White People Love Cottages

Using Workflowy to Structure Comedy Bits

I write all of my comedy in Workflowy, a mind-mapping tool that allows you to create, manipulate, reorder…damn, pretty much zoom in and out of your freakin’ mind at will.

Here’s an example of how I’m using this free, online tool in my writing. The light grey text is used to indicate stage directions like emotion, inflection, and physical movements which are intended to help deliver a line effectively.

Michael Jagdeo
Follow @Jagdeocomedy

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For SEO purposes, and for those of you on 286′s that don’t handle images well, the text version…

All White People Have Cottages

• Major Premise
• This kinda looks like a cottage crowd. You guys have cottages? They’re fun, eh?

Smile / Act like it’s a genuine question / nod to get them nodding / engage audience

• Punchline
• I hate people with cottages.

Abruptly Angry / Misdirection

• Tag
• I grew up in malvern, in a place you guys might know, called a, uh, a basement. We had enough trouble trying to live under the earth. I had to go upstairs to start at the bottom.

Calm back down

• Sub-Premise #1
• My white friends already had HOUSES. That meant they lived ABOVE THE EARTH which was so lucky they had no idea.

Natural.

• Tags
• And so now what you’re telling me is that you own ANOTHER above the earth living structure…ah-adjacent to a body of water, no less?

Facial expression of huh!?!? / head sideways

• And you love your cottage, don’t you…It’s a great excuse to breathe the clean air, take a boat onto the water, and just forget about all of the minorities that have ruined what was once a, a great place to live.

Relish it / break rule of three / BIG SMILE / engage audience

• Sub-Premise #2

Deliver ONLY if you have an ethnic crowd

• PAUSE

Sly smile emerges

• But now I’m getting my revenge. Because of the recession, you white people aren’t living like you used to.

Smile

• But now I’m getting my revenge because due to the recession, some of the white friends are having to move back in with their parents. What are you whining about?

Puzzled look.

• Punchline
• Moving back in with your parents: you know what that sounds like in my culture? That sounds like Tuesday. Get a hold of yourselves.

Deadpan/sarcastic