“I shot a moose once,” says Woody Allen. The audience at the comedy club starts chuckling.
“I was hunting upstate New York,” Woody explains, “and I shot a moose.” It’s the beginning of a 3-minute routine. But it’s already funny.
The question is why.
If you don’t want me to kill this joke for you, then stop reading now. But if you’re curious why “I shot a moose” is already funny in itself, and how this can help you write better stories, then read on.
Still here? Let’s dissect this:
“I shot a moose once,” says Woody. The audience chuckles.
Partly it’s the improbable setup. Woody Allen, small, city dweller, nebbish, hunting in upstate New York.
But partly it’s the moose itself. The same improbable setup would not be as funny if Woody said, “I shot a deer.”
Why moose and not deer? A few possibilities:
Moose look funny. They have the round muzzle, the cauliflower antlers, they are oversized and look ungainly.
Also, moose are less common than deer. Maybe that makes the story less likely to be real, and therefore more absurd.
Finally, the word moose is funny for some reason to English speakers. Perhaps it makes us think of “moo” as in cow. Perhaps it’s the unexpected unvoiced “s” at the end. If the animal’s name were pronounced “mooze,” it might not be as funny.
In good comedy routines, as in good stories, the comedian takes you down a meandering garden path. What’s important is not the destination – the punchline — but the journey along the way.
So how do you organize a meandering stroll for the greatest effect?
Like a fountain in a real garden, some things are guaranteed to please during a comedy show — mockery, mimicry, slapstick.
Other times, it’s just important to stroll and take surprising new turns. What exactly lies around the corner doesn’t matter too much, as long as it’s new.
And then, there’s the unimportant detail that’s actually important. The cabbage patch instead of the flower bed… or the moose in the Woody Allen routine.
So why the moose?
We can guess, but nobody knows for sure, not even Woody Allen. Whatever it is about the moose, the fact is this seemingly unimportant detail is actually important.
The point of today’s email is not the moose. It’s that fascinating gardens, like great stories and funny comedy routines, rarely spring forth fully formed.
They are the work of careful craftsmen.
Comedians like Woody Allen will deliver the same routine hundreds or thousands of times, each time perfecting the delivery and testing out small variations, including all the unimportant details. It’s the collection of all those details that ultimately “get the click.”
So that’s my takeaway for you.
If you have a story to tell, but it’s not clicking, maybe it’s not the story. In fact, it’s almost certainly not the story.
Retell it again, tweak it, add in stuff, take out stuff, polish it.
A new audience will keep thinking that it’s new. An old audience will need to be reminded. And to both an old and a new audience, the final walk down the garden path that you deliver will be more fascinating and stimulating than what you started with.
I wish I had a storytelling training to sell you right now. I don’t have one. But I’ve actually written quite a lot about storytelling, and experimented with storytelling techniques myself.
You can learn and profit from my experiments. They are one part of what’s documented inside my Most Valuable Email course, specifically in the Most Valuable Email Swipes #13,#16, #17, #18, #19, #20, and #22.
For more information:
https://bejakovic.com/mve/