And my point originally was what's the point in writing jokes if you don't know how to deliver them? Part of writing a joke is knowing how you're going to deliver them. You could write jokes for 2 years and then realize that the way you wrote them is not the way you could say them and now you have to go back to day one and re-write all of your jokes.
nathan smart!
http://www.nathansmart.com
I guess ultimately what I'm saying is its important to take your comedic perspective seriously. Yeah, seriously enough to take two years and discover what it is. You're going to get there by writing and learning to find the funny in the everyday. Am I putting too much weight on this ?
Hey I can't remember if I posted this earlier or not but I don't remember if anyone gave me any feedback. If you have the time could you check it out, its the first time I went on a couple months back, but I'd like to hear what people with experience in comedy think. Thanks
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qTvPiiYxwu8
Of course that's true but I think you're putting too much weight on the writing and not enough on the performing. In stand up, you can't have one without the other. There's no point in waiting around to go up on stage while you develop material. Someone on here already said that they were writing a blog for a long time and then had a hard time translating it to the stage. Imagine if they had been doing both and how that would help with both the stage performance and the blog writing.Originally Posted by RubelT
nathan smart!
http://www.nathansmart.com
I've made more progress in these last three months finally getting on stage than I EVER would have in 1 or 2 years spent writing jokes without ever getting up there.
I don't see the point in just writing when I have the option of also covering the perfoming aspect. That's like taking half a slice of bread every day instead of the full piece you're being offered.
If you're doing stand-up comedy, chances are that humor and comedy is already a big part of your life. You already KNOW what makes you laugh.
When I go on stage and use my material, I almost always tweak it afterwards. If I just spend 2 years writing and not getting on stage, it would just be a waste of two years because I'm only just seeing how the material feels on stage two years later instead of constantly getting and working with that knowledge all the while.
Do you want to be a writer or a performer? And if you want to be a performer, why the hell would you wait 2 years to perform?
If anything, write for a couple months before going onstage, and when you go onstage, realize that you cannot use 95% of what you wrote because you had never done stand up before. Worked for me.
I wrote for about 6-7 months and got up on stage for the first time a few weeks ago. I feel that the preparation for getting on stage (the week or two before I got up for the first time) and the actual act of getting on stage inspired me to try to write more and edit and organize what I'd already written. Maybe there's no particular mold that we should all try to conform to. Do what works for you.
One interesting thing that I noticed about my writing it that it seems like I write more and funnier stuff when I'm going through hardship - such as losing a job, breakup of a relationship.....money problems and such. Does anyone else write funnier and more material when the chips are down?
Don't waste years writing. I did that and I delayed myself. After 4 years of writing jokes I whittled it down to only about 20 jokes that I thought were quality enough to tell on stage. I finally did it and 15 of the 20 jokes got laughs. Some strong, some just chuckles. Within a couple of months I had figured some stuff out and wrote more jokes than I did in 4 years.
Do it.
Hey, I've been reading this thread and its got a ton of good advice.
Here is the audio from my second time on stage ever, it was yesterday at the Hollywood Improv open mic:
The audio quality is pretty bad and I'm sorry if its hard or impossible to hear (I can make out what I'm saying but that might be because I know my material). Its from a handheld cassette tape recorder being played into my computer mic. Thats not me coughing in the beginning.
I was nervous as hell, and I have this weird reaction when I'm on stage, where I will get really deadpan and emotionless and quiet. There isn't a lot of flopsweat or quivering voice, I just sort of shut down.
I still haven't quite decided what my comedic voice or style is going to be like, but I don't think I'd want to go that deadpan. I feel like I was approaching levels of deadpan that made Steven Wright look like Dane Cook, but that was mostly nerves. I feel like my style will probably be somewhat deadpan but not so much that it limits the kind of material I can do (you need more energy and more ebullience to tell bigger stories/more complex jokes or express emotions in jokes, I think).
I think the first two bits went okay but the last one, about being stranded on a deserted island, really laid an egg and I think I'm going to strip it from my act. Also, I messed up the telling of it; heres the joke straight from the textfile I write my material in:people always ask if you were on a deserted island with someone, who would you pickYou can tell I didn't even tell most of it; they only give you three minutes and I didn't want to get booted off the stage. The rape stuff is kind of hacky and lame so I'm glad I didn't even mention it.
and I don't understand the question
because it would be a survival situation
you're not going to talk to them about anything meaningful, you're going to be fighting for your lives
"anthony hopkins i loved you in silence of the lambs, and i'd really love to talk to you about it, but for the love of god please construct a goddamned raincatch or we'll not make it through the drought season"
and you're going to have sex with that person eventually to
"hey um, you know, we're the only two people here and I REALLY need to have sex with someone and uh
i really don't care if you don't want to, actually. This is an island and I'm the president.
Its not rape if you're on an island, thats a law I just passed"
"if you fuck me theres a cabinet position with your name on it!"
I guess the answer is someone who I'd like to see die and also have sex with
and so I'm going to go with Kim Kardashian
she's really hot but she needs to really not be alive
there is such a bizarre combination of sexy and awful going on there
i can't quite put my finger in it
But yeah, that was my second open mic.
I've been researching some Professional Comedians lately (since I'm wet behind the ears in comedy) and it seems that more and more I'm noticing that they have jokes that work and they often do the same jokes/routines that get laughs over and over. An example would be a funny Comedian I saw at a Philadelpha open mic (he is somewhat known and travels all over the country) who did about 15 minutes of very funny material. When I came home and went to his Myspace page and searched for clips of him on Youtube I noticed that he was doing most of the exact same jokes that he did the night that I saw him performing at the open mic - pretty much word for word - his props and body language seemed identical.
I realize that I've pretty much made this point previously, but there must be merit to doing the same material that works over and over since that's what many successful, professional Stand Up Comics do.
As I write/say/whatevs this, keep in mind that I'm just inching up to my 3rd year of standup. But from what little I know, in the quest to get to that 15 minutes you'll repeat stuff a lot...different wordings, phrasings, physical movements to heighten the impact of a particular bit. You'll add stuff, cut stuff out, etc., until it's a finely-tuned comedy machine that you can rely on in almost every situation, with practice and through all the lousy sets at crappy open mics and combative audiences and all that other stuff.
That's not to say a junky, crappy or ill-conceived bit shouldn't be scrapped...I'd say 75 percent of what I come up with goes in the trash within two or three attempts onstage. But if something has an inkling of possibility within your performances, you keep working it until it's where it should be...and then you pull it out of your arsenal in an audition or a bigger show or a paid gig or whenever you're out to impress, not just working on your basic skills.
I think one of the biggest obstacles in every comic's way is to realize that open mics are OPEN MICS - they are NOT big shows or the single greatest event in your lifetime; it's an opportunity to work on your material, your stage presence and your overall performance. Stop thinking of every single open mic in a cafe, laundromat, friend's basement, barn or extended outhouse as The Place You'll Be Discovered and start working on getting better.
NEWSFLASH: Working comedians develop "an act."
That really shouldn't be a newsflash, you know.
Think about the whole premise of the movie "Jerry Seinfeld--Comedian". Jerry had the same basic act for DECADES and decided to put it aside; the movie follows Jerry as he tries to build up a new act from scratch. He goes out night after night, doing multiple shows per night--an option available to him because he's Jerry Seinfeld...and it takes him months of struggling to generate workable material (despite the fact that he's a veteran professional gifted with excellent jokecrafting skills.)
Jerry's experience allowed him to go through this process quicker than anyone else could possibly manage...and it still took him hundreds of shows to get something he could work with--not even coming close to the precision of the original act that he had honed and perfected over the years.
Now...remember...you don't have Jerry's years of experience. You still have to learn mic technique, stage presence, dealing with various audiences, how to read a room, how to recover, how to follow someone who bombed, how to follow someone who killed, how different set lengths demand different pacing, how to handle distractions, performing when you're not feeling 100% healthy, performing when you're not feeling 100% happy, performing when it becomes a job, trying to meet the expectations of those who hire you when they might not be the same as what you'd like to do...and the nearly infinite other things you need to learn that lead me to constantly advise you that "you don't even know how much you don't know yet."
Jerry already knew all that stuff...and got to be one of the best at all that stuff...and, yet, without his act, he became little better than an open-mic'r...until he could, through constant work, rebuild a new act.
Does that put your expectations more properly in line? Does that begin to illustrate why most of us who do this stick with the advice of "get on stage as often as you can"? Does that help you stop sweating the small stuff, Kevin James?
pg--Drieux's paragraph about "open mics are OPEN MICS" is true wisdom. Print it out, tape it to your wall and read it out loud before you go to do an open mic...then go to that open mic and swim your laps for you.--seattle
Watching "Jerry Seinfeld - Comedian" was really discouraging at first, because I was like "If it's this hard for JERRY..."
But I'm too optimsitic and delusional to let that slow me down.
Believe this. You're not going to be discovered at an open mic. And also people like to see progress. I've had several people come up to me that haven't seen me in a year and tell me how awesome it is that I stuck to it and have gotten better.
It should be inspirational. When you think that it's hard or if you feel discouraged, you can always think to yourself, "It was this hard and discouraging for JERRY."
It's a process. The process is meant to train you to be good. You can't really shortchange the process--people who make it too quickly often fail to learn certain valuable things and burn out quickly...and people who get frustrated quickly and quit won't really be missed.
Turn your impatience into hunger...be driven to keep going to open mics and keep getting on stage consistently, even if your head is filled with excuses for why you shouldn't bother.
There's a comedy book that suggests "100 shows" as a minimum before you begin to take away any real lessons from what you've done up until that point. I don't know if I agree with him on that (seems rather arbitrary, and you shouldn't keep going up entirely blind...every show has something to teach you after all)--but the idea behind it...that it takes time and a commitment towards that time...is sound.
pg--One thing that you'll want to learn quickly is to judge yourself on your own terms. Too many comedians get bogged down with the progress and opportunities afforded to others If you can avoid that, you'll be happier...believe me.--seattle
I definitely took more inspiration than discouragement from the film, don't worry. It gave me a real feel for how tough it was going to be and when I realized I was okay with that, it got me even more excited.
I've always been outrageously optimistic in life, and it's no different in this endeavor.
Hello Folks. I have two questions:
Is it common for a fairly new Stand Up Comedian (he's been at it just over a year) to be progressing very well as a Stand Up act but be terrible as an MC?
My other question:
I've done a few open mics now and I noticed that lots of the better and more experienced guys are much more animated and lively (more dramatic in voice and body gestures/movements) on stage then me. I don't have much cash now to take lessons or anything because I'm unemployed, but I learn well through reading/advice from people who are good. I do walk around the stage to address the entire audience, but it kind of feels unnatural (but not hopeless) to be dramatic in voice and body language (I don't have acting experience), but I'm willing to learn (if I can) because I'm really enjoying what I'm doing. I've been accused of being laid back and Type B in the past - if that helps. I'm not as laid back as Steven Wright and truthfully could never be that laid back and he doesn't seem like a style I'd want to fit into. I'm more of a Norm MacDonald laid back. Thank's for your help.
Last edited by John Santana; March 28, 2009 at 1:22 PM. Reason: Making corrections and additions
I believe both your questions have the same issue and that would be being comfortable on stage. if your jokes are presented well but you are not that comfortable due to your lack of experience you may be doing well during sets but not as well as a mc where your personality is put to the forefront.
again as you gain more experience i believe you will find yourself becoming more animated and lively not in a forced way but just in the fact that you will have spent allot of time in front of people.
And the flipside of that is just as common--new comedians who don't have much to offer as far as their act but who can manage the duties of an MC with a certain amount of success.
Being good at being MC is a skill set unto itself...and if you can master the skills necessary to being an MC, you may find that you get more opportunities to comedy quicker than those who can't...but, you may also find that you're unable to balance the demands of being the MC with your goal to progress and grow as a comedian.
If you don't know what the skills and responsibilities of the MC of a comedy show are, ask...there are lots of official and unofficial rules.
First--recognize what's happening. You have an audience wanting to be entertained. It shouldn't surprise you that the louder, more active, more dramatic performers tend to grab the attention of that audience and get bigger reactions from them. Of course, if EVERY performer was loud, active and dramatic...you're dealing with the law of diminishing returns and you might recognize that you'd get an audience's attention by NOT being loud, active or dramatic--it's a matter of reversing the dominant paradigm.
Second--you will forever be trying to balance "what you think will work" with "what feels right to you"...but the glory of stand-up comedy is that you really can do pretty much exactly what you want to do the way you want to do it. (Recognize that, certainly, your success and the opportunities open to you may vary depending on the approach you take...but as long as what you're doing is your original approach, no one can tell you that you have to change.)
I think everyone here would advise you that you should tend to lean towards pursuing "what feels right to you" when it comes to comedy--as that is a basic tenet of the "alt-comedy" approach that people on this message board gravitate towards. The idea that you'd force yourself to change just to be more "successful" is anathema to the mindset of most on this board.
However, as you learn the craft of comedy--what you THINK "feels right to you" may change... Right now, you're still at the stage of trying to emulate your collection of influences...and what you think you want to be like may not be your most honest voice...and it may not be what your eventual performance style may be like...
I remember, early in my own efforts in comedy, that when I felt like I was in a rut...when I felt I wasn't learning anything, I'd force myself to try a completely different performance approach. For example, one time, I did the Chris Rock-style "angry, energetic pacing" approach...while another time, I brought a stuffed cat with me on-stage and did my material as if I was an emotionless, Teutonic villain from a Bond movie (complete with petting the cat between every joke.)
...and that often helped to shake me out of my rut and remind me that it's not all about the writing, it's about how we choose to present both ourselves and our material.
You're still at the stage of development, where if you feel like trying something different...go ahead and do it! See what it feels like...see if it adds to your understand of what you want to do and how best to go about doing it.
If not--don't feel like you have to make any excuses for why you choose to perform the way you do. That's your style...and hopefully you'll get good at it.
pg--Success is the best excuse for letting yourself do what you want.--seattle
Last edited by pg13; April 19, 2009 at 12:44 PM.
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