Picking the brains of professional funny people to find out how we can all be as creative as comedians

Hi, I’m Tim Reid. I write comedy and coach teams in creativity and innovation. And I think we can all learn how to be more creative by finding out how comedians and comedy writers think, behave and the methods they use for coming up with a steady stream of new material. So I’m getting inside their funny minds to see where their ideas come from.

Today I’m talking to comedy writing duo, Marc Blakewill and James Harris. Marc and James have been writing together for a number of years and have an impressive list of credits to their names, inclusing CBBC’s Horrible Histories, Russel Howard’s Good News, White Van Man, Sorry I’ve Got No Head and the brilliant 4 o’clock club., or writing comedy for TV and radio, he runs his own PR company.

Here are three brilliant creative techniques you’ll hear about from Marc and James…

• Forcing random connections, the UKIP cookbook, for example, an idea born from linking two ideas together.
• Using famous people to create new characters by imagining how they’d behave in new situations – I’ve used this as ‘What Would Elvis Do’ to explore how they might approach a business problem… as a start point to finding a different perspective
• Collaboration – they explain how, when collaboration works, you can’t tell who came up with any word as all words had both their input… idea generation is the same, when collaboration works brilliantly everyone helps build and shape the idea – you have to take egos out of the ‘writing room’, lose self-consciousness, no need to impress, or defend your own thinking, just be free to let things grow organically knowing no-one will say ‘that was my word’ ‘that was my idea’… that’s not how collaboration works.