Trying to write comedy? Just take it in your stride - Ian McMillan

You can tell, if you look closely, that this scene is happening in the past. 1982, to be precise. I’ve got dark hair, for a start; the 21st Century hasn’t begun to turn it grey and then white. John’s beard is almost Rasputinesque whereas these days it’s like a wisp of mist on an autumn morning.

We continue to stride towards each other. We stride past each other. We turn at the end of the rook and begin to stride towards each other. As we stride, we scribble furiously in notebooks.

Let me explain what’s happening. John and I are trying, because we’re young men who are hoping to make our way in showbiz, to form a comedy writing partnership and we reckon that the best way to do that is to write jokes for comedians.

As it happens, John has made contact with an up-and-coming comedy duo from Goole who, in their words, are ‘desperate for material and don’t care where it comes from’. So we’ve decided to provide them with some.

John has read somewhere, perhaps in a comedy-writing manual he found in a charity shop, that if you want to write gags then you should walk around, because the walking stimulates the comedy areas of your brain.

And that’s why we’re walking up and down the room. We stop walking, briefly, and check the notebooks: a couple of lame half-jokes and an unfinished story that runs out of gas way before the punchline.

John, ever resourceful, says ‘We’re not walking far enough. The Laughter Lobes are still dormant.’ I’m sure he made Laughter Lobes up. So we went outside and walked from his house to the lovely Clifton Park in Rotherham where we marched around for a while.

With our notebooks we must have looked like park inspectors or a couple of members of The Notebook Club looking for a place to hold an outdoor AGM. We wrote and wrote and maybe, just maybe, the gags were getting a bit better.

‘Did you hear about the hippy who was a messy eater? He didn’t know which side his beard was buttered’ I said, as we passed the bandstand. Neither of us laughed, but we imagined the denizens of the comedy clubs of Goole becoming helpless with mirth.

‘Let’s walk down into town and get a cup of tea’ said John, and we wandered down the hill and then, as sometimes happens in real life, a miracle occurred. A comedy writing miracle which wouldn’t have happened if we’d stayed in the house.

As we walked towards the old Rotherham Arts Centre a big car drove past and at the same time the sun came out. We glanced at the big car and who should be in it but those Rotherham Kings of Comedy The Chuckle Brothers.

We stared, stunned for a moment, and then we waved our notebooks and, gloriously, they put their thumbs up, they put their funny thumbs up. And some kind of comedy transference happened and we rushed back to John’s house and wrote some gags that knocked ‘em dead in Goole and beyond. Well, Scunthorpe anyway.

So, if you’re writing comedy, always go for a walk. To me, to you; from them, to us.