Three Jokes, Three Worlds

Straightforward, plain language writing is what I always strive for. I study standup comics to notice how they get to the point in a short space. Namely, how the rules of direct writing are at play. I do this by sitting with a joke and feeling how it moves.

Nate Bargatze

“I watch a ton of sports, I love them. You see the NBA when a team wins a championship, some players get up after and say, ‘I want to dedicate this to everyone who doubted me my whole life.’ And the guy is like seven-foot-two, 340 pounds. You want to ask, ‘No one? No one in your life ever looked at you and thought, I bet you can go far? Nobody? People thought your parents were your children, that’s how big you are.’”

Nate takes the ordinary, a championship speech and lets it unravel. The joke works in layers: the size of the athlete, the absurdity of being “doubted,” the closing jab about parents looking like children. The language is loose but clear, with each step adding more plain-language clarity.

Tig Notaro

“My whole family’s still down there in Texas, Louisiana, Mississippi. I was down there in August hanging out with my crazy redneck Aunt Sheila. We’re sitting on her back porch and she put her arm around me and she was like, ‘Tig, it’s pretty outside, don’t it?’ I was like, ‘Yeah, Sheila, it does… because it did. It really, really had.’”

Tig’s pace is slow and flat. The humor slips in through timing and phrasing, “pretty outside, don’t it” is both nonsense and perfectly Southern. The way Tig repeats “it did, it really, really had” doubles down on the odd phrasing instead of correcting it. The laugh comes from leaning into nonsense and joining the nonsense.

Norm Macdonald

“You ever notice how you can kill a person, and then go to prison. But if you kill 100 people… they give you a nickname and put you on the news.”
Norm delivers darkness in daylight. The logic is flat, the words are simple, and the escalation is a quiet shock. The humor blooms from the pause before “they give you a nickname,” when the audience realizes the twist is both absurd and true.

Three comics, three paths:

Nate wanders into the obvious that was overlooked, Tig leans into low-key nonsense, Norm lays out horror with a shrug. Same tools of language with different maps.

In every case the language was simple, paced, clean. I study these comedians not to learn how to be funny but to help me keep my writing to the point and free of unnecessary clutter.

Attention Maps//Mr.A 🫆