1 Joke From The Vault - "Baby Mumble Rapper"

I’m off on vacation, so instead of sending five topical jokes each day, I’m sending one joke, episode, comic strip, or sketch, with some explanation of the process that led to its creation.

- Tim

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One of the best comedy gigs I ever weaseled myself into involved working for Comedy Central’s digital brand in 2018 and 2019. It was weird in the sense that this wasn’t writing jokes and sketches for a specific host, showrunner, or show. Instead, it was writing jokes and sketches for the voice and audience of Comedy Central, the symbol.

I owe a great deal to Tim Duffy for tossing my name in the hat for that job. It was an opportunity came at at the perfect moment for me personally, as I’d recently not been invited back for the second season of the first TV show I’d ever worked on — polite industry speak for being fired.

Lessons learned… water under the bridge…

But unlike that previous gig, where my title was web producer, this Comedy Central gig finally gave me the status of a writer — something I’d coveted for years while navigating various new-media positions in the realm of video production and podcasting by day, while doing standup comedy by night. I even fibbed in my interview, suggesting I didn’t know how to edit video or anything like that that despite their general interest in a “predator” (writer/producer/editor); the idea being that if my higher ups thought I only knew how to write, they’d only ask me to write.

The gamble paid off. I got the job and was assigned a cubicle with a clunky old Dell computer that had no editing software installed, meaning all I could do was write.

Many delightful sketches came as a result — like the Mini-Mock, Baby Mumble Rapper:

There’s a lesson to be found in this sketch, because the final product of Baby Mumble Rapper has less to do with my ability to write and more to do with my ability get an idea across. Comedy Central is where I honed the skill of pitching — often by finding a punchy string of four or five words to sell an entire concept.

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A bit more about Baby Mumble Rapper below this paywall, but for more projects I’ve been a part of, click here!

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