Show Your Work: My Baby is Afraid of Wolves
Show Your Work is a series in which I attempt to work through a new joke idea every week, out here in the open for all to see. Each day, I’ll hopefully make a little more progress on turning my idea into a bit that’s ready for the stage. I’ll use different writing tools and exercises to get from premise to punchline(s) and find different things to explore (and maybe entirely new joke ideas to work on later) along the way. I’m going to try to keep it organized as best as possible, but there will also totally be a good bit of stream-of-consciousness writing going on here, as I’ll be actively working through ideas and trying to type as fast as I think.
I’m doing this for a few reasons. First, I love developing and working on new material, but I don’t have a lot of time to do that at open mics right now (because I have a baby). So, this is a way for me to make myself work on stand-up without being able to actually perform regularly. Once I do start getting on stage more often again, I’ll start working in these bits and eventually post the finished product here as an update.
Also, Have You Heard This? started as a podcast in which I talk to comedians about one of their bits, with the goal of working through it/adding to it/figuring it out/making it funnier/etc. — so, this series fits that theme. If you enjoy diving into the process of making comedy, this series (and the podcast) are for you!
My plan is to have one main post for each week’s new joke that I’ll update a little bit every day. Don’t worry, I won’t spam your inbox every single day when the new updates are done. I’ll only send a link to the finished piece in my Weekender Newsletter at the end of each week (along with links to any other comedy writing or podcasts I did that week). If you do want to get daily updates, you can follow me on Substack Notes or any of the following social media accounts: Instagram, Threads, BlueSky, Twitter.
Okay, that’s enough about this series; let’s get to the actual thing already.
The Premise: My Baby is Afraid of Wolves
As previously mentioned, I have a baby, and I found out that she is afraid of wolves. How did that happen? Well, in her first few months of life, she would not allow me to hold her while sitting down. I had to be on the move. She would only accept it if I was standing, or walking around, or bouncing on an exercise ball, but I could never be at rest, or she would scream and cry. I did some research to see if this was common, and it turns out it is! The reason is that from an evolutionary standpoint, babies are afraid that if their protector (me) is at rest, then we are both vulnerable to predators (the article I read specifically mentioned wolves).
I think this is a great place to start a joke.
There are a few questions I like to ask and answer when I first start working on a joke. This helps set the tone and get me started on the right path. They also serve as a touchstone to come back to if (when) I get stuck while working on it later.
Why is this a joke I want to tell?
What do I think is funny about the idea?
There are a lot of other questions to ask and answer later in the process (I really like asking and answering questions when trying to figure out and work on a joke). But these are a great place to start. If I can’t answer them, maybe it’s not a good premise.
For this particular joke, the answers are:
I think it is both personal to my current experience as a new parent and can be very relatable to people, whether or not they also have a baby. I also think the specificity of “wolves” stood out to me as very funny and offers me a way to play around and have fun with that animal.
It’s funny that our biological programming and natural instincts do not in any way line up or prepare us for the modern world. My baby does not need to be afraid of wolves, but everything in her evolution is telling her that if I sit down, a wolf will see it as the perfect time to attack. There’s also part of me that thinks that a time in which we did have to be afraid of wolves is preferable to the world we have created and the fears we must have today. Also, it’s funny to explore the wilderness that is being a new parent, and being totally unprepared (no matter how much you prepare) to get sent home from the hospital with a brand new person that you are totally responsible for.
I think those answers are a good starting place. Let’s move on!
Monday
So, where do I go from here? As you may have figured, I’m going to start asking myself a series of questions that I will answer in truthful ways that open doors to more opportunities for comedy, and lead me down a rabbit hole to laughter.1
One thing I like to ask at the beginning is “What does an audience need to know to be on board with this idea?” I ask this because, through my years of doing stand-up comedy, I have learned that a lot of times an idea seems really clear and obvious in my own head and makes perfect sense to me and because of that I do a really bad job of presenting that idea to an audience in a way that makes it clear (because either subconsciously or consciously I think that they will certainly be on board immediately because of how clear and obvious the idea is to me.)
For this joke, the audience needs to know that I am a new father, and it helps if they know that it is my first child. Luckily, I have a few other bits that set this idea up so I don’t need to include that work here. They also need to know that as a new parent, I’m constantly doing research (Googling) about if things my baby does are normal or if I need to panic and head to the hospital (honestly there was a lot of looking up pictures of poop).
This actually opens up an opportunity of me to shoehorn in an older joke about how we use Google for everything now…which will help set up the premise and establish my viewpoint on the world. Wow, look at me, building sets!
So - taking the “what does an audience need to know” answers as well as the “what do I think is funny about this idea” answers I can start building a roadmap for this joke. That would look something like this:
I am a new dad and rely on Google to answer a lot of the questions that come up in day-to-day parenting.
When my baby wouldn’t allow me to sit down while holding her, I found out it is because from an evolutionary standpoint, she is afraid of predators (specifically, according to the article I saw, wolves).
Being afraid of wolves in the year 2026 isn’t really practical, but there’s not a way to explain that to a baby who is operating on instinct.
To me, it sounds kind of nice to have a simple thing like “wolves” to be afraid of rather than the complex fears of the modern-day world.
Next - I need to find a way to make each of these steps along the way funny (you know, the hard part!) I could keep going, but I want to save some for the rest of the week (that and I have so many chores and things to do around the home and my baby has not yet napped today - perhaps there is a wolf in the area.)
I’ll be back tomorrow, where I will be asking the question “why"?” approximately five thousand times. Until then, if you’re new here, consider upgrading to become a paid subscriber - or, listen to my stand-up comedy album Delicious Mistake, or both!
Tuesday
Today, I’m going to start with one of my favorite writing tools for digging through ideas until you hit something funny – asking “why?”
It sounds simple, but if you keep diving down the rabbit hole of “why?” you’ll eventually hit gold. The key is to be honest and truthful when you answer, but open to going down strange avenues. That way, you’re hitting something relatable and real, while also unexpected and surprising.
I’ll start with the first bullet point on the roadmap of this joke: “I am a new dad and rely on Google to answer a lot of the questions that come up in day-to-day parenting.”
Why do I rely on Google?
Because we use Google for everything now. There’s no need to actually “know” anything because the information is just a few clicks away. (This point is pretty similar to an older bit of mine that I will most likely insert here during longer sets.)
Okay, but why can’t you just ask your own parents for advice?
I can’t ask my own parents – they were parents in the 1980s – do you know how much things have changed since then? (Here is a nice chance to insert a homework assignment to look up common parenting methods of the 1980s to find crazy shit people did back then. I could do that right now, but I’m gonna keep things moving with my “why?” exercise for now.) Another way to answer this would be something more personal about weird/strange/bad things that my actual parents did when I was a child (like, one time my dad stuck me in a basketball hoop and left me there — it wasn’t full 10-foot, regulation height, but still, I don’t want to take advice from a guy who did that! What would his advice be — “Sometimes you just gotta dunk ‘em”?)
Why don’t you ask friends of yours who are also parents?
Here, I would like to say that in real life, I totally would. But for the sake of the joke, there are many reasons why I would not do this. I could say that no matter how far my friend has come, and how good of a parent they are now, they are still the same person I saw (do something drunk and crazy) when we were in our 20s, and I can’t trust that person to give me advice on taking care of my precious baby. I could say I don’t want to bother them because I know how busy they are – or that I tried asking them before and their parental experience was so different from my own that it turned me off from ever asking them again.
Why don’t you read some parenting books?
Who has time for that? I have a baby. Here’s my daily schedule: prepare breakfast, eat breakfast, clean up from breakfast, prepare lunch, eat lunch, clean up from lunch, prepare dinner, eat dinner, clean up from dinner, stare at the wall and dissociate, go to bed. Where exactly would you like me to read? Also, Googling basically is reading the book; it just cuts out all the pages you don’t need and gets right to the important matter.
I don’t know if I have to mention this, but I will. I’m not going to actually deliver the joke like it’s some kind of Q&A. Asking these questions now just help me understand the idea, what I want to say, my point of view, and many times, discover punchlines and funny avenues to explore. This is where actually being able to get on stage often would help – as I’d be able to see which ideas resonate most with a live audience so that I can focus on developing those areas. But, for now, I’m doing this.
Is it even helpful to Google things?
Sometimes. But today, you have to make sure you’ve got AI mode turned off, that you’ve scrolled past the sponsored results, and that what you’re reading isn’t propaganda, fiction, or a stealthy advertisement.
Why?
Because we have created hell on earth for the benefit of corporations.
Why?
This is a great question, and perhaps the set-up for another whole bit. So let’s move on.
I’m going to skip the second bullet point in my joke roadmap (When my baby wouldn’t allow me to sit down while holding her, I found out it is because, from an evolutionary standpoint, she is afraid of predators specifically, according to the article I saw, wolves) because it’s mostly just information that I’m giving the audience to get to the next chunk. That doesn’t mean I can’t spend some time to try to make it funny; it just means that’s not the most important thing to work on right now.
Why are wolves not really a threat to us in 2026?
I would say mostly because we live inside. I don’t live out in the tundra. I’m not even sure if I know what a tundra is. There’s a Toyota Tundra; that’s a truck. That’s the world we live in now; the only tundra I have to worry about is the truck. (Why do people drive such big trucks? What are they doing with those huge trucks? Is this a side bit in the middle of the wolf bit? Perhaps.) If there’s a wolf anywhere in our proximity, I can protect us from the wolf by shutting the door.
But the baby doesn’t understand all that. And I can’t just explain to a brand new baby that we are safe from wolves. So I kinda have to play along like there are wolves. I have to stand up and be on high alert, and I just want to sit on the couch and watch TV (a more specific show here would be nice…figure that out at some point.) But I can’t just sit down and watch (name of TV character on the show I want to watch) doing (something that character does that’s, like, a well-known cliché of the show/character) because I have to play along in this baby and wolf charade!
This has inspired a few new thoughts/ideas for the bit. One is that the idea of going along with what this baby/young child wants is what parenting is – that’s what my life is now – acting like I’m afraid of wolves when I know that I can just shut the door. It’s like that for everything now, because for this baby, everything is new (and much of that can be scary). Parts of that are (obviously) wonderful, because you get to watch this brand new person experience everything for the first time, but, for the joke of it all, there’s a way for me to explore that – playing up the idea of things that are normal and everyday like they are big or special or scary. (Homework - brainstorm some stuff!)
The other new half-idea is that if I have created an environment in which my baby did actually need to be afraid of wolves…she would have a whole lot more pressing issues than the wolves. She’d be in a lot more danger from a lot of other things before the wolves even found us. If I was dumb enough to make us vulnerable to wolves, we’d have all kinds of other problems on our hands (brainstorming homework: like what?)
Which brings us to the last bullet point of the joke: “To me, it sounds kind of nice to have a simple thing like “wolves” to be afraid of rather than the complex fears of the modern-day world.”
Why?
Because wolves are an obvious threat. They’re physical and natural and predatory, and they can be bested by doors. It seems like once We (the human race) figured out how to be safe from wolves, we got in a big hurry to make up other things that now we have to be scared about. Like, going to work on Monday. We had to create the “Sunday Scaries” because we created a world where 5 out of the 7 days per week we have to go create value for a company that doesn’t give a shit about us, and we have to do this in order to eat and have a door to keep out the wolves. And now we’re making AI, so we have to be scared that we won’t have jobs anymore (but that we’ll also have to keep paying for all that stuff.) And ALSO the AI is using up all the clean water that we need to drink. Give me the wolves!
More homework here…brainstorm other modern fears that are worse than wolves. I think that will be my work for tomorrow: a few brainstorms (and next steps post-brainstorm).
Wow, this new series idea really is making me work on these jokes. Anybody wanna book me for some shows so I can practice them?
Wednesday
I did not have a lot of time to work on stuff today, but I still want to share what I did, which was a few half-ass brainstorms based on my self-assigned “homework” from yesterday.
Honestly though, brainstorms work best at the beginning of a joke or when you’re stuck or just looking to pull ideas — that’s when you can just do a brain dump on a page and look at it later to pull what’s best. In my situation, I’m just looking for a few funny ideas to throw into the joke (again, this is where being able to test them on stage in front of an audience would be best) so if I hit on something I like or think can be good, it’s fine to stop. Is this an excuse for not doing more today? Maybe a little bit.
Research: Parenting Methods and Tropes of the 1980s
“Free Range” parenting
Fed us sugar and let us watch TV all day
“It’s 10pm do you know where your children are” - they had to be reminded!
Let us cry it out
Latchkey Kids
Brainstorm: Why Wouldn’t I Ask My Parents?
Dad put me in a basketball hoop
Mom dated a Civil War Reenactor
Mom put little notes in my school lunches even when it got me made fun of
Mom made me call a school bully on the phone and stand up for myself (which is probably good but still feels bad when I think about it)
Dad was my youth basketball coach and said things to our team that I will not repeat here or ever (and will tell myself it was a different time and we knew different things.)
Technically, I can’t ask my mom now because she is dead. Sorry to bring the whole room down, but that’s just true. And I’m not asking an Ouiji Board for parenting advice; any old spirit could just pretend they're my mom.
Brainstorm: Things You Have to go Along with/pretend when you are a parent
You have to let kids try things and fail and learn on their own rather than just doing it for them and saving yourself so much time (have to pretend putting on a shirt is hard or counting to ten or saying the ABCs…)
You have to let go of the rational and embrace pure instinct and feelings (not really a specific idea here, more of a general thought to help guide this/future brainstorms about the subject)
Brainstorm: If I Created an Environment where Wolves were a Threat, What Else is a Threat?
The elements
I’d probably forget to do some basic stuff, like give her food
I definitely wouldn’t know that you’re not supposed to mix bleach and vinegar (something I learned way too recently, in the exact way you’re imagining I learned it)
NOTE/THOUGHT WHILE BRAINSTORMING - I can definitely get dumber than this with my examples here - permission to go SUPER DUMB
If wolves can be beaten by closing a door, maybe that means I left the door open, and something else is gonna get in before a wolf. Like, a bunch of bugs. If a wolf runs away with your baby, that’s one thing, but imagine that happening with a bunch of bugs. That’s some bad parenting.
Brainstorm: Modern Fears That are Worse Than Wolves?
Running out of water
No Jobs
We’re letting like 3 people have all the money in the world
All of our food is plastic
They won’t stop making Marvel movies
Not enough time to listen to all the podcasts
Everything I ever talk about is then an ad on my phone two seconds later
As you can see, I probably could have gone on a bit of a deeper brainstorm dive here, but I just didn’t have the time. Ideally, brainstorming works best when you have a clear chunk of space to just empty out your brain on a single topic. That wasn’t the case for me yesterday, but I think I got a few decent ideas I can at least put into the joke as placeholders for now (or maybe not placeholders if they work!)
Thursday
I’m going to use today to reorganize the roadmap of the joke and then go through it, point-by-point, to write a stream-of-consciousness first draft of the bit. (Full disclosure, I have tried this bit on stage a few times, in a half-written, not fully fleshed out format, so there are some things I have said before, but it is nowhere near a bit that is “ready” to be performed.)
This part of the exercise makes me cringe a little bit, because stand-up comedy is a spoken medium, and it never fully translates when reading a bit that is written on the page. So much depends on the delivery and the timing and the rhythm. That’s what makes it different than a written humor piece or funny personal essay. You can feel it the other way as well, when someone delivers stand-up that seems like it was written to be read instead of spoken out loud. I think that’s what a lot of people who claim that they don’t “write” their stand-up mean – not that they’re freestyling every time they get on stage, but that they just think about it and then work it out on stage (after preparing in their heads or with bullet points or whatever) instead of writing down every single line they’re going to say. I think it’s a way to not come off as “too rehearsed” or unnatural. I’ve found that, for me, loosely writing it all out in a conversational tone helps me get out more of my ideas and figure out where the jokes are. I don’t try to memorize every single word I write down, though. It’s more of a guide. I don’t want to sound like a robot.
The joke before this joke is about my fears as a first-time father. I won’t get into it here. Come see me on a show sometime. I’m just telling you what it is about so that you can see how I transition into this joke.
Babies are also afraid. I learned my baby is afraid of wolves.
I learned it on Google. Because I learn everything on Google.
I can’t rely on my own parents or friends with kids.
My baby wouldn’t let me sit still when holding her; I had to be in constant motion.
My baby doesn’t have to be afraid of wolves.
I can’t tell my baby that wolves aren’t a threat - I have to play along in this wolf charade.
I would prefer a world in which wolves were our biggest threat.
I learned that my baby is also afraid. That seems wrong, doesn’t it? That a baby comes out a completely blank slate, perfect and new, except for naturally programmed in fears. Seems like a raw deal. Welcome to earth, you can do three things: eat, shit your pants, and shit your pants metaphorically. The fact that babies feel that tells me there’s absolutely no god. That, and that dogs can’t eat grapes. I just learned that one, too. Luckily, not the hard way. A grape does seem like it would be a perfect treat for a dog. Those are the two things that tell me there is no just and loving god. If there was a god, grapes definitely wouldn’t kill dogs and babies would know no fear.
But instead, my baby is afraid of wolves. From like, an evolutionary standpoint. I didn’t expose her to wolves just to see what would happen. Here’s what did happen: she would not let me sit down while I was holding her. I had to be standing up, in constant motion. And I needed to know two things: one, if it was normal, and two, if I could make it fucking stop. So I went to Google, because that’s the only way I know anything anymore. - Here is where I will possibly insert my old bit about Google and computers or maybe just say a few lines from it to get the best punchlines across.
By the way, Google did that to us, and now they’re like: “Guess what, sometimes we’re wrong now! Deal with it!” They just use AI, and it gets stuff wrong all the time, and we have to be like “I guess we just don’t know anything anymore.” Cause I can’t just ask somebody else. What am I gonna ask my own parents for advice on how to be a parent? They were parents in the 80s; they’d probably be like “just give her the keys to the house and come home whenever.” This is true: one time, my dad stuck me in a basketball hoop and just – left me there for a while. I can’t ask “what’s the best parenting advice” to somebody who might say “hey sometimes ya just gotta dunk ‘em.”
So Google told me this is very common and that my baby screams and cries whenever I sit down because she is afraid of wolves. Because if I sit down, I might be vulnerable to a predator, and we might get eaten by wolves. Apparently, my baby thinks we live on the tundra, and I don’t know how to tell her that…I don’t know what a tundra is. I’ve heard of the tundra. It sounds intimidating. They named a truck after it, and they only name trucks after things that are tough. I also don’t know how to tell my baby…that she doesn’t have to be afraid of wolves. It’s 2026, we’ve figured out wolves. We live inside. If a wolf comes, I can just…close the door. If it knocks, I ain’t answering. Go ahead, say you’re Grandma - I can’t be tricked by a wolf!
So I have to just play along with this baby wolf charade and stand up and move around and pretend to be on high alert. That’s actually what a lot of parenting is so far - just validating the irrational emotions of a tiny human who you can’t reason with yet. Not doing that would be psychotic. You can’t yell at a baby because the blender can’t hurt them. So I just gotta dance around and pretend to be on the lookout for wolves.
[Here, in the delivery of the joke, I would probably milk a pause and act like I’m thinking of this for the very first time. What a little sneaky trick!]
I kinda think it would be nice if wolves were our main concern though. Do you know what I mean? Like we conquered our fear of wolves and rushed right into a bunch of other things we have to be afraid of that are way dumber than wolves. Give me wolves any day over “the Sunday scaries.” I’d rather be afraid a hungry dog beast is going to rip into my throat and eat my flesh than get sick to my stomach when the sun goes down on my weekend thinking about the backlog of emails I’m going to have to answer on Monday morning.
Friday
Okay, so at this point, what I really need to do is try the bit on stage, record it, listen back to it, see what works, what doesn’t work, rewrite it, add some stuff, cut some stuff, and repeat that at least 50 times until I’m somewhat happy with where things are going or I give up on it completely. But I can’t do that online. So this is where things end for now.
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