What Does a Half-Formed Pitch Have in Common With a New Comedy Premise?

Too much in the setup and the surprise is gone before it arrives. Too little, and nobody follows you there at all.

Either way, the joke is DOA. Good comedians know it's data, not a fatal result. Usually.

There is a third way, and many more besides, but let's keep focus, to kill a joke before it has a chance, and it is the one people least expect: reference something only you find interesting. Tolstoy might be the most rewarding writer who ever lived. Base a joke on Pierre Bezukhov and watch a room of strangers stare back blankly.

If you, like almost everyone else, are more of a Star Wars than a War and Peace kind of person, a joke about Luke Skywalker opens the room up instead. It builds a connection through common ground and hands you a path to any number of gags, feeling the force, how Yoda handled his A-levels, what Darth Vader might say if he worked in a nail bar. Etc, etc, etc. The spin-off ideas do not stop arriving once the door is open.

Consider the "pop" in "pop culture." The same logic that makes Star Wars safer than Tolstoy is why a reference to a famous brand failure, a royal mishap, or a widely mocked piece of technology earns an instant laugh almost anywhere in the room. Shared and recent beats rare and rewarding, every time.

There is an extra bond available too, the mirror image of this.

Reference something the room recognises as known almost exclusively to them, or their kind, and you get a different but equally powerful rush, the subconscious thrill of being in the know. A joke about an industry figure known for corruption, or for golfing too much, or a dig at a piece of legislation or software everyone in that specific room has suffered through, can bond a presenter to an audience faster than almost anything else available.

Wide net or narrow net. Both work. What kills a joke is choosing a net nobody in the room is standing inside.

None of this is really about jokes. It is about premises, the original notion or observation, and what happens to them between the moment they occur to you and the moment they actually work in front of an audience.

A pitch might die from any of these same causes, or from the many other errors available to anyone shaping a story, an idea, a joke or a pitch. Too much context before the point. Too little, so the point lands nowhere. Or built on an assumption the room in front of you does not share, however reasonable that assumption felt when you wrote the deck.

Every story worth telling does one thing: it takes someone on a journey that feels both surprising and, looking back, completely inevitable.

The ending has to land somewhere satisfying the audience did not see coming, while making total sense the moment it arrives. Get that balance wrong and a story either unsatisfyingly telegraphs its own twist or makes no sense when the finale arrives.

A joke is a story compressed to its smallest possible size. A pitch, underneath the slides, is exactly the same shape. Hook the room. Take them somewhere. Land them with something that surprises and satisfies at once. Leave them happy. Cinema runs on it. Stand-up runs on it. A strong pitch runs on it too, whether or not anyone in the room has ever called it that.

There is a word for getting the setup-to-payoff balance right, and it is the same word whether you are writing a joke, building a pitch, or shaping a story. Calibration.

It is a judgement that gets sharper with reps, the same way a comedian learns, gig by gig, exactly how much a particular room needs to be told before the punchline will land, and exactly how wide or narrow the net should be cast.

Too much information kills the surprise. Too little kills the comprehension. The sweet spot moves depending on the audience, which is why this has to stay a skill rather than a formula. No two rooms are quite the same room, and no two audiences have quite the same appetite for Pierre Bezukhov.

Strong material rarely arrives finished. It starts as a rough pile of observations, or from a very particular notion handed to the creator, who is well advised to use that notion as the reference point for the next step: making a pile of written thoughts around it.

Either way, the rougher and more honest that first pile, the better. Every angle that occurs to you, every half-formed observation, written down without judging it yet.

Then the real work starts. Go back through the pile, find the two or three threads with genuine life in them, and develop those properly while the rest gets left behind without ceremony.

This is where comedy technique earns its keep, because there are specific, repeatable ways to take a flat observation and find the angle that actually has something in it.

One useful move: ask what something is like. Force an unexpected comparison and the interesting part often appears somewhere the original description never reached.

Another: ask what the opposite would look like. It sounds almost too simple to work, and it keeps working anyway, because it knocks a premise out of its default framing and into territory worth exploring.

There are more of these than belong in a blog post. But the principle holds regardless of which one gets used: a flat idea becomes sharp material through a small number of deliberate moves, applied on purpose, judged against the room it is heading toward.

AI can generate a pile faster than any person alone. That part of the process it genuinely helps with.

What it cannot do is calibrate. It cannot stand in front of a specific room and feel, the way an experienced act feels it within the first seconds, what this particular crowd needs more of, or how wide a net it can afford to cast.

It cannot judge which thread in the pile actually has life in it and which only sounds promising on the page.

That judgement is built through repetition in front of real, unpredictable rooms, and it remains stubbornly human.

I have written elsewhere about what AI cannot replace, and this belongs right on that list.

This sits beside the question of what a pitcher has in common with a stand-up comedian.

That piece is about delivery, winning the room once you are standing in it. Ultimately, performance. In stand-up the skills reduce, a little reductively, into two arenas. Writing. And performing. Developing Stronger Ideas taps into the writing side.

Strong delivery cannot rescue a poorly developed idea. A wisely developed idea still needs strong delivery to land it. 

Developing Stronger Ideas is built around exactly this, for creative directors, planning teams, strategy leads and anyone whose job depends on turning a raw observation into material strong enough to hold up in front of an audience, client, or board.

No jokes required, though a few tend to turn up anyway.

If the bigger problem is winning the room once the material is ready, rather than developing it in the first place, Confident Client Engagement picks up that later stage of the same process. 

Either way: a strong idea still needs the room to hear it properly. Get the calibration right, then make sure the delivery does it justice.

People also ask

Why do good ideas sometimes fail to land with an audience or client?
Often the calibration is off rather than the idea itself. Too much setup buries the point. Too little leaves the audience unable to follow it. A reference or assumption the room does not share, in either direction, narrow or wide, can sink an otherwise strong premise before it gets a fair hearing.

What is the difference between an idea and finished material?
An idea is a raw observation or notion. Material is that observation after it has been piled, sorted, redrafted, and judged against the specific audience it needs to land with. Comedians treat this as a repeatable process rather than something that happens through talent alone.

Can AI help generate better business ideas?
AI is genuinely useful for generating a large volume of initial options quickly. What it cannot do is calibrate, judging which raw idea has real potential for a specific room and adjusting it accordingly. That judgement is built through repeated exposure to real, unpredictable audiences.

What techniques help develop a flat idea into something sharper?
Comedians use repeatable reframing techniques, including asking what something is comparable to or what its opposite would look like, to find an angle a straightforward description would miss. Applied deliberately, these techniques turn a flat observation into material with genuine impact.

Photos courtesy of Steve Best at www.stevebest.com and Gary Manhine at www.garymanhine.com