Successful standup comedians have to be among the best editors. They can’t waste the crowd’s time, and it is their own jokes they are polishing. Think of how economical — how stingy — they have to be with their words.

And no matter how easy they make it look — how offhand and improvisational — they are diligent writers and editors.

The secret is that good writing is a matter of good editing — of editing your own writing. Jerry Seinfeld “has very much squeezed every wasted word out of his act,” says one of the producers of Comedians in Cars Getting Coffee, in The Comedians in Cars Getting Coffee Book, released in November to coincide with the show’s 10th anniversary. That takes a tremendous amount of discipline. Good writing isn’t easy, even if it reads like it is. It takes a lot of hard work to make something seem effortless.

Tom Corfman in PR Daily recommends the Comedians in Cars book to “every professional communicator,” and he is on solid ground to do so. I do have one quibble, however, which goes back to the larger point about being parsimonious.

“Writing for the internet encourages wordiness,” Corfman says. “The space is unlimited.”

Actually, it isn’t. People read differently on a Kindle, laptop or phone, than they do with the Sunday Times in a Barcalounger in front of the fire.

• They’re in a hurry.
• In that sense, the space is less “unlimited” than ever.
• To keep their attention, respect their time.

(That’s why bullet points are so useful.)

Annoying Word of the Month — wackadoodle. “As drum major of a wackadoodle parade,” The Washington Post’s David Von Drehle wrote in mid-January, Donald Trump campaigned for GOP candidates who got shellacked in November. Wackadoodle? Again? As Tony Soprano would say, “Can we not?” Wackadoodle — used about the same time by David Brooks in The New York Times — is the go-to word of political writers who want to be funny but actually aren’t. At least Von Drehle and Brooks didn’t drag out kerfuffle, which served much the same purpose — or was used with the same wan hope — for years that seemed like decades, if not centuries. Let’s deep-six them both, OK? They might have been amusing the first 400 times we read them, but now they’re just sad.