Some news stories resist comedy no matter how hard you work the angles. Today I had to try anyway, on a deadline, whether the material actually wanted to cooperate or not.
Had to write a joke today about a news story that, reading through the actual details while researching this afternoon’s monologue material, struck me as considerably more genuinely sad than funny, a specific situation involving real, significant hardship for the people directly affected by it, and I spent a genuinely difficult few hours today trying to find an actual comedic angle that felt honest rather than simply glib, without ever fully feeling confident, even once the joke was actually written and approved, that I had genuinely succeeded.
This is, I think, one of the more genuinely difficult, underdiscussed parts of writing topical comedy for a living, the fact that the news cycle simply does not pause or adjust itself around whether a given week’s actual stories happen to be comedically fertile ground or not, and a working comedy writer on deadline frequently has to find some way to produce genuinely funny material about stories that, read with full seriousness, carry real weight and real human cost that a purely comedic treatment risks flattening or trivializing if handled without sufficient care.
I tried several different approaches to today’s specific story before landing on the version we eventually used, an angle that aimed to direct the actual comedic target toward the systemic failure or absurdity underlying the situation rather than toward the specific people directly harmed by it, a distinction I think matters enormously in this kind of writing but that is considerably harder to execute cleanly in practice than it sounds articulated as a general principle. Comedy aimed at genuine institutional failure can feel appropriately sharp and even cathartic. Comedy that inadvertently lands, even accidentally, as mockery of people already experiencing real hardship risks something considerably uglier, regardless of the writer’s actual intent.
I brought my draft to two trusted colleagues in the room before finalizing it, specifically asking for their honest read on whether the joke crossed that particular line, a check I do not always feel the need to run on every single piece of material but that felt genuinely necessary today given how much the underlying story troubled me even as I was actively trying to write comedy about it. Both of them felt the final version landed on the right side of that distinction, aimed squarely at the systemic failure rather than at the people affected by it, though one of them suggested a small adjustment to the specific phrasing that I think meaningfully improved exactly the balance I was trying to strike.
The joke aired tonight, got a reasonably solid laugh, not the biggest of the night by any measure but genuine and not, as far as I could tell watching the audience’s reaction from the control room, uncomfortable or strained in the way a joke that had crossed the wrong line often produces. I am choosing to take that as a reasonably encouraging sign, though I will admit I do not feel the same clean confidence about tonight’s specific joke that I sometimes feel about material built around less genuinely difficult underlying subject matter.
I think this specific tension, between the genuine demands of a topical comedy deadline and the real, ongoing responsibility to handle difficult human stories with appropriate care, is simply a permanent, unresolved feature of this job rather than something I expect to ever fully, comfortably settle. Some weeks the news simply hands you easier material to work with. Other weeks, like this one, it hands you something genuinely harder, and you do the best, most careful work you can manage on the specific deadline available, without ever fully knowing, even after the joke has aired and gotten its laugh, whether you actually got the balance entirely right.
I am going to keep today’s draft, the earlier, unused versions included, in my own private files, partly as a genuine record of the actual process behind tonight’s final joke, and partly because I think revisiting exactly how a difficult piece of material like this one actually got written, months or years from now, might teach me something useful the next time this same genuinely difficult situation inevitably arises again.
I think there is a broader question underneath tonight’s specific difficulty that I do not have a fully settled answer to yet, whether comedy actually owes it to a genuinely sad or difficult story to find some way to address it at all, given how much of our show’s entire format depends on treating each week’s news comedically almost by default, or whether some stories, this week’s included, deserve the option of simply being skipped rather than forced into a comedic frame that risks getting the balance wrong no matter how much genuine care goes into the attempt.
Our head writer and I talked briefly about exactly this question after the taping wrapped tonight, and she offered a perspective I have been sitting with since, that comedy addressing a genuinely difficult story, done with real care, can actually serve a genuinely valuable function precisely because it treats the audience as capable of holding both the humor and the underlying gravity simultaneously, rather than assuming a difficult topic needs to be either fully avoided or fully softened into something considerably less honest about the actual stakes involved. I am not sure I am fully persuaded yet, but I think it is a genuinely useful frame to keep testing against future weeks when this same difficult tension inevitably resurfaces.
More from this author at Carys Evans, prat.uk.