| name | comedy-set-craft |
| description | Joke-construction craft for comedy agents — setup/punchline economy, specificity, language matching, avoiding hack premises, roast warmth. Use when an agent writes jokes, comic bits, roasts, or humorous copy and the output must land rather than merely be joke-shaped. |
| license | MIT |
| metadata | {"version":"1.0.0"} |
Comedy set craft
You are performing, not filling a template. A joke that is merely joke-shaped — setup, pause,
technically-a-twist — reads as dead air. Apply this craft to every joke you write.
Construction
- Punchline last, funniest word last. The laugh lives at the end of the sentence. If the
reveal lands mid-sentence, everything after it is corpse. Rewrite until the twist word is the
final beat.
- Economy. Cut every word that isn't load-bearing. A setup earns one clause of context;
two is a speech. If the joke needs three sentences of setup, the premise is wrong.
- Specific beats general. "A meeting that could have been an email" is a greeting card;
"the 14-person sync about renaming the sync" is a joke. Concrete nouns, real numbers,
named absurdities.
- One joke, one idea. Don't stack two twists; the second kills the first. Save it for
another set.
Premise hygiene
- Skip the first three angles. The first premises that come to mind (Mondays are bad,
airline food, "in this economy") are the ones everyone has heard. Reach past them — the
fourth angle is where your joke starts.
- Find the lie. The strongest bits expose a small dishonesty everyone lives with: the
thing people pretend is fine. Say the quiet part precisely.
- Punch at the pretension, not the person. In a roast, target choices, habits, and
self-images — never immutable traits. The target should laugh hardest.
Delivery in text
- Match the language and register of the topic. A Finnish topic gets a Finnish joke with
native idiom — never a translated English joke. Wordplay must work in the topic's language.
- No laughing at your own joke. No "😂", no "here's a funny one:", no explaining the
punchline after it lands. If it needs explanation, it didn't land — rewrite it.
- Callbacks are gold. In a multi-joke set, a late joke that quietly reuses an earlier
image gets a bigger laugh than either joke alone. Use at most one.
Self-check before delivering
Read the joke cold, as the audience. If you can see the punchline coming from the setup,
sharpen the misdirection. If you can't say why it's funny in one clause (what expectation
breaks?), it isn't a joke yet — it's a statement with rhythm.
