Stand-up Comedy
I originally did stand-up comedy for two years on the
London circuit in the U.K. I stopped performing, mainly because I got tied of trawling virtually the same 5-10 minute act around for those two years. Routines changed during that time, but my Stand-up Comedy act essentially remained unchanged.
I had no set approach for when I should develop more stand-up comedy material or how to develop it. The stand-up comedians that I met during this time, and the advice I got given, could not tell me when my 5-minute set was "finished" and when I should create another five minutes - slowly working my way up the “stand-up comedy ladder.”
I often asked myself “how do I quantify a really funny comedy act? Does the audience have to be laughing constantly? Or is it okay for them to be laughing less often?” I'd had seen comedians makes audiences gasp for breath and also ones that had an audience laughing, but not as frequently. And I'm not talking about bad open mike comedians either.
Towards the end of those two years I had lost all my passion for my material. I stopped enjoying writing jokes and something I couldn’t believe… I actually stopped enjoying the performing.
I’d read countless books on stand-up comedy writing and I couldn’t make them work for me. Friends would say to me: “hey, I like you’re stuff you sound really well-rehearsed and scripted.” That was a nice back-handed criticism. But no matter what method I used, my comedy material sounded exactly like that… material. I sounded scripted because that’s what I was. I wrote material so that it looked good on paper, without it necessarily being good when I delivered it.
I kept reading in books that I had to write about 50 jokes a day and throw out the rubbish ones and then write new ones. After all, the top gag writers have been doing this for years, right? But in all honesty, I was disgusted with the whole process.
I always found it a bit weird to write that many jokes in isolation from one another, then determine which ones did not work, and then wave them into a routine hoping that it would sound natural and be funny.
I was constantly being told I was much funnier in real life. But with the approach I had been using I couldn’t capture my natural sense of humour.
So you can imagine how frustrating and soul destroying this whole stand-up comedy game had become for me.
But all this was to change when I discovered the
Stand-up Comedy Fast Start GuideStand-up Comedy
