Barrett Wendell, professor of English at Harvard University, [1] has suggested an effective mechanical aid for determining the clearest and best arrangement of sentences and paragraphs in English prose, and his plan seems especially adapted to help the monologue writer determine a perfect routine. Briefly his method may be paraphrased thus:
[1] English Composition, page 165.
Have as many cards or slips of paper as you have points or gags. Write only one point or gag on one card or slip of paper. On the first card write "Introduction," and always keep that card first in your hand. Then take up a card and read the point or gag on it as following the introduction, the second card as the second point or gag, and so on until you have arranged your monologue in an effective routine.
Then try another arrangement. Let us say the tenth joke in the first routine reads better as the first joke. All right, place it in your new arrangement right after the introduction. Perhaps the fourteenth point or gag fits in well after the tenth gag—fine, make that fourteenth gag the second gag; and so on through your cards until you have arranged a new routine.
Your first arrangement can invariably be improved—maybe even your seventh arrangement can be made better; very good, by shuffiing the cards you may make as many arrangements as you wish and eventually arrive at the ideal routine. And by keeping a memorandum of preceding arrangements you can always turn back to the older routine—if that appears the best after all other arrangements have been tried.
But what is really the ideal arrangement of a monologue? How may you know which routine is really the best? Frankly, you cannot know until it has been tried out on an audience many, many times—and has been proved a success by actual test. Arranging a routine of untried points and gags on paper is like trying to solve a cut-out puzzle with the key-piece missing. Only by actually trying out a monologue before an audience and fitting the points and gags to suit the monologist's peculiar style (indeed, this is the real work of writing a monologue and will be described later on) can you determine what really is the best routine. And even then another arrangement may "go" better in another town. Still there are a few suggestions—a very few—that can be given here to aid the beginner.
Like ocean waves, monologic laughs should come in threes and nines—proved, like most rules, by exceptions. Note the application of this rule in "The German Senator."
Study the arrangement of the points in this great monologue and you will see that each really big point is dependent on several minor points that precede it to get its own big laugh. For instance, take the following point:
And if meat goes any higher, it will be worth more than money.
Then there won't be any money.