Nobody Knows Anything
Comedians are encouraged to be specific in their writing. I interpret specificity either as details that give a subject flavour, or unique experiences that could only come from the performer’s lived experience. Specificity avoids generic material that could be performed by anyone anywhere anytime.
But how do you balance the need for specificity with the fact that nobody knows anything?
My ill-fated Christmas set was built around the assumption that people would know who LadBaby were and that LadBaby had had five Christmas number ones. Big mistake. Did I learn from this mistake? No, I wrote an entire set about the gameshow Blankety Blank.
The most successful outing of the Blankety Blank set was at G&B to an audience that skewed older; there were people in The Bell who remembered Terry Wogan presenting Blankety Blank.
Gradually I poured some exposition into the set. But still people would talk to me afterwards and ask if I’d made Blankety Blank up or if I really did write the theme tune. I’m not sure what to do with this confusion. One would assume that Blankety Blank, a British staple for over forty years, successfully revived with Bradley Walsh at the helm, would be a pretty well-known reference. Nope.
There will always be ambiguity with an audience about what it is you’re going on about. Especially at open-mics which often attract totally random groups of people. This encourages you to move away from specificity. To only use broad references or write material that does not refer outside of what it is you’re presenting.
I’m not sure what the answer is, I’m still figuring this out.