Save this article to read it later.
Find this story in your accountsSaved for Latersection.
It was early September whenRicky Velezanswered the phone and a voice asked, Where have you been?
The caller was the Comedy Cellars booker, and Velez had to fess up.
I have no jokes, he admitted.
That wasnt entirely true.
Velez had an hours worth of his best stuff.
I felt like a fraud doing that material again.
I wiped out my whole book after that, Velez recently told Vulture.
I was very nervous for the first time in a very long time, he says.
Its crazy going back to square one.
The mind-set was that you needed to hoard material because it was so precious, he remembers.
And jokes that toured but were edited out of a special can live to fight another day.
He dropped all other material for a tightly focused show.
But for the most part, comics start from scratch.
ForGulman, its a solitary struggle since he doesnt try jokes on civilian friends.
For Chieng, however, bouncing ideas off fellow comedians is part of the process.
The real first step is testing new ideas in front of a live audience.
Chieng doesnt write detailed jokes out beforehand.
Ill think about the phrasing, but Im not reading it in front of a mirror, he explains.
I write more in front of an audience than I do by myself.
Gulman used to write out each joke, honing it meticulously in a notebook.
But if the joke failed in front of audiences, he felt like he wasted so much time.
Now, with experience, he skips those steps in the writing.
I can make a lot of word choices and timing choices intuitively onstage, he says.
As new ideas fight for life onstage, comedians need a safe haven to experiment.
These are not open mics but shows for established comics to work out material.
We can use our years of experience to decipher if theyre genuine laughs or laughs of pity.
The last 18 months have presented a unique series of challenges for writing new material.
For starters, of course, there was the stress.
For a while, I was not thinking about stand-up, Chieng says.
It was more,If we step out of the house, are we going to die?
I learn about my jokes onstage, he says.
He also found certain bits that didnt work on the page could be saved to adapt for stand-up routines.
Its an old-new-old sandwich.
Jokes that make the club sets are not locked down.
He helped so much making it a story rather than just a collection of jokes.
Now I still send him recordings as Im creating my new material.
Performing longer shows also draws your fans, which Gulman says fuels the material.
The best crowds are the ones that are on your wavelength, he says.
In my head, I had to say,These people are wrong.
This is a good routine.
While fans watch specials repeatedly and pick up nuances, he feels old chestnuts lose energy live.
(Corporate events are an exception: Give me enough money, Ill do pretty much anything.)
There are jokes that survived the pandemic, Chieng says.
Its good to see that some stuff I was complaining about before the pandemic is still relevant.
After touring the new material, its hopefully time for another special.
Ignoring it completely may actually distract audiences, he argues.
Are we going to pretend it didnt happen?
It is so daunting, Velez says.
How do I top what I just did?
Theres more pressure now.
AfterThe Great Depreshdebuted in 2019, Gulman got a call from producer Judd Apatow.
He said, You do not have any obligation to top it or equal it, Gulman recalls.
My thought had been,What do I do for an encore?
