Perimenopause Is a Comedy Writing Prompt

Why this works as material

Comedy runs on recognition. You need a room full of people who already know the feeling and have never heard anybody say it out loud. That is a nearly perfect description of a room of women in their forties and fifties.

The laugh isn't 'that's a clever joke.' The laugh is 'oh my God, that happens to me too, and I thought I was losing it.'

The method: symptom, specific, stakes

• Symptom — name it plainly. Hot flash. Brain fog. Rage. Two hours of sleep.
• Specific — put it in one exact moment. Not 'hot flashes are bad,' but the exact second it hit you in a meeting, in a church pew, in the frozen aisle.
• Stakes — say what you did about it. The action is where the joke usually lives.

Prompts to write against this week

• The most inconvenient place a hot flash has ever found you.
• A word you completely lost mid-sentence, and the substitute you used instead.
• The exact object that made you irrationally furious this month.
• Something you tolerated for twenty years and now refuse to.
• The dumbest advice a professional has given you about your own body.
• What you now say out loud that forty-year-old you would have swallowed.

Two rules that keep it funny

Rule one: you are not the victim of the joke. You're the narrator with an opinion. Self-pity kills a room; self-knowledge kills in a room.

Rule two: be specific enough to be uncomfortable. 'Getting older is weird' is not a joke. The thing you would only tell one friend, said out loud on purpose — that's a joke.