Entirely Free Comedy Class - Revised Edition
Hey all, my Entirely Free Comedy Class is now over five years old, and looking back, it could be clearer and better, and more detailed. So I’m revising it. And the first week is ready. Here it is!
WEEK ONE
In every major city, someone is teaching a stand-up comedy class, often charging hundreds of dollars for the effort. While I know some professional comics who have benefited from these classes, the majority consensus among my fellow comedians is that they are of dubious value.
They may help a little to build courage and comfort on stage, but they will not replace any of the many hours you will have to spend in Open Mics if you want to tell jokes for a living.
There is only one way to get good at stand-up comedy, and that is to do stand-up comedy. There is no short cut. There is no homework. You can practice your jokes in your room until they are tight and polished. You can practice them on the very stage you are going to tell them on. You still won't know if they are funny they are until they encounter a live audience. You can't know anything about a joke until an audience of everyday people, who expect to laugh, reacts to it.
A comedy class is an artificially supportive environment. You can't get the honest reactions you need to build an act from fellow students and a teacher who wants a good Yelp review. Only performing stand-up in real “game time” conditions will do. Not only do you need to learn on the job, you can only learn on the job. For the comedy beginner, there is no substitute for the open mic.
I am not saying stand-up instruction is impossible. I'm not saying all you can tell a new comic is to go out, plow through their sets with no game plan, and hope for the best. I did that. It was a nightmare.
I would love to have had some kind of road map to help me know what to focus on. I got important advice later in my career that I would have loved to have had access to at the start. Many aspects of this art form took me years of wrong turns to figure out. I would love to spare the next generation some of that confusion. They might get better quicker if I could tell them what they needed to know right when they needed know it.
This is my twelve week class on stand-up comedy. It's everything I've learned about writing and performing comedy. This book is the textbook. Your city's open mics are the classroom. And through the magic of Youtube, the best comedians of all time will be your guest speakers.
Read one chapter a week. Watch the featured video clips and answer the study questions. Then put the instructions into practice at your local Open Mics. After you have gone up at least three times practicing the lessons of that week, read the next chapter. Repeat for twelve weeks.
There are two goals of the class. One is for you to have a five minute set you can do at any comedy showcase with confidence. The second, more important goal is give you an effective process for improving your act that you can use as long as you do stand-up comedy. It's the
process I use every week to this day.
I focus on basic fundamentals. I don’t tell you what to write or talk about. Previous books about stand-up presented a “right way” to write jokes. As the sheer variety of modern comedians shows, there isn't one. My process can help you with any style you might choose. As long as the essential elements of comedy are present, you can make people laugh any way you like.
Assignment One:
Find out where the comedy open mics in your area are. Maybe they are on a web site that lists all the comedy shows in your city. Maybe they are listed with the music shows of the week. Maybe you can find them listed among the offerings of local theater companies. Googling your city's name and “comedy open mic” is as good a way to start as any. Find out how many you can go to this week.
Find out what you need to do to perform on them. Sign up if necessary.
If at all possible, go to open mics that are listed as specifically for comedy. This class was designed with those in mind.
It may be hard to find comedy open mics in some areas. If this is the case, all is not lost. Many music open mics will let you do stand-up as well, but you'll want to check with the host and venue first. If you don't know who to talk to at a venue, ask the bartender. They always know.
Music open mics will be a tougher audience to crack. You will have the added challenge of getting the audience to stop talking and focus. Music acts generally do not require an audience's undivided attention the way comedians do. That will be something you have to earn. If you can grab them and make them laugh on a night that's not conducive to comedy, that's a win you can be proud of.
Assignment Two:
Write five minutes of material.
What sort of material? This is up to you.
I know this is a vague assignment that doesn't give the student much guidance. Even the word “material” is vague. It seems specifically chosen to describe as little as possible. It just means “something that exists.” It doesn't get any clearer when you look at the other words comedians use to describe what
makes up their act. “Stuff.” “Chunks.” “Bits.” Bits of what?
Well, bits of whatever you can think of that might make someone laugh. You'll need all of it. Those skewed insights on life you've had over the years? Those things in the world everyone thinks are normal but you can prove are actually insane? Remember your analogy that made your friend say “I never thought of it that way” You finally have a place for all that stuff. And they give you a microphone!
As a famous comedian once said, “You should write whatever you can't stop thinking about.”
Still stuck? Don't worry. It's understandable. You haven't had any practice. Somehow, for all the millions of different writing assignments you get in school, “Write something funny” never comes up.
Try this.
Think of something you said that made your friends laugh. What additional information would strangers need to have to laugh at that? What words could quickly explain the situation and context just enough that the funny part made sense? Add those words in before the part you said to your friends. Your punch line now has a setup line. You now have a joke.
I've written many jokes this way.
Once a brutish guy came up to me after my act and said “it’s weird you’re hanging out after the show. Most comedians won't hang out after the show.” He said “comedians” like a snotty kid would if they were going, “Ooh... look at the big comedian.”
I didn't respond to the tone in his voice. I was nice. “That’s weird, we always hang out after the show,” I said. We do.
The guy ignores it. He says, “Fucking queers don’t want to drink with me.” Oh, he's a bigoted asshole, I thought. No wonder no one wants to drink with him.
I whispered to my friend Adam, under my breath, “Now I get it.” He laughed.
In real life, I only said “Now I get it,” and Adam laughed. I didn't need to describe the guy. Adam was looking right at him. I didn't need to tell Adam we were at a comedy show. He was with me the whole time. All Adam needed was “Now I get it,” and it was funny. An audience of strangers needs more.
When I related the story in my act, I began, “I go all over doing comedy. Sometimes you meet cool people. Sometimes you don’t.” I described the guy's initial question, and how I was confused because comedians always hang out after the show. Then I did his asshole voice going “Fucking queers don't want to drink with me,” followed by, “and I was like, “Now I get it.” I got a laugh in the same place as I got it from Adam that night.
With those modifications, something I said that made my friend laugh became a joke I could do on stage.
Incidentally, Adam doesn't appear in the joke at all. His presence at the scene is not essential to why it's funny. The joke is about me and the guy, not Adam. That night, Adam was the audience. In a comedy show, I have a real audience. Telling them that Adam was there is just needless words that don't serve my purpose, which is to get a laugh when I say, “Now I get it.” You only need to include what the crowd absolutely needs to know to get the joke. Everything else should go.
Don’t spend more than five hours writing your material.
It's not a novel, it's five minutes of comedy.
The important thing is to get up on that stage as soon as possible. Don’t put off that first performance. I know it can be scary. It may be nerve-wracking when you picture yourself up there, but prolonging the wait only makes it scarier. Best to rip the band-aid off as quickly as possible. Your fear will diminish once the experience is no longer a scary unknown.
Some people wait months and months trying to hone the perfect material before they do their first set. This is pointless. There is no way to anticipate the reaction your jokes will get before you tell them. Further hours of editing are a waste of time. Get your ideas in front of an audience as soon as possible. You will have all the time in the world to re-write it later, when you actually know what worked.
Some of you may be asking, “Wait! What if I don’t want to write ‘jokes?’ What if I want to do characters or tell stories or just talk to the crowd? Why can’t I get laughs that way?”
You can! You can do anything you want as long as you can get them to laugh after you do it.
Stories and character monologues work a lot like “jokes.” If one of these is your thing, for every sentence in this book that mentions “jokes,” just replace “joke” with “character monologue line” or “story beat” and the principles are the same.
Keep in mind that a stand-up story has to have laughs peppered throughout the entire piece. It can’t just pay off at the end. No matter what approach you take, you are still going to have to make the audience laugh at the rate they are accustomed to, which is roughly between two and four laughs a minute. You can make them wait longer here and there to build tension, but the longer they have to wait, the bigger that payoff is going to need to be as well. Stand-up is both the widest and the most narrow form of performance there is. You can do anything you want…. as long as the audience does one specific thing over and over again.
Improv and talking to the crowd are a little tougher to teach than jokes. They rely on you being funny in the moment. They are a product of your pure comedy instincts and the amount of practice you’ve had expressing them. The only way to improve is to start racking up stage time doing improv and crowd work,the way an athlete must practice being in the moment to perform better in those moments. Week Nine of this class is devoted to doing just that.
For now, follow the joke writing exercises and develop written material anyway. It is the best way to learn what makes a series of words funny. Think of it as practicing improv in slow motion. Besides, improvisers and crowd workers like Rory Scovel and Jeff Ross still need something to do on TV sets where they don’t let you wing it. Even in your live act, it can help to have some surefire lines. While improv can light up a crowd like nothing else in comedy, it misses sometimes. It's unavoidable. You will appreciate having tested jokes to fall back on when the riffing doesn't work.
Write your new five minutes in a dedicated space for this class. It can be a notebook. It can be a computer file. But it should have no other writing in it. I find a small notebook is the best because you can carry it anywhere. If you prefer to just type your bits into your phone that works too, but I feel that writing words out long-hand helps commit them to memory.
I advise writing your jokes out in full sentences, but if you can remember:
“I gotta get healthier. I can’t have one more day go by where the BEST thing I can say about myself is that the pot I smoked made me too lazy to eat Carl’s Jr. TWICE.”
from:
“Gotta Get healthier/best thing I can say/too lazy from pot to eat Carl’s Jr. 2x”
…then I am not going to make you write it all out just because I think you should. But the MINUTE you find yourself staring at “Candy Crush/Slot Machine guy WTF?” in your own handwriting with no idea what it means, it's complete sentences from now on. A forgotten bit could be the Netflix Special closer that now you’ll never have.
Assignment Three
Once your five minutes is written down, it's time to memorize it. Don't freak out from the “m” word. You don't necessarily have to know it word for word. But some level of memorization is necessary. You don’t want to be in actual danger of forgetting the point of what you’re talking about.
Some people like the certainty of knowing the words by heart. It's one less thing to worry about, and besides, they’re proud of that wording so why not make sure to show it off?
Others find memorization a source of stress and would rather not have another thing hanging over their head they have to remember not to screw up. For them, a loose idea they can sort of “jam on” is better.
Whichever sounds best to you is how you should do it, as starting out in stand-up is all about increasing your comfort level as you do something that provokes intense anxiety.
However you choose, I have found that whether a joke was written out verbatim the minute the idea appeared or whether it took ten tries through informal riffing, a “right way” based on brevity and the strongest, most colorful word choices begins to suggest itself. By the time a joke is ready to be recorded, even the “jazziest” comics tell it pretty similarly from night to night.
There are advantages and drawbacks to both approaches. A memorized joke sounds polished and can be delivered with confidence, each syllable emphasized for maximum
power. You may discover interesting language sitting down and writing that your onstage riffing brain would never have landed on in the moment.
On the flip side, there is a directness and energy to an improvised wording that a memorized bit can lack. It sounds like you're just hanging out with the audience and that's powerful.
When you script a bit out verbatim, there can be a tendency to think of it as “set in stone.” You deliver the lines like an actor and only those lines. You can forget that there is always room to add things because you are not talking “in the moment.”
Personally, I go up with at least one written-out punchline for each new bit that I intend to work on. On a fresh page, I write down all the punchlines and premises in a list before I go up. The Carl’s Jr. bit from above might be listed as “Lazy/Pot/Carl’s Jr.”
My set list might look like this:
Lazy/Pot/Carl's Jr.
Comedians don't hang out/Now I get it
40/Green Day
40/Close Bar/Bulls
Favorite Gay Bar/Ke$ha
After it's all written out, I take the list up with me and riff. No matter what, I always make sure I hit at least one prepared punchline for each subject I bring up. That way, bomb or crush, the audience will know I had a purpose to each bit. You will test their patience if they feel you are just meandering around with no payoff. They will check out. I feel I owe it to them to reward their attention with at least one thought-out comedic idea for each of my premises. They should know I respected them enough to at least have a point to each of my ramblings, even if the jokes don't all land.
If they happen to really like one of those punchlines, I will keep talking, in case I find something else funny. They seem to like where this is going, so let’s find out what else is there. This has lead to great stuff, but if it’s a dead end, at least they got a solid joke they liked before I went exploring.
Over time, as the repetition and trial and error process continues, I find my jokes inevitably find their way into a series of words that changes little from night to night. It's the best way I have found to get that idea out, and I know it by heart.
Assignment Four
Do your five new minutes at an open mic. Then do this same five minutes at two more open mics. Write down what worked and what didn't, but don't adjust anything yet. Perform the same jokes in the same order.
With the amount of people trying to do comedy now, some open mics give you just four, three, and sometimes even two and a half minutes to do your act. If this happens, do as much of your material as you are able to get out in the time allotted, but don't rush. Tell your jokes the way you think they work best. Don't try to jam them all in just to say you did it. Get to what you can and give those jokes the best chance they have to succeed.
Assignment Five
After your week of performances, or however long it takes to do a set at three open mics, look over your notes.
Write down your answers to the following questions. In the back of this book, you can find them on the easy to copy “Set Questions” Worksheet.
Set Questions
Which of your jokes got a laugh?
Which jokes didn’t?
Why do you think the jokes that did work worked?
Why do you think the jokes that didn’t work didn’t?
What could you change about the ones that didn’t work to maybe make them work?
Could changing jokes that worked make them work even better?
Keep this info handy for next week. We will get into it in depth.
Assignment Six:
When you've done your three performances, and you've written down your initial thoughts about your jokes, search the internet for the late, great Greg Giraldo's special “Midlife Vices.” It is currently view-able on Youtube.
Watch the special.
Answer the following questions. They are also printed out on an easy-to-copy Worksheet in the back of this book. It's the one that says “Video Questions.” Every week there will be comedians to watch and you will answer these same questions every time, so making a bunch of copies of this one might be a good idea.
Video Questions
How would you describe the comic's stage character, that is to say, the personality they present in their act?
Were the jokes presented as true stories from life? Or clearly false “jokes?”
What made you laugh in their act? Why?
What didn’t work for you? Why? Why do you think it may have worked for others?
How did the comic use their body to get laughs?
How did the comic use their face to get laughs?
How did the comic use their voice to get laughs?
What did you notice that made their act unique?
How did the comic structure the jokes that they wrote?
You will find answers at the beginning of next week's lesson.
That's it! That’s week one. Get started and I'll see you again next week. Kill 'em!