It's been a while since I saw this film and I couldn't find the actual clip of that joke (the embedded clip is of the Tom Hanks meltdown), so please correct me if I'm wrong. When Lilah first tells this joke she does it in the third person, “What do Polish women get on their wedding night that's long and hard?” And of course the joke falls flat. It isn't until she tells it in the first person that the joke works. We talked on Monday about What About Bob? and how people laughing with you are on your side. Here, Lilah doesn't connect with the audience until she makes the routine about herself, her husband and the troubles they're going through. She makes the personal universal and thus connects with the audience (and her husband.)

The Good Will Hunting clip from Thursday also shows this and Will even spells it out when he says “It works better if I tell it in the first person.” It's always more interesting to hear first accounts of stories, be they jokes or anything else that happened. We connect much stronger with that than if we hear about something that happened to someone somewhere. Here it's in your face. This happened to me.

I've never done stand-up and you certainly know more about this than I do, Scott, but the thing that I've noticed is that the more vulnerable the comic is the truer the jokes and the more he or she connects with people. In Punchline, Lilah opens up about her marriage, warts and all, and everyone in the audience recognizes themselves in her situation. A great comic makes us feel that the things we're going through in our own lives aren't so bad after all. It's all part of being human, being in a relationship, raising a family, hating your job, uncertainty about the future, frustration – whatever it is that we all go through on a daily basis - those common things that connects us all.

Here is Lilah's routine toward the end of the film when she has internalized all the jokes and just kills (even though the laughter is fake):

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r4V-7N07Hx4

Thanks, Teddy, for sourcing that clip. I'll update the OP.

The thing about comedy is there are all kinds of humor. Think about the range from Lenny Bruce to Jerry Seinfeld to Steve Martin, political to observational to absurd, and that just scratches the surface. But I think you are right: When a comic can zero in on something with which audience members can identify, that's a great starting point, at least emotionally.

I've always been funny, much of that, I think, derived from being a military brat forced to move around as much as we did, learning to use humor to make a good impression quickly in new surroundings, to deflate tense situations, to turn difficult circumstances into lighthearted ones.

I learned a ton of lessons during the two years I performed my comedy routine in clubs for a living. Here's one of them: I had my best nights when I just cut loose and went for it. The nights my creative energy was stifled by nerves or I was thinking too much about what I was doing, those tended to be just okay nights. But by the end of my stint, when I really didn't give a rat's ass what the audience thought, that's when generally I had my best response.

I think there's something to that with writing. We take all the lessons, principles and practical insight we learn about the craft, Hollywood, movies and all the rest. But at some point, it's really just about you and your creativity, you and that damn story. To have at least a bit of that "To hell with them" [the readers] attitude and immerse yourself totally into your story, your characters, and let them go at it on your pages, that's probably when you do your best writing.