The Lungshot Lifestory

If there's anything that's ever really made me laugh in a video game, it's what Dan and I refer to as the "lungshot lifestory." Named after a certain Sniper Wolf, video games tend to humanize characters by allowing them to have massive speeches as they're dying. In video games, Oscar Wilde wouldn't have just said, "Either the curtains go or I do," he would've recited a whole new play which examined his life after being shamed for the sodomy charges which brought him to ruin. Maybe it would've been more dramatic, but a little less cool.

As it stands, this is the exact problem I've been working with editing my material. As I've said to a number of comics, the better I get at comedy, the less material I have on stage. In other words, the better I become, the more tight my jokes are and therefore I don't spend thirty minutes regaling the audience with a set-up that has one, two punchlines.

While I like telling stories to the audience (ones with characters and events and beginnings and middles and ends and climaxes, oh the climaxes), I think the tough lesson I've learned over the past year and a half was that a comedy audience doesn't give a fuck about your day or what you did recently unless there's some type of payoff. A humorous story reads well on paper, but they need that rimshot to really get into it. Maybe "need" is a bit of an overstatement, but I've found myself less and less happy with my material when it's not spotted with punchlines.

I was born on a battlefield, raised on a battlefield...