Show the scene

The principle

The Specificity judge is looking for a moment it can picture. Not a situation. Not a feeling. A moment. When you write "my colleague was being annoying in the meeting," the judge has nothing to see. It is a label. When you write "he tapped his pen against the table on every other sentence, and the sound got louder each time until someone in the back row said stop it and he did not," the judge can see the pen, hear the tapping, locate the person in the back row. That is a scene.

Here is why this works: a physical action is checkable. The reader can verify it. Did he actually tap the pen? Yes or no. "He was annoying" is not checkable. It is an interpretation you have done on the reader's behalf, and the reader's job is to laugh, not to audit your feelings.

The microphone in a comedy club does one thing: it lets the performer talk at conversational volume. The audience sits close enough to feel spoken to. Your writing does the same job. You are not projecting across a gymnasium. You are leaning into a small room. So you write at the register of the moment, not the register of explaining the moment. You do not say "I was frustrated." You stage the physical act frustration produces: the spreadsheet opened, closed, opened again, forehead pressed to the glass.

You also do not need to build a person. A comedic character in writing is two-dimensional by design. You need one trait doing one thing in one specific moment. The person who checks their phone under the table during every conversation. The person who narrates their own cooking to an empty kitchen. You are not writing a biography. You are staging one beat where the trait is visible.

Practically: for every emotional beat in your joke, ask what the body does. Not what the mind feels. What the hands, the posture, the spatial relationship to the nearest object, does. One or two actions per beat. No more. If you need three physical details to land a point, you are describing a scene, not staging one. Cut to the one action that makes the reader's own body flinch.

That is the move. The judge scores what it can see. Give it something to see.

In a joke

Illustrative example. Same topic in both versions: waiting for a parcel.

Weak. "I was so annoyed waiting for my package. I kept refreshing the tracking page and it was driving me insane."

Fixed. "The tracking page said 'out for delivery' at 10:14. I refreshed it at 10:31. Again at 10:47. By 11:03 I was standing in the hallway in one sock, holding my phone up to the window like I was trying to pick up a signal, and my cat walked past me and looked at me the way you look at a door that keeps opening for no reason."

Three things changed. First, the emotion words ("annoyed," "insane") are gone; the reader infers the frustration from the sock, the window, the phone held up like a prayer. Second, the situation is no longer summarised ("waiting for my package") but staged as a sequence of timestamps and a body in a hallway. Third, the cat is a two-dimensional comic function, the unimpressed witness, and it needs no backstory because the reader already knows what a cat looks like when it judges you.

Your turn

Find the sentence in your current draft where you name a feeling or a situation. Delete it. In its place, write the one physical action the body performs in that moment. One action. Then read the line aloud and check whether you can see the person doing it; if you cannot, you have written a summary, not a scene. Repeat for every emotional beat in the set. Ten minutes, pen or keyboard, phone face-down.

In one line

Stage the body's action, not the feeling behind it.