (It may have even been in a NEWSPAPER. This was wayyy back in the day, y’all.) Many people may think, “Open mic comedy? Could be fun to watch that trainwreck.” I thought, “Oh no. I am going to become obsessed with standup until I try open mic comedy.”
I love a challenge. And I love trying new things. Combining those 2 things leads to a breed of naïve ambition that borders on insane. So when I saw the open mic ad, I made the obvious realization that they’ll let anybody up on stage. Intriguing! I love comedy, so I should at least TRY. Life’s too short. Even if I suck (which I will), it’s a good life experience.
I wouldn’t sign up that night in 2013. No no no. I’m not that type of insane. Instead I’d spend hours and days and months and years learning to write jokes and pouring over comedy books. I’m THAT type of insane. (My favorite standup books: Sick In The Head by Judd Apatow and Born Standing Up by Steve Martin.)
And so, The Glad Stork was born.
I created my Twitter account in March 2013. I needed a place to publish my awful jokes. Twitter is great for that. The jokes were so embarrassingly bad that my Twitter account was a secret. Only my wife Laura knew about it. Nobody in else IRL was aware.
(The Glad Stork’s Twitter would eventually be rebranded. AS THE DAD. It’s true, check the date. “Joined March 2013“)
I had literal spreadsheets of categorized and color coded jokes. I am not joking. Nothing makes jokes funnier than typing them into rows and columns in Microsoft Excel.
Shout out to my brother Josh and my friend Matt Diaz, who read what I wrote in those days and encouraged me. I mean, honestly, the material was garbage. Just so bad. But they still said, “Haha good stuff.”
If someone comes to you about an ambitious dream they are chasing, be honest and helpful with feedback, but try to be encouraging. Even if they’re bad. Because the first step to getting good is being embarrassingly bad.
So I took to Twitter. I could draft jokes, publish them, and get feedback. What a concept! Instead of driving to a comedy club, battling crippling stage fright, and speaking a joke into a mic to see if people laugh, I could press “Tweet” and wait for my phone to vibrate (or not… usually not). As an extreme introvert, this was a much better situation.
Most importantly, instead of quietly deliberating with myself and rewriting a stupid joke over and over again in Excel, I could publish it out, see if it’s crap, and if it was crap, delete it.
I’ll get em with the next one.
And there are plenty of next ones.
Keep an abundance mentality (there is an endless pool of ideas and original content) rather than a scarcity mentality (there are only so many new ideas and they are RUNNING OUT).
This is not just about joke writing. Whatever you’re working on or whatever is important to you, don’t be afraid to try lots of things and put them out into the world, even if they’re embarrassingly bad. And then be willing to delete the bad stuff and quadruple down on the good stuff.
Trust that you have an endless pool of originality, dear reader. Because you do.
But perhaps the real Twitter treasure was the friends we made along the way.
Like most social platforms, Twitter has various sub-cultures: political Twitter, sports Twitter, hip hop Twitter, and my personal favorite: comedy Twitter. Even within that sub-culture, there’s a sub-sub-culture of parenting comedy Twitter.
If you want to build a platform on Twitter, or any network, find the community for you and be active and involved. I’m not great at this type of networking, but I gradually found the spot for me.
Twitter has direct messaging (DM). You can group DM with lots of people. So within these Twitter sub-cultures, there are often massive group DMs (“DM Rooms”) with lots of Twitter accounts talking with each other, all the time, about everything. Long live AOL chatrooms.
Early on I found large comedy Twitter accounts would share their tweets within these rooms and everyone would like and retweet each other’s stuff. Fascinating. I had no idea.
So you could leverage these rooms to pimp your content. True. But you can also connect with kind, talented people. I did more of the latter. People I met through these writers groups would become friends that I’ll have for my entire life. And the FOUNDATION of The Dad brand.
Clockwise from bottom left: @thegladstork (RIP), @jordan_stratton, @tragicallyhere, @adult_mom, @house_feminist. Portland Oregon, August 2017.
When I quit my job at GE in 2015, I took one week off before starting at 84.51.
With a week of unemployment, I had the mental bandwidth necessary to torment myself to the point I’d go to an open mic. It was…. fine.
A million props to standup comedians. It’s so much harder than it looks. I don’t think I have it in me.
Very few people know that I even did this. But if you’ve made it this far in this blog, here’s a “treat” 😬:
You can hear my friend Andrea Kramer laughing behind the camera. You can also hear Blake Hammond laughing in the audience. Unlike me, Blake is excellent at standup.
And even in 2015, he was laughing extra loudly to be encouraging to someone embarrassingly bad.
Best thing on the internet. This is a gift!
Simba kills... in both comedy and in the Disney Universe. Good stuff Joel!