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Posts: 26121
Feb 21 09 6:02 PM
yibbleyibbleyibble
Zee, Congratulations! That first trip on the stage is the hardest, and I know you've got the funny, so, stay with it, pal. I did standup off-and-on for a couple of years when I lived in L.A. For what they're worth, here are a few tips still remaining in my addled brain from back in the day (and my total gross income from doing standup was "free food and drinks at the bar if the waitress was nice, and as you will soon learn, there is no such thing as a nice waitress in a comedy club," so obviously, these tips are of great value ... ) 1. I started out studying with Judy Carter, who ran sort of a comedy salon out of her house in Venice Beach. Her books are an *excellent* source of info, including many valuable tips for avoiding rookie mistakes and structuring bits: Stand Up Comedy: The Book The Comedy Bible 2. The best tip she ever gave me was "record yourself every single time you perform. Watch yourself the next day with a critical eye." When you first get on a stage, no one actually looks how they think they think they look while they're performing; no one actually sounds how they think they sound. It's even more important to record yourself once you start getting comfortable on stage. Because, you think you are getting smooth up there, but what you are really doing is talking way too fast, because you have everything memorized and you don't pause the way a normal human being does when they speak conversationally, so you sound like the guy in the old FedEx commercials, and you immediately stop being funny because you've turned into a robot. Have somebody in the audience point their cell-phone cam at you. Get a crappy digital audio recorder like they make for dictation. Something. But always record yourself. 3. Be real. When I was taking Judy's intro class, I wondered to myself how somebody who was such a terrible *performer* could be such a good *teacher*. (I had vaguely remembered seeing her on TV years before, doing not-very-funny bits about dating, and even-less-funny bits with puppets.) As the culmination of the class, she booked the "B" room at the Santa Monica Improv for us, and we all did our bits, with her doing a five-minute warmup up front. It so happened that the day of our show was National Coming Out Day. (They still had those back then.) Judy started out the show by stating that it was Coming Out Day, and that she wanted to take the major step of coming out of the closet in front of this audience, and that she wanted everyone to know that she was a lesbian, and proud of it. And she *killed*! That five minutes on "And when you're a lesbian, you ..." was one of the funniest things I'd ever seen. In William Goldman's book "The Season," there's a great line from an acting teacher giving audition advice: "Don't try to figure out what they're looking for. What they're looking for is *you*." 4. "Be real" and "be shocking" are not the same thing. "Kramer" (can't remember the sonofabitch's real name) wasn't being "real" shouting the N-word. I kinda doubt that was his typical mode of conversation when he was relaxing at home in the mansion he bought with his Seinfeld money. He was just a schmuck who discovered he couldn't get a reaction from an audience (after 10 years of being told he was a genius because he had lucked into a sitcom role that allowed him to play the one note on his piano), so he thought he'd try to be "edgy". The only "reality" there was that he is a real *moron* .... Admittedly, given that your sensibility (and mine) tend toward "So then I stuck my dick in the pumpkin ...", the line between "be real" and "be shocking" can be kinda hard to draw, though ..... 5. On the other hand, "be real" and "be boring" aren't the same thing, either. Another comedian whose name escapes me was getting a lot of press back then because of the almost clinical level of reality in his act, and the press would alway bemoan the fact that he wasn't getting any kind of big TV or movie break. He never made it because listening to him was as exciting as watching paint dry. As the joke goes, "The important thing is sincerity. And once you can fake *that*, you've got it made." (It was years before it occurred to me to wonder how many *previous* National Coming Out Days there might have been in which Judy may have done that exact same bit ....) The *art* of standup is making reality *funny*. 6. Everyone bombs. You will too. That sounds incredibly obvious, but I was *way* unprepared for it. The first time I got on stage, I killed. Big time. People were asking me how many years I'd *really* been doing standup, who my agent was .... The next several times, I was always trying out a lot of new material, and I would do either very well or not-very-well-at-all, depending on how good my new material was. I thought doing not-so-well in that situation was "bombing." Uh-uh. "Bombing" is doing your best material, in a club where you'd killed with the very same material the previous night, and the audience stares at you, doesn't even chuckle, and you can hear a pin drop. It's exactly like the nightmare where you're in the classroom, and you have to take the final exam, only you realize that you haven't gone to any of the classes, and all the questions are in another language, and you're naked, and ... only it's real life, so you can't just wake up. Seriously. It just happened to me the one time, but I completely freaked, and I never quite got over it. Knowing that it happens will help. 7. Get away from "Open Mikes" as quickly as you can--they tend to draw People-Who-Should-Be-Nowhere-Near-A-Mike as performers, and Empty-Chairs-At-Empty-Tables as audiences. (Particularly someplace like NYC--what kind of weirdo goes to an open mike night in a town with actual professional entertainment?) When I was doing standup, there were a surprising number of places to perform professionally in L.A. ... as long as you didn't mind not getting paid. Judy and her minions knew all the club owners in town, and groups of us aspiring comics would book ourselves. "Oh, you don't have a 7 p.m. show Sunday? Just a 9 p.m. show? Listen, open the doors early, we'll do two hours for free, you'll sell lots of drinks ..." That's a very doable thing in the 'burbs and in East Bumfuck Nowhere. Half the towns where you are probably have a Holiday Inn somewhere with a stage that they book Friday and Saturday nights ... and there ain't no Michelle Pfeiffer's singing with The Fabulous Baker Boys on those stages. Ask to be an emcee for free. Ask to do your bit on a night when they're normally dark. Push hard enough, and you can get time on a stage in front of paying customers. Go to NYC when you're ready to beat down the doors of the *real* comedy clubs. 8. I found doing Improv to be very helpful. Many cities have starving Improv troupes that love to have paying students. I studied with the Comedysportz group in L.A., but pretty much anybody anywhere doing work based on Viola Spolin's or Del Close's or Keith Johnstone's teachings would be good for stage presence, openness, naturalness, and getting away from "setup/punch/setup/punch" .... 9. Have fun! Mike
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