Organizing Jokes Using Microsoft Word Outline View

I’ve recently found a great new way to organize my material and I thought I’d share it. (You’ll need Microsoft Word for this, although other programs might have a similar feature.)

Before I give instructions, here’s what the end result might look like:

Basically, when you click the little “+” button it expands into lower levels of headings and then into the actual joke text. So how do you do this from scratch?

Select View – > Outline

You’ll get a blank screen with one bullet point, that’s your highest level of header

Type in some categories of jokes, then under each category type in the name

Then highlight the joke title’s (in the above case, Joke 1, Joke 2 and Joke 3) and click the green arrow that’s pointing to the right in orderto indent the jokes. Notice when your cursor is on “joke 1” the “Level 1” sign changes to “Level 2”

Type in joke text under each joke, then click the little drop down arrow below level 2 and select “body text”

There you go, you’re now more organized with your jokes. Click the “+” and “-“ buttons to expand and collapse joke sections

If you want to view and edit jokes normally, just click on

You get the following view:

And yes, this is a pain to do the first time, but once you’re done, you have all your jokes nice and organized and it’s easy to add new jokes to this file, as well as to find a specific joke. Plus, you can now easily build a set list based off of your joke titles.

Wanna try stand-up comedy yourself? I teach a Comedy Class in New York City. I also do private one-on-one comedy coaching (in-person or via Zoom).

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