Nouns, numbers and times

The principle

The judge hands you a 2 when you write "a coworker is annoying" because you have given the audience a category, not a person. A category has no face, no desk, no fish in the microwave. The audience's brain cannot build a scene from "a coworker." It sits in the abstract and the laugh never arrives.

The fix is not to add more words. It is to replace the one or two abstractions with a named noun, an exact number, or a precise moment. "Dave from procurement reheats fish at 11:40 every Tuesday" works because every element is checkable. You can picture Dave. You can picture the fish. You can set a calendar reminder for 11:40 on Tuesday. The audience does the same, and the picture is funny.

Here is the diagnostic. Read your joke back and ask which word is doing the least work. The word that is a gesture rather than a thing. "Sometimes." "A lot." "Things." "People." "A while ago." That word is your abstraction. You do not need to rewrite the whole joke. You need to swap that one word for a concrete noun, a count, or a clock time. One pass. That is the revision that moves the score.

But you will not always know the specific detail on the first try. When you stare at "a coworker" and cannot name Dave, you run the numbers game. Write fifty concrete things related to the topic — names, objects, times, places, sounds — without stopping to judge whether any of them are funny. You are not writing the joke. You are building a shelf. Then you scan the shelf and pick the one detail that makes you picture a scene. The odds of finding a usable image improve enormously when you are choosing from fifty concrete nouns instead of staring at one vague word.

One caution. If the joke already lands and the audience laughs, leave it. Grammar, logic, and literary elegance are not what you are measuring. The only question is whether the audience can see the picture. If they can, the abstraction is not your problem tonight. If they cannot, swap the noun, count the number, set the time, and test it again.

In a joke

Illustrative example, same topic in both versions:

Before (scores low on Specificity): "My cat is really annoying at night and I can't sleep."

After (scores high on Specificity): "My cat, Geraldine, sits on my keyboard at 1:15 a.m. every night and types a different word until I throw a pillow at her."

Three things changed. "Really annoying" — a vague adjective — became a physical image the audience can picture: a cat, a keyboard, a pillow in the air. "At night" — a six-hour window — became 1:15 a.m., a single clock time. "I can't sleep" — an abstract consequence — became the concrete, checkable action of throwing a pillow. The cat also got a name, which turns an animal into a character.

Your turn

Take the joke you just scored. Find the three words that are gestures rather than things: the "sometimes," the "a lot," the "kind of," the "people." For each one, write ten concrete replacements — a name, a number, a clock time, a specific object. Pick the replacement that makes you see a picture, swap it in, read the joke aloud once, and submit it. Ten minutes, one pass, no further editing.

In one line

Name the person, count the things, set the clock, and the joke gets a face.