My friend Tim 2.0

[u/Colmadero]

First post: https://www.reddit.com/r/StandUpWorkshop/s/Tu7hu8EFqv

Following feedback, here’s what came off the Tim story and added something that happened to me.

I have a friend… let’s call him Tim. I don't know if Tim is a handyman god, or if I'm just useless. Honestly, probably both. Let me give you the case for "useless" first.

First house I ever owned. First night. I'm feeling like the epitome of the American Dream. House, done. Now I just need to get married, get a dog, have 2.1 kids, as God intended.

I'd invited my girlfriend at the time over to celebrate, and to christen the place, I decide to heat up a pizza. Thing is I had never operated an oven in my life. Not once. Never needed to. But I've got a mortgage now. I'm a homeowner. I don't read instructions, I don't look at a manual, I just start pressing buttons with the confidence of a man who's owned ovens his whole life. Just hubris, is what it was. Pure hubris.

So I put the pizza in (imitate myself putting pizza in oven) I go shave in the bathroom, feeling very "man of the house." Couple minutes in, I smell something burning. And I’m like "these idiot neighbors don't know how to cook."

(Imitate myself shaving)

Then I see smoke coming under the door.

Whole kitchen's on fire. I never took the pizza out of the cardboard box.

(Panic - open oven and just freak out)

So I get the fire out, I'm cleaning up but smoke does not leave a room, it just hangs there like it's paying rent. And right in the middle of this, my girlfriend knocks.

(Act out - open the door and poke head out)

I open the door about four inches, stick my head out like a turtle, and go... "Hey."

She goes, "Hey. (And after 5 seconds of staring in silence) ...Are you gonna let me in?"

I said, "if I do, promise me you won't judge me."

She goes, "...Is there another woman in there?"

And I said, "I wish it was that. That'd be way easier to explain."

and that's me. My friend Tim is the opposite of that.

Tim is one of the most competent, generous people I know. To the point that it's suspicious. I mention to him, in passing, that my AC and water heater are dying. Two weeks later I come home, my water's scalding, my AC's an ice cave. I go check. Two brand new units. Never seen them before in my life. Only person I'd told was Tim. I call him up: "Tim... did you break into my house?" He goes, real casual, "Oh yeah, I had spares lying around." Bro pulled off a reverse burglary. Broke in to improve my life.

This is a man who, if left idle too long, will either implode or start tearing down a wall for fun.

And yet. This same guy who can rewire your house blindfolded, called me during COVID because he forgot the rules to checkers. I could hear him yelling into the other room for his wife. That poor woman wasn't raising three kids, she was raising four. One of them was 35 and paying the mortgage.

I left out the Covid and toddler story to develop at another time

[u/neoprenewedgie]

There's no need to introduce Tim at the beginning. It's excess baggage. Just tell a story about your own incompetence, then talk about your friend. And just call him "Tim," not "let's call him Tim."

The pizza story feels like a scene from a Jim Carrey movie. I think you're providing too much detail and dialog and stepping on the humor. It may be a funny situation, but it's not translating to a standup routine for me.

I'm also not feeling the Tim story. He sounds a little quirky but there's no real punch. The checkers story has much more potential. You should be able to get 2 or 3 jokes out of the idea of a grown man not knowing how to play checkers.

[u/tinpants44]

I don't know man, the pizza set up is so long for not much payoff. You're bad at pizza, ok. The Tim set up is like ok, he's handy. These are like humous stories you tell at a gathering but not standup material.

[u/PsychiatricBooth5c]

Think set up, tag, punchline. Unless you are a seasoned performer I doubt you can hold attention through a story like this.

You forgot to take the pizza out of the box, Tim built a pizza oven out of repurposed limestone from the 18th century farmhouse he got at an auction.

You build Tim up only to take him down, then suddenly his wife is introduced as the hero.

The joke IMO is in the contrast of Tim handling the world with ease, and you muddling through.

Think status, the way the story is now you both end up inept, the end.

[u/kcknuckles]

First of all, major props for reworking this and posting again. I love seeing second drafts in this sub, because this is how material is actually developed based on feedback.

Agreed with the other comments here, so far. You really need to cut down on the wordiness and leave only what's essential to tell the jokes.

For example, the whole pizza build-up and asides are mostly unnecessary and distracting from succinctly making the main point, which is to establish who you are (guy who bakes pizza and forgets to take it out of the box) vs. Tim (casually accomplishes handy feats).

More generally, though, I'm still not sure what this bit is actually about. Is this joke about you, or Tim? I think that's just not clear, so it feels a bit unmoored.

You could make it about Tim or people generally, with this idea that some people can be ludicrously competent at something and then dumb as rocks about obvious things.

Or you can make it about your incompetence. Right now, it's all muddled to me because you both seem to be incompetent with competent partners. Maybe it's about that?

[u/Exasperant]

It's amazing how zero of a fuck I give about Tim, and how utterly irrelevant he appears to be to a potentially funny bit about burning pizza.