The best stand up comedy advice a person can get starts with bypassing most of the MIT jokology course-like courses out there and finishes with putting yourself in front of and recording as many audiences as you can, so you can turn your take on funny into something you can take to the bank.
The easiest way to illustrate what a successful stand-up comedy act launch looks is to look at what most people do to leak themselves of funny fuel just in time for the stage. If you follow this self-defeating stand-up comedy (most of what's out there) you'll look more like a pot in need of some fresh tomato sauce, than a guy that can brew together some ideas in a way that makes people open their mouths:
The Patented Stand-up Comedy, Limb-by-Limb, Career Suicide:
1. You see a comic on TV and think to yourself: 'I can make people laugh, so why am I wasting my time making my getting relatives to blow gravy out of their noses at thanksgiving dinner when I could be cool in the eyes of cool people!'
2. You think, 'OK, If I'm going to be good at this I need to learn as much as that cool guy on TV. That's what I did when I wanted to get good at something at school - I learned more about it than most...I turned my brain into a living textbook.'
3. You go to the library and the internet to collect all the written stand-up comedy advice you can find. You follow the tips in these
books and put them to work, not sure if they actually work. Using the chinese restuarant menu writing strict formula they dictate you create a series of jokes that are letter perfect, on paper.
4. You find an open-mike event and hit the stage, thinking your job is done and that the only people who have any responsibility left in the process of turning you into a full time comic are the people in front of you, who, incidentally, seem to treat your arrival on their drinking scene about as cemeroniously as a cow treats the arrival of a fly on her outside round.
5. You remember your jokes, pulled straight from the confines of your mental text-book of stand-up formula knowledge, perfectly, to the sylablle, in fact. Actually you only recite the first couple perfectly. After these two duck and punch routines make the audience look at you like someone who has just announced that he has purchased their favorite booze can and will be bulldozing tomorrow at the crack of dawn to install an 'enthusiasts only' wine bar, you figure you might want to get out of their while their is still a clear path to the door.
6. Reminding yourself that, because of shopping malls, you can find other ways to be cool without opening your mouth in front of strangers, you decide to go home and call your mom and see if you can't get her to laugh about your miserable failure. She does and you think, 'damn, getting good material is a lot quicker of a process than I thought.'
Did you catch the moral of this story? Yes, it's to not take stand-up comedy advice from someone who tells you laughs are a science and that anyone can earn a laughology doctorate with enough book-burrying. But that's what a succesful first stand-up comedy act is NOT about. What IS this stand-up eulogy you just read really all about?
Look over the last sentence once more. Here you go: 'You decide to go home and call your mom and see if you can't get her to laugh about your miserable failure. She does and you think,'damn, getting good material is a lot quicker of a process than I thought.'
Did you catch it. Did you get a glimpse about what real, honest, consistent, stage-smarts is all about.
You see how the stand-up wanna-be -- let's say its you for future orientation purposes since we're past the dire conflict in the story and on to the hidden happy-ending -- ends up putting down HIS, or YOUR audience's gaurd, a bunch of mind-meddling that could be performed by your pet parrot with a lot less humiliation, and just gives his take on something funny that happened in his, or YOUR, life? Do you see how he didn't change a single thing about how he gave that take because he was JUST talking to his mom? This is what standing up and delivering your funniest-side on stage is ALL about.
So what's the best stand-up advice I can give you? Not to take someone elses stand-up advice. But instead to find what you say that's funny to people around you and find a way to talk about it as if you're at the dinner table on Thanksgiving and your Grandma's just taken a scoop of horseradish onto her plate thinking it was mashed. This compete disregard for the science of stand-up and total acceptance of the inexplicably personal artistry behind it will find you, finding yourself being funny on stage. Did I mention 'yourself' needs to be self-evidentally funny?
Here's my career launching stand-up comedy advice in a more linear form, just so you don't take those steps above and use them because, they're, well, steps:
A Becoming Way to Become a Stand-up Success For Those Who Don't Need to Become Funny:
1. You realize that you ARE funny after you trip over your neighbours flower bed and recover by telling her that you were just seeing if her pansies were as tough as they look, causing her to laugh so hard she doesn't realize that half of said pansies are wedged, with a hunk of sod, in your belt buckle.
2. You are watching comedy network and you see someone else who is funny, only he isn't wasting his time on his unhip, soiled neighbor. You think, 'becoming a stand-up dude is a far more becoming way to spend my time, than joining the local daphodil society.'
3. You go to work on making your unique brand of funny a recognizable one on stage. Not hard work, but work that is designed to make your life easier in the club trenches. You start by watching some more comics on TV. You find one that has the same type of bent on things as you. You record his act and watch it, noting how many laughs per minute he gets, how long the segments of his act are and how many words he says before each laugh. In general, you get an idea about what one thing about him gets him the most laughs.
4. You have a blueprint for success that doesn't involve manufacturing humor. A structure for your own humor. You will now work on harnessing your sense of humor for the stage by fitting it into this framework. You do this buy making a note of anything that you find funny in your day to day life and that you are moved to express your veiwpoint of. When you have three or four talking points, you start talking as if you're talking to that uncool, octagenarian neighbour you are shamelessly trying to distance yourself from. You write down your takes, just as you say them, keeping in mind that the words you put down on paper are not going to amount to a funny performance if some one other than you is performing them, just like an Elton Jon's Tiny Dancer isn't going to rock Yankee stadium during the seventh inning stretch at the world series if it is performed by Metallica, and vice versa, I would venture to guess.
Because you want to learn how to turn this material creation process into a Harry Potter sized epiphany and figure you won't have to perform at a different kind of club once or twice to pay for it, you use the Interactive Writing Guide found here.
5. You practice your act in your room in front of a mirror. You make sure that there are no excess words - words that don't help you convey the overall tone and message you plan to convey and that you perform by EXPRESSING YOUR FEELINGS, not those that you figure the audience might want to here. When you've got it down, when its natural and captures your humor, you slip in bits and bites of it when talking to the yard-bound woman next door, who you also take a jello-mould just to make sure you get off on the right foot.
6. Scratch the jello part. We don't want to develop bad habits.
7. Gauge the reaction you get to your material when surreptitiously auditioning it to friends and people you meet in between saying things like, 'can I get you a refill on that', or 'come on - this darn joke writing book has only been taken out twice in ten years and one of those times was by me...for nine years.' You feel prepared and confident that you'll be able to feel your extremities once on stage.
8. Get a gig. Find an open-mike or just go into a place with people that want to be entertained and ask the manager if you can have five minutes or so one night. Mentally rehearse your self suceeding by picturing how your act will go and drawing from your past successes to do this. Whatever you do, make sure that you record this first gig. This is just a beta test. There is no failure. You 2.0 is still to come.
9. Take you act home and watch it. Watch it again. Then watch it like you mean it. At this point you should be able to pick up on what's working and what isn't. Cut out the filler and give them the 100% angus beef version of your humor. Admit defeat if a part of your act just doesn't work. No sense trying to stuff a burger down their throat when they're in the mood for steak tartare!
If you can do so without eating ends meat on day old bread ends, then purchase this stand-up evaluation software (which comes with the only stand-up training program that doesn't turn your short-lived stand-up career into the only thing funny about you). It'll rate and show you how to improve the teeth sinkability of your performance.
10. Get back on stage and do it all over again. Repeat steps 9 and 10 until you can make your audience a giggly as a kid at the circus while on a Kool-Aid IV drip. Get 6-10 laughs per minute.
11. You've got a salable, replayable stand-up act that you can probably use to pay off those late-fees for the stand-up books that that turned you into Mr. Roboto Does Stand-up, if a club owner likes his audiences to keep their overripe tomatoes or decapitating durian (watch out for those clubs in predominantly East-Indian inhabited neighborhoods) to themselves.
BTW: The ONLY desk, to stage, to video-room stand-up training system I've found that WON'T turn you into Mr. Roboto Does Stand-up OR a NOT joke virtuoso (Killer Stand-up) is here:
http://www.killerstandup.com
It's 50% OFF but you'll get over 100 Complimentary Pages of the Interactive Writing and Performing Guides and a demo of the game-changing video evaluation software that turbocharges if you sign up for the newsletter after clicking the link above
(P.S. DON'T take the protein out of your diet just to pay for this - you might need it if things get rowdy on stage.)
And oh here's my Killer Stand-up review: http://upstandingstandupcitizen.blogspot.com/2010/05/killer-standup-comedy-system-review.html
Wednesday, May 05, 2010
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