About Matt McDonald Expertise I DO NOT FULFILL REQUESTS TO TELL JOKES! PLEASE DON'T ASK. I can answer questions regarding getting started in stand-up comedy: what to expect, what to do before, during and after your first show, pushing past stage fright and associated pants-wetting fears and so on. I am also reasonably comfortable talking about the basic business aspects of stand-up where beginners are concerned.
Experience I DO NOT FULFILL REQUESTS TO TELL JOKES! PLEASE DON'T ASK. Experience in the area I "worked" for nine years as a stand-up comic in Ohio. Most of my experience comes from open mics, local competitions and the like but I do have some familiarity with "the road" as it pertains to beginners. I have counseled/coached/mentored several people who wanted to get into stand up and wanted the full lowdown on what to expect once they started to pursue it in earnest. In 1994, I made more money from winning local open mic night contests than I did at my actual job. I also performed in improv comedy for a couple of years, though I never considered myself very good at it - I can answer general questions re: improv as well.
Due to a volatile temper and abysmal luck, I never managed to make it to the next rung of the ladder. Middle age has mellowed me and now you can learn from my mistakes.
Question People tell me all the time to do stand-up because they say I'm funny. Has this been your experience? Personally I don't buy it because I've been in front of many a comic and didn't laugh once. The stakes have got to go up when performing in front of strangers. Do you agree with me? Also, how does a newcomer get over their cold feet? Thanks for your advice.
-Cliff
Answer Cliff,
The subject of your post is "How did you know you were funny?" so I'll answer that first: I simply did. It was like this innate self-knowledge I had, a self-confidence about this one aspect of my personality where, on all the others, I had no idea. I didn't know if I was smart or interesting or insightful or whatever. But I knew I was funny. I knew I made people laugh, I knew I saw the world in a sort of odd way. I could predict punchlines for comics that I had never seen. I would often times come up with better punchlines for their jokes than they had. All of the girls I ever dated went out with me because I was funny (and subsequently broke up with me because humor is misplaced in romantic encounters).
I was obsessive about stand-up from the age of 7 years old. Where other people would listen to a comic on The Tonight Show or Letterman, I would listen, memorize and dissect that comic's act: how did this joke work? Why was it funny? Did it follow a similar structure to his other jokes? I was very analytical about it, much like a young painter is looking at much more than what you or I might see when we look at a Monet. We see the whole thing - a young artist sees the brush strokes, the use of color, the layering of paint to create light and shadow, etc. I could recite, from memory, almost every recorded bit of Bill Cosby, doing all the voice inflection and characters and so on. When other kids were outside playing, I was in my room writing and recording one man skits. I would secretly watch SNL in my room when I was supposed to be asleep. Put as simply as I can: comedy was something that I had, it was just always there, it was a fundamental part of who I was, even when I was a kid. I know that doesn't answer your question, but it's the best I can do to explain it. Now, from your post, I think there's a deeper question at heart here, which is: "How do I know if I should try stand-up". That's rough.
When I told my best friends in the world that I was going to do stand-up, they told me I was nuts. They simply didn't think I was funny enough to do it. And to be honest, I was never the "class clown" or the guy in the meeting who always got in the best zingers. I was the quiet kid in the back of the class who made the girl sitting next to me laugh. I was the guy who didn't say anything in the meeting, but then wrote up fake meeting minutes and distributed them anonymously to the other attendees.
On the other hand, a very good friend of mine whom I met through stand-up was always the life of the party, always the guy cracking jokes, etc. and he was a good comic too.
I think what it comes down to is this: why do YOU want to do stand-up comedy? If the answer is "Because my friends tell me I should", I think you're handicapped at the outset. Stand-up, like any other art, has to be something that's really a part of you, something that you pursue at the expense of everything else. If you're doing it for somebody else, I don't think you're likely to succeed because your heart is somewhere else. Now, if you want to do it AND your friends think you should, that's different because they're just encouraging you to do something they think you'd be good at. What it really comes down to in the end is whether you would do stand-up *in spite* of them. Would you still want to try if they said you were 100% guaranteed to fail (as my friends did). I think that's a good litmus test: are you motivated, on your own and in spite or evidence to the contrary, to give it a shot?
You're on the right track when you say "stakes have got to go up when performing in front of strangers". By definition, your friends *want* to hang out with you, so they tend to share your sense of humor, your perspective, etc (if they don't share it, they at least understand it). When you get in front of a crowd of strangers, there's a broader range of personalities, backgrounds and so on. What might make perfect sense to your friends (and be hysterically funny) might strike somebody else as stupid or banal or simply not funny.
As a result, my experience is that people who are encouraged by others to do stand-up tend not to last very long. I don't know exactly why, but I have my theories. Please keep in mind that the following is not directed toward you personally and is simply my opinion as to the mistakes that others in your situation often make.
First, I think many people who are encouraged to get into stand-up start out on the wrong foot by bringing a cadre of friends/relatives to their first few open mic shows. Of course, this is a built-in "laugh track" for them, so they get a good reaction. This leads them into a false sense of security about how good they are, how quickly they will progress and so on. Then they do their first show without those friendly faces, they don't get that reaction and it's crushing.
Stand-up comedy, at the entry level, is a psychologically difficult thing to do. The audiences are sparse to non-existent in most places, and the laughs can be very difficult to get. If you "insulate" yourself from these forces by bringing your own crowd, you're not really exposing yourself to the harsh realities of the "business". And when you finally do get in front of a crowd in which there are no friendly faces, it can be a painfull crash back to reality. Your first bomb is the true test of whether you're really committed or not. If you come back for more, you're probably serious.
I think another assumption that people make is if you can be funny while you're sitting around the dinner table with friends, you can translate that to an act. There's a distinct difference between being funny when you hang out with your friends and doing stand-up. When you're just hanging out, you can get laughs by simply reacting to something somebody says, or by tossing in a comment about something and so on. If you get maybe 10 laughs in a night, people will think you're a genius. Now compare that to a stand-up comic. A stand-up comic has to direct the conversation, has nothing to react to and has to get, on average, about 2 good laughs per minute (yes, some clubs do rate comics based on "laughs per minute"). Further, what might be great "couch" material among your friends may be completely undoable on stage.
You can't do jokes about a particular person, because the audience doesn't know them. You can't do jokes that involve the history of the group, because the audience isn't part of the group. You can't do "in jokes" that only your friends understand. And so on. This means that you have to take those jokes and either discard them or figure out a way to make them understandable to a larger, heterogeneous audience. This is where a lot of people in your situation fail because they never expect to work at stand-up. Since they were told they were naturally funny, it comes as a shock when they learn that they can't rely on an innate sense of humor to carry them through.
The reality is that stand-up comedy is more about writing than performing (for most, although there are those select few who don't write much and performance is the bedrock of their act). Comedy isn't simply adding a funny comment or two to a conversation – it's the focused study of a particular topic. You probe that topic for weaknesses, inconsistencies, oddities and so on. Once you've picked it apart for all it's worth, you reconstruct it using only the parts that you found interesting. It's very focused and specialized.
One of my best friends in comedy was a guy who never made me laugh when we were just hanging out watching TV. He wasn't very quick on his feet, and so in conversation he was not all that funny. But he was one of my favorite comics. He worked very hard on his act - he would sit at his desk every day for one hour and write new material. It turned out that when he wrote, he was extremely good at dissecting whatever topic he was writing about. He could really explore every facet of it and bring out ideas that were not obvious on the surface. That's what made him so good – if you can do all the exploration and find funny stuff, you can figure out how to perform well. But if all you have is performance and you're no good at really examining your topics, you don't have much.
So that's my theory as to why people who are encouraged to do stand-up tend to burn out very quickly: sheltering from real audiences and a lack of ability to adjust to a stage environment.
If you do decide to give it a shot, I'm going to level with you: there's absolutely nothing you can do to feel "comfortable" the first time you perform. It can't be done (unless you have some stage experience already). Simply put, the first time you go on stage is absolutely terrifying. And to be honest, you don't want to be fearless - ever - when you go on stage because fear can make you do amazing things. It heightens your ability to think, makes you quicker, etc. It's a great performance-enhancing drug.
Now, can your fear be limited? Controlled? Absolutely. And that's crucial because uncontrolled fear keeps people from performing at all, or from performing well. So the game is to walk a line between "Oh my God, I think I just wet my pants" and "I'm so bored I might just fall asleep on stage".
I don't necessarily have any prescription for how to do that, because I think everybody is different in the level of dread they have for getting on stage and speaking. Before I got into stand-up, I had experience in school plays and I had done presentations in college and so forth. I found it pretty easy to overcome my fear. I was also confident that I had the goods, and confidence always helps of course. I think making the first step, getting on stage for the first time, takes two things: preparation and courage.
Courage, of course, I can't counsel on because you either have it or you don't. By the way, in this particular context I think "courage" could also simply mean "commitment". At my first show, I nearly ran out the back door instead of actually going on. But what it came down to was that I had told myself I was going to do stand-up comedy so why did it matter whether I started that night or the next or the next? It didn't - if I was going to do it, I was going to have to overcome this fear at some point, and no better time than the present. I don't necessarily think I was showing great courage in doing that, but I had was demonstrating my own commitment to what I had set out to do. So part of what you need to do is make a definitive choice: do you want to do stand-up or not? If you do, then hold yourself to that and don't back down on it for any reason. If you don't, then don't bother.
Now, as for preparation. If you decide that you definitely want to try to do stand-up, there are definitely things you can do to make your first experience a little easier to deal with. The following is a long, rambling list of suggestions about things you should do before your first time on stage. I think, if you do them, you'll be less likely to have paralytic fear on your first open mic night. You'll still be pretty nervous, but hopefully it will be controllable.
Preparation is all about, basically, two things: material preparation and mental preparation. If you go on stage without material that you're comfortable with, you'll be terrified. If you go on stage without having psychologically readied yourself, you'll be terrified. So in the time running up to your first show, you need to be preparing mind and material.
First of all, pick a date and open mic at which you'll perform for the first time. STICK TO IT! Don't put it off for any reason – consider it the first day of a new job and treat it as an obligation. If you put it off because you're scared or nervous, whatever, you'll keep finding reasons to put it off and you'll find yourself a year later still “getting ready”. Choose a date that is neither too soon nor too distant. I would say maybe four weeks out at a maximum. This should give you enough time to get some material ready without being so far in the future that it seems like you can sit on it for a while. By locking in the date, you're forcing your psyche to come to grips with that fear.
Once you decide on the date, it's time to start compiling material. Get yourself a small tape recorder or notebook and keep this with you at all times. I used both at various times in my career and each has benefits and drawbacks. Notebooks are great because they're private - you can write down a joke about a person without that person knowing. On the other hand, tape recorders can be used while you're driving (I always wrote tons of jokes while I was driving). I'd go with the notebook at first, just because it's cheaper.
If you say something funny in response to a friend, write the whole exchange down, as well as a description of how it started, etc. Whenever you see a situation that strikes you as funny, write it down or record it. Don't worry about whether you have a punchline for it or not - doesn't matter. All you're doing right now is compiling situations, scenes, information that may have a funny angle to them.
DO NOT abbreviate or clip any of this information for the sake of brevity. Ask any comic with a year's experience and s/he will tell you of pages worth of ideas that have been lost because they wrote down a few key words for a premise or joke without writing it all the way out, and now they have no idea what they were talking about. Your friends, family, co-workers, etc will have to accept the fact that every once in a while you're going to stop and start frantically scribbling things down. Tell 'em to get used to it.
Review your notes every day to two days (Remember, we're talking about a three week deadline to your first show, so you need to be really working on this material. After you've been doing stand-up for a few weeks, you'll slow down your review pace and may review notes once a week or so). Sometimes punch lines will just come to you because your brain has incubated an idea and sometimes you'll have to struggle to find anything at all. Let it flow at first. If an idea comes to you for a bit, great. If not, maybe next week.
NEVER EVER EVER THROW ANY NOTE AWAY, NO MATTER HOW NOT FUNNY IT SEEMS TO YOU AT THE TIME. In time, you'll learn how to explore a topic for jokes and this backlog of junk you've never used will be helpful when you're going through a dry spell and can't seem to come up with new stuff.
When you write a joke, once you're "finished" with it and you think it's ready to go up on stage, practice it. Even if it's just a one liner. Practice it. Say it into a mirror or just say it out loud in the car. Vary the way you say it, which words you emphasize, etc. Also, be aware that your whole body is part of the joke - stand-up involves genstures, pantomime, etc. So as you say the joke, be sure to be thinking of how you can use your body to better illustrate it. Eventually, you'll find the best combination of voice intonation, word emphasis and body usage. Keep practicing that particular delivery. Practicing each joke on its own, outside a unified "act", is very helpful because you'll soon find that jokes can be fit together like Legos, where the shape of the act in general can be changed based on the order of the jokes. So you need to be able to view each joke as "separate" from all the others. Of course, there are often times "blocks" of jokes that should or must always go together, but it will probably take you a while to develop those.
A day or two before your first show, take the material that you've worked on and find five minutes that you like (five minutes is pretty typically the amount of time you'll get at an open mic). Don't worry too much about whether this is the “best” five minutes. Your first year or two is about finding your voice on stage, figuring out your point of view. So if you choose the material you think is best (funniest), it might not represent the material that best fits your persona (it's hard to explain, but you'll start to get it after only a few times on stage). Instead, you want to choose the jokes that you personally like best – they probably best represent “you”, and therefore you're likely to perform them better.
Arrange this five minutes however you want, keeping in mind that you want to open and close with strong material. Generally, the rule is that you want a short, punchy joke up front to lead your set – a joke with a minimum of setup. You want to get your first laugh in under thirty seconds. For your last joke, just make sure it's funny – you have the luxury of going with something that has a longer setup here.
Write this set out in as much or as little detail as necessary. I always had a pretty good memory for my jokes, so I would basically just write out the key words or basic concept; I knew other comics who wrote their jokes out word for word (one guy even inserted <pause> wherever he needed to, or would explain the facial expression/hand gesture he planned to make). The level of detail you put into this will be dictated by your personality, memory, rigidity, etc. Commit to this list and practice it. Once you've come up with the list, consider it Biblical and binding - if you come up with a killer new joke right before your first show, do not add the new joke to the set list you've already practiced. The first time on stage is a really frightening experience for most people. If you've got your set list and worked it out, it helps you control that fear a little - the last thing you want to do is run the risk of messing up your memory by adding a new part at the last minute.
Once you've nailed down the set list (no later than 24 hours in advance of your first show), write out a miniature version of it. Typically, you'll "name" each joke - write the joke names out in the order you intend to perform them. Put this list on an index card or small piece of paper. You're going to take it with you on stage. This is not the best form for a seasoned pro but it's perfectly OK if you're new (and nervous) OR if you're trying out new material. If you watch the comics at an open mic, you'll see them glance down at their hands a lot - they're holding a list of their jokes in their hand. I've even seen people who write their set list on their palm or back of their hand.
A lot of first-timers make the mistake of thinking they can just go up on stage and bring the funny spontaneously. If you try that, you'll go blank – I would almost guarantee it. Going blank while performing is the absolute worst feeling and it prevents a lot of first-timers from becoming second-timers. After you've been doing stand-up for a while, it's actually a useful exercise to go on stage with no prepared set list and just “riff” and talk to the audience. But that's for later. When you start out, your set list is vital to your success and comfort.
One thing you definitely should NOT do is to take your notebook on stage. I see a lot of amateurs doing this, using the excuse “AH, it's just an open mic”. And they sit there and thumb through their notebook as they do their act. In a certain sense, I understand, because it ain't like you're being scouted by Letterman, you know? But, you have to look at every performance as a building block in which you're figuring out how to perform your jokes. And if you have this artificial crutch of looking through your notes, you're not really working on those “muscles”. The absolute most you should ever do as a memory aid is to bring a set list on stage (as I've described above). Additionally, a set list allows you to organize the jokes in a way that makes sense to you, progressing from one topic to another in a way that's logical, or alternating with jokes you think are strong then weak then strong again. If all you're doing is reading from your notebook, you tend to hopscotch from one joke to another and it's hard to get a read on whether a joke is good or not.
Now that you have your set list, practice it in order. Practice it anytime you have a chance - while driving, on lunch, in the shower, etc. Even if you're just running through it, visualizing it in your head. You've already practiced each joke on its own, so this should really just be a matter of getting the sequence right so that you don't have to rely on your written set list (but you're still going to take it on stage, just in case).
You should also practice it at least once, all the way through, as if you were really on stage. It sounds hokey and stupid and juvenile, but hold something to simulate a microphone. Learn how you like to deal with the mic before you ever get on stage, that way the mic is one less thing to worry about. If you find that holding the mic is a distraction, or limits your ability to gesture, this means you're the type of comic who prefers to leave the mic in the stand and simply talk into it. That's fine - so long as you have some idea before you go on stage. I mean, imagine that in your first time on stage you're trying to deal with your natural fear, remember your set list and figure out how to deal with the mic. It's just one more thing to intimidate you; practicing before hand removes it from the equation. But it looks really stupid to talk into a hairbrush, so make sure the doors are locked and the blinds are closed.
Okay, so you've got your set ready to go and it's the day of the show. All of the material prep you've done so far should have helped your mental prep as well. But now we've got to deal more directly with that. First of all, accept the fact that you're going to be nervous, maybe even terrified. It's part of the game, and if you try to "get rid" of it, it'll win. Let it in and live with it, don't try to beat it down.
One thing that will help is to know what you're likely to be faced with. So here's the ugly truth. You're going to be performing, in all likelihood, at an open mic night. Expect very little from an open mic night. Don't get your hopes up.
Open mics are almost always held in bars on weeknights (Tuesday and Wednesday are popular). Audiences will be sparse to non-existent. If there is an audience, it will likely be either the friends of a new comic who are there to laugh only at their friend or it will be the patrons of the bar who stopped in for a few beers, only to find a comedy show broke out around them. I once did an an open mic night for one customer at this little restaurant and as soon as I went on stage, she went to the bathroom.
Open mics, especially those in bars, are very hard rooms to enjoy or look forward to. They tend to be a little soul crushing and it's difficult to imagine how they are, in any way, helping you advance your career. But the thing is, they're the only place you can perform when you're just starting out and performance time is your lifeblood at this stage. Plus, if you can get laughs in these rooms with a particular joke, you can be pretty certain the joke is actually good. These are the “paying your dues” rooms – they're not pretty, but they serve a purpose.
Also, as should be clear from what I wrote in part 1, I don't recommend that your bring a contingent of friends to your first show(s). In addition to the problems I already mentioned that this creates for you, other comics generally don't respect this and if they shut you out of their clique, your ability to progress is going to be hindered.
For your first show, know that you will be a man alone. Expect that none of the other comics will talk to you - comedy is very cliquish, so don't expect the regulars to welcome you into their circle right away. Comics see a lot of amateurs come and go, so they tend to be stand-offish at first because they don't want to waste time helping somebody who isn't going to come back next week. They might say “Hi” or ask you for your name or how much experience you have, but that's it. If you get lucky, they might tell you you did a good job after the show, or they may suggest a punchline for a joke that you did. Prior to the show, the regulars will probably occupy one table and talk amongst themselves. When I was part of this group, I generally didn't like some newcomer trying to butt in on our group. So if you get there and see a group of comics talking amongst themselves, don't even introduce yourself - you'll introduce yourself by virtue of your performance. Just pick a seat somewhere by yourself and wait for your turn. Don't try your jokes on them before the show, and don't suggest any punch lines for their jokes at any time (it's just like any other job: if you're a newcomer, don't barge in and expect everybody to acknowledge you as an equal). Go on stage, do your time and get off. Watch all of the other acts – don't leave after your set. That's just rude.
So that's what you face in your first show.
Another thing that can prepare you mentally is to figure out a "methodology", a pre-show ritual, that helps you relax on stage; this will limit the likelihood of forgetting your material or having a panic attack before or during a set. For me, I found that if I got to a room waaaaay in advance of the start of a show, it put me at ease because I felt like the room was "mine": I was here first, so these people should listen to me. So I'd get to a room at 7 and the show wouldn't start until 9. A friend of mine would stay outside the performance space until he was supposed to be on stage. That way, he couldn't form an opinion about the audience and whether they would like him or not. Another friend had a picture of his deceased father, who had been one of his biggest fans, that he would stare at for a few minutes before a show.
Of course, there's no sure way to know what will put you at ease for your first show and, truthfully, probably nothing short of drugs could really do it. But you should be able, just through your own self-awareness, to have an idea of what would put you at ease. Generally, think about what you would do before a date, or before going to a party where you wouldn't know anybody. How would you psych yourself up for that? That should give you some idea of how to approach your pre-show ritual for your first show.
But you should really accept that, no matter what you do, the first time is a pants-wetting experience for everybody. Just remember: stay as calm as you possibly can. Prior to your first show, do nothing that would jeopardize your self-control: don't bring a cell phone, don't drink anything alcoholic (Want to ensure that the local comics will never, ever welcome you into their cicle? Go up on stage drunk or tipsy.), don't try to pick up the hot waitress, don't get involved in a heated political conversation, etc. etc.
So I guess that's about it. If you have any follow up questions, just let me know and I'll try to help. Let me know how your first show goes!
