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 Hey matt, Im a 19 year old male, who just discoverd his talent. I had been wondering for the last sevral years what was I gonna do with my life,and I think I found the answer. I started writting material for fun about a week ago, and I just absolutley loved it. I think my material is very funy, and I have absolutely no problem remembering it.(I have about 15 minutes memorized already)What advice would you give a hungry, aspiring, comedian like myself? Oh and I wan't you to know that Im 110% committed(my parents will support me)to this. I don't wan't you to think that im a guy that keeps switching aspirations, hell no. I love doing this and I can't wait to showcase my talent. Oh, one more thing, Im in it for the big time( you only live once). So I would Apreciate it, if you give me the straight dope. Remember, im 110% committed. Thank you
Answer TANK,
I'm really sure how much help I can give or that you need. If you're already writing and feel like you've got a good handle on that, you're where you need to be.
However, you should still practice your material, no matter how naturally or easily you remember it. Doing it on stage is a lot different than doing it in your head - there's more pressure, the environment is different, and so on. So you really need to practice your material. That seems like common sense, but a lot of people take it for granted and those that don't often don't know *how* to practice. I can't give you a failsafe prescription for what method will work because everybody is different, but I can at least show you a method that has worked for me and a few others. You might find it does for you too, or maybe it will give you some insight into what I mean by "practice your material".
When you write a joke, once you're ready to try it 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, your voice inflection, facial expressions etc. Your whole body is part of the joke - stand-up involves gestures, pantomime, etc. So as you say the joke, be sure to be thinking of how you can use your body to illustrate it. Eventually, you'll find the best combination of voice intonation, word emphasis and body usage, or at least you'll find the version of the joke that is as good as you can make it before testing it on a real audience. Keep practicing that particular delivery. Practicing each joke on its own, outside a unified "act", is helpful because you'll soon find that jokes can be fit together like Legos, where the feel 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 "blocks" of jokes that should or must always go together, but it will probably take you a while to develop those.
But, don't overpractice. If you do it too much, your delivery will become robotic and remove the spontaneity from your act. For an experienced amateur, this is bad enough. But as a first-timer, you're likely to have a real stage fright situation, and one of stage fright's most common side effects is to make it difficult to remember your material. If you have over-practiced, this locks you into a delivery for the joke, so you start to get your pants in a twist if you don't deliver the joke as you've memorized it, this then raises your anxiety, which makes you worry that you're NOT delivering the joke properly (i.e. as you memorized it) and that leads to forgetting the joke. So practice the general feel and layout of the joke – make sure you know your premise, your punchlines, etc. but allow the delivery to be fluid and shifty each time you practice it. You want to practice the feel and "intent" of the joke without necessarily practicing its word-for-word delivery.
Overpracticing will also tend to get you stuck on its timing, and sometimes the timing of a punchline is all you need to adjust in order to make a bad joke work – so if you're over-practicing, you can really hurt yourself on a couple of different fronts.
Two days 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 – these may not be the funniest ones, but they probably best represent "you", and therefore you' re likely to perform them better. Arrange this five
minutes however you want, and remember 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. If you're worried about remembering your jokes, you might want to write a short summary of each joke. The level of detail you put into this will be dictated by your personality, memory, rigidity, etc. Commit to this list and practice it. As opposed to the practice you did earlier as you crafted each joke, now you're practicing the set of jokes as a whole, getting a feel for how long it takes you to get through the material, how it feels to transition from one joke to another and so on. So you're starting to synthesize the performance practice from earlier with practice that focuses on the act as a whole. But keep in mind that you don't want to practice so much that it becomes robotic, memorized and flat. Think of performance with each joke (which is why I emphasize performance practice of each joke before ever integrating it into a set).
As to the rest, if you're really ready to go, it's just a matter of getting out and doing it. Believe it or not, the first step is the hardest, so if you're both willing and hungry, the rest tends to come naturally, assuming you have real talent.
Now, I can point you to my long overview of how to prep for your first show (all the practice stuff above is taken from it) and it'll tell you how to start writing and all that stuff. But really, if you already feel like you're writing and ready to go, then there's not much point to that. They key hurdles most people face are how to get material and how to prepare for their first time on stage. You've got half of that and if you're committed, the other half will just happen naturally, because you'll find someplace to perform and just do it.
As for how to achieve fame and fortune, I can't help you from a personal perspective because I never made it. But, my best friend is starting to live the dream as a scriptwriter and I can tell you exactly how he got where he is - it's actually pretty simple.
1. Have real talent.
2. Work your ass off.
3. Never lose sight of why you're working your ass off.
4. See #2.
Let me talk a little about 3. There's an old saying that goes something like this: life is what happens while you're making plans. Amen to that. Everybody I know - Every. Body. - who has lost sight of their dreams, including me, let themselves get distracted. By women. By money. By other opportunities. By what the hell ever. The only exception is my best friend.
Sure, he dabbled in stand-up and improv. Hell, he was even the Austin, TX poetry slam champion a few years ago. But whenever it came down to a choice where he could either commit to writing or commit to something else, he always stuck with writing because that's what he wanted to do. And what do you know? Now he's got three scripts in production.
Never, ever shift gears to go with what seem promising *right now*. Pick your horse, place your bet and root like hell for it to pay off. I have so many friends who would do stand-up for a while and then when that took a downturn they'd move to improv for a while, and then that wouldn't pan out and they'd try doing scriptwriting. You simply can't make that work.
And when I say you commit to it, I mean you commit to it. My friend who made it lived like an itinerant worker for years because he'd go wherever he felt the environment was best for screenwriters. He moved to Hollywood knowing nobody, then he moved to Austin knowing nobody. Fearless, man. That's what it takes - vision, commitment and absolute fearlessness. It's a tough prescription and not for the faint of heart - I certainly didn't have the stones to make it work back in the day. That's what it's going to take in the long term. In some ways it's a very selfish way to live, at least when viewed by an outsider, but that's what it takes.
