The Best Story I Heard This Week
Before we start mixing the flour, water, salt, and yeast on this week’s newsletter, I wanted to share the best story I heard this week. This week’s story is brought to you by my sister and a little bit (or more like a lot a bit) of luck.
While out picking huckleberries in Idaho, my sister found an older model iPhone in the brush. The battery was dead, so she brought it home and charged it to see if she could figure out who lost it. After some purposeful searching (and a little bit of just plain curiosity, of course) she noticed that the date stamps on the most recent photos were all 2018. The same for the recent calls and texts. After texting “Mom” in the phone, my sister found the girl who lost it. The girl does not live in the area. She was there on an internship. However, she happened to be there AGAIN on an internship for two weeks. The phone has been returned, and somehow after multiple winters and summers, photos and other info thought to be long lost are all still there. There's gotta be an iPhone ad in there somewhere.
Reveal the Scale
You know how earlier this year that cargo ship blocked the Suez Canal? When it happened, I understood it was a big ship and a big deal. However, I didn’t grasp the magnitude (Pop POP!) until I saw the photos of the toy-like bulldozer trying to dig it out. All it took was one photo to understand the scale.
Scale on the TV
Change is integral to a good story. The more an audience understands the difference between where things were and where they are now, the better the story.
Take Raising Hope for example. (A quality TV show with one of my top three favorite TV father figure characters. My current top three in no particular order: Burt Chance-Raising Hope, Jimmy-The Mick, Hal-Malcolm in the Middle ). If you haven’t seen it, the premise is a 23-year-old guy gets a serial killer pregnant and has to raise the baby. In the first episode, he and his parents can’t get the baby to sleep, so the parents pull out a guitar and sing Danny’s Song by Kenny Loggins. Then, in the last episode (not really a spoiler), after four seasons of wild antics and change, Kenny Loggins shows up and starts to play the song at a wedding. You may not think too much of it, other than “I wonder what the negotiation was like to get him on the show.” But the second he starts strumming his guitar and singing, you are hit with some feels. The show helps you place those feels by doing a flashback to the beginning. With that, you start to grasp the scale of the story. You see the whole thing from beginning to end and realize how far you’ve come.
Scale in Comedy
Comics use callbacks as a similar method of revealing scale in their stand-up stories by making you realize the joke is bigger than you thought.
One example that I heard recently was by Ray Romano. He begins his set with a joke about a spider in the shower that caught him, cough, “enjoying himself.” (I’m using a different expression here since I’m not sure yet what this newsletter is rated. My lawyers haven’t told me what words I can and can’t use.) He shares that he doesn’t like to leave any witnesses, so he had to kill the spider. Then later he tells a story about his dog that died. It feels a little bit sad, and you don’t know where he’s going with it, until he ends by casually saying she caught him “enjoying himself,” and then you are instantly pulled back into the spider joke and it all seems so much bigger.
The Moral of the Story
The moral of the story is people like to see (figuratively or literally) the scale—whether it’s bigger or smaller or somehow different than they assumed. Set an anchor, lead your audience through some change, and then reveal the scale. Works every time.
Which of your favorite stories do a good job of revealing scale?
Sentence of the Week
The hand dryer is so weak that every time I use it, I can’t help closing my eyes and pretending that an asthmatic old man is blowing on my hands.
—Jonathan Goldstein, I’ll Seize the Day Tomorrow
Thanks for pointing your eyes at this.
Braden