Step by Step to Stand-Up Comedy by Greg Dean

• A joke contains two parts: (1) the setup and (2) the punch.
• The setup is the first part of the joke that sets up the laugh.
• The punch is the second part that makes you laugh.
• The setup and the punch are directly related to expectation and surprise.
• In order to work, a joke has to surprise you. The trick is that you cannot be surprised unless you’re expecting something else first. That’s what a joke does: It causes you to expect one thing, then surprises you with another.
• The setup creates an expectation.
• The punch reveals a surprise.
• A joke requires two story lines.
• The setup of a joke creates a 1st story in our minds that leads us to expect something, then the punch surprises us with a 2nd story that's compatible with, yet somehow different from, what we’re expecting.
• Every part of a thing you imagine exists--but aren’t directly perceiving--is an assumption.
• Human beings, as a rule, have a profound need for things to make sense. If something doesn’t make sense, we’ll fill in the information so it will make sense, and we do that by making assumptions based on our past experience.
• The target assumption is the key assumption upon which the 1st story is built.
• The target assumption is the assumption directly shattered by the punch.
• Many jokes have target assumptions that most people accept based on physical laws, societal biases, cultural and national presuppositions, accepted definitions, stereotypes, and familiar environments, to name a few example.
• On a daily basis, people make millions of assumptions without even realizing it. It’s these unconscious assumptions that are targeted by jokes without setups.
• The aim of the reinterpretation is to shatter the target assumption.
• Any interpretation other than the assumed one is a reinterpretation.
• At the center of joke structure is a third mechanism which I call the connector, defined as one thing interpreted in at least two ways.
• Jokes are rather simple structures because they revolve around one central idea. If there’s more than one connector, there’s more than one joke.
• Every joke writing system lends itself to writing one-liners.
• Interestingly, the vast majority of jokes in the world come from social situations as jokes without setups. But jokes without setups are nearly impossible to teach without first understanding the makeup and composition of jokes with setups.
• You explore a joke’s passageways by asking questions.
• Asking questions forces you to come up with answers, and each answer will take you farther along your way or even lead to a completely different tunnel.
• Any exploration is better than being stuck saying the same thing over and over again.
• If at any time in the process you think of a joke, write it down.
• Often the most obvious assumption is usually the best choice for the target assumption because it’s the one everybody will make when you deliver the setup.
• Remember, you want to eventually shatter the assumption held by your audience. That won’t be possible if you choose an obscure assumption that most of the audience members won’t make.
• Write punches in the way you naturally speak or act.
• Since brevity is the soul of wit, you should really try to reveal the 2nd story in as few words as possible.
• When it comes to joke writing, nothing is set in stone.
• As an artists you have one incredibly precious thing that no one else in the entire word has: your own perspective.
• One thing you should never, ever try to write about is what you guess the audience might think is funny. There’s actually a word for people who only try to write what they think someone else will like: Hacks.
• The jokes are in the details.
• The sense of humor evolved as a means of coping with painful things.
• Any creative endeavor that tries to cover more than one central idea tends to get lost because it has no single through line.
• An important note: A topic must not include an opinion.
• The function of a topic is to begin with something general, from which you can generate countless details.
• Once you’ve chosen a general topic, make an association list of all the specific things you can think of relating to that topic. Keep the entries on the list as short as possible and avoid long descriptions.
• The punch-premise is a negative opinion about a smaller aspect of the topic.
• Whether your jokes go from good to bad or bad to worse, they’ll always be moving toward the more negative. If you’re uncomfortable with this concept, get used to it because it’s a consistently useful technique that will come in handy whenever you’re writing jokes.
• It’s important to remember that a setup-premise is not a setup. If you write a joke using your setup-premise as a setup, you’ll only get one joke.
• The steps to the Joke Map are:
• List some topics
• Select on topic and make an association list
• Create several punch-premises
• For each punch-premise form a setup-premise
• Choose a setup-premise and write a list of setups
• You explore by asking questions.
• Asking questions is the cornerstone of creativity.
• Remember, comedy is a playful means of dealing with painful things. The more horrific a concept, the better it usually is for comedy.
• A famous writer once said, “There is no writing, only rewriting.” That may be extreme, but the point is well-taken. Once you have a first draft, there are many things you can do to improve it.
• When you go about polishing your jokes you’ll discover there are many possible versions depending on which technique you employ.
• One word of advice: Don’t worry about polishing and improving your material while you’re coming up with it. Creating and editing are two very different and mutually exclusive functions.
• When you’re writing new jokes, write quickly and move on.
• As Shakespeare said, “Brevity is levity.” Nothing kills a good joke more certainty than something it with an avalanche of unnecessary words and information.
• As a general rule, the audience should respond to your jokes, not think about them. This doesn’t mean you shouldn’t write intelligent jokes. It means that a joke, even if it’s  a novel idea, should be so understandable that the audience doesn’t have to figure out what you’re talking about.
• Comedy has its own conservation of energy law: Energy spent by the audience thinking is energy taken away from laughing. That’s why it’s important to give them no more information to process than absolutely necessary.
• The less time it takes to get a laugh, the more laughs per minute, LPMs, you get. Economy is an important technique for achieving high LPMs.
• Within every punch there’s a pivotal word, phrase, or action that presents the reinterpretation, which in turn shatters the target assumption with the intent of making the audience laugh. From the audience’s perspective, this pivotal word, phrase, or action is hidden until the punch exposes it, which is why I call this technique the reveal.
• To effectively construct a joke, make sure your reveal appears at the very end of the punch. A properly placed reveal is a very important factor, because it determines when the audience laughs.
• Talking past the reveal is one of the most common and irritating errors. It usually occurs because the comic inserts mindless prattle beyond the point where the joke gets a laugh.
• It’s imperative to identify the reveal; otherwise it may get mixed up with less important information needed to make the joke work.
• The hard consonant sounds, especially K sounds, which include hard C, Qu, and, to a lesser extend, T, P, hard G, D, and B, tend to make words sound funnier. Using words with these hard consonants instead of synonyms with softer sounds really helps improve a joke.
• Make it a habit to search for words with hard consonants and test this out for yourself.
• A pattern is a simple way to get people to make an assumption because they assume the pattern will continue. And what is the smallest number of beats needed to set up a pattern? You’ve got it--two. Two beats set up the pattern and the assumption, and the third beat breaks the pattern, shattering the assumption.
• If they don’t understand what you’re talking about, they won’t laugh. When a certain word or reference is crucial to the understanding of a joke, you must consider whether it’s familiar to your audience. Sometimes you’ll need to use a more familiar alternative.
• If there’s a reference or information that’s crucial to your joke that is not in the common realm of knowledge and has no convenient alternative, explain the reference or state the information in the setup.
• Sadly, once in a while you’ll have to drop a joke altogether because explaining the reference kills the comedy or gives away the punch.
• Quoting yourself and the characters in your jokes brings the scene into the present, greatly adds to the reality of the performance with personal interactions, and provides opportunities to find more jokes.
• Puns are an old, somewhat outdated style of comedy.
• Making the characters in your jokes real and specific greatly enhances the jokes’ effectiveness.
• Refer to the characters in your jokes as friends or relatives rather than nebulous persons, or use actual public figures.
• Every town has an area or some nearby town that people look down on. Find out what it is and refer to it. Make it the place that an unlikeable character in one of your jokes comes from. The audience will love you for it.
• Tying your old jokes in with current news stories helped make your material sound fresh and up to date.
• Have some jokes and routines handy for all of the special calendar days. You can do these “topical” jokes year after year, and they’ll never get old.
• People don’t talk like they write, so you should write like they talk. Proper grammar and syntax have nothing to do with making a joke funny. In fact, stiffly worded jokes seldom flow as well as jokes written with the flaws and rhythms of everyday speech.
• Comedic license permits comedians to muck around with language for the purpose of making jokes.
• Don’t be afraid to try acting out scenes instead of talking about them.
• Tagging a joke is a comic’s slang for adding another punch to a complete joke. Getting two or more laughs from your initial setup increase your overall LPMs.
• Tags are the road to success. If all you do is setup and punch, 95 to 99 percent of your stage time is spent on the setups. That means 95 to 99 percent of your time is spent not being funny. But if you’re tagging all your setups with multiple punches, you increase your LPMs, hence the percentage of time you spend being funny.
• With every new punch comes a 2nd story filled with numerous assumptions.
• Ask yourself what new assumptions you’re making about the punch or tag, and go down the list of questions in the Joke Mine until you dig up another punch.
• Fine-tuning your jokes can make the difference between getting a chuckle or a really big laugh. Stick with it, and you’ll find the increased number and volume of laughs well worth the effort.
• Maintain a joke and routine file.
• Routine Builder:
• Put each joke on a separate index card
• Organize the jokes into categories
• Arrange jokes so one thought leads to the next
• Rewrite, rewrite, rewrite
• Joke writing isn’t a linear science; it’s erratic and unpredictable.
• You’ll need to experiment with wording, editing, and reordering to make the jokes flow as an entire routine. When you’re rewriting, read the jokes out loud.
• It’s so unnatural to just come on stage and start saying your first joke. You’ll want to bring up the subject matter of your routine in the same way that you’d bring it up in normal conversation.
• Segues are transitions between categories.
• Personally, I find most segues to be a waste of time.
• I believe the best segue is when the comedian just stops to think; the audience will know that a new topic, punch-premise, setup-premise, or category is about to follow.
• Assembling a routine isn’t a destination, it’s a journey.
• Narrator POV: how you perceive things as a non participant or observer.
• Self POV: how you perceive things as a participant
• Character POV: how you perceive things as someone or something else
• In Narrator POV, the comedian is never directly involved in the experience the joke is about, but observes, reports, talks about, or...narrates it.
• When doing Self POV, the comedian is involved in the experience, which is acted out as if it’s happening in the present.
• Character POV is anyone or anything the comedian can act out as a character. This includes people, impersonations, animals, objects, and concepts such as emotions.
• Having a particular voice you can focus on helps settle you into a character.
• A distinct posture, mannerism,or physical idiosyncrasy really helps you find a character quickly.
• One of the most common mistakes beginning students make is mixing up the sides the POVs are on. It’s confusing when the audience accepts a Self POV on the left side and a character POV on the right side, and then switch sides for no apparent reason, or even worse, both stand on the same side facing the same direction.
• If you’re uncertain which side each POV is on, the confusion will be reflected in your performance.
• POVs are a robust technique with a wide range of uses with implication throughout my entire comedy technique. The more you explore and play with POVs, the more applications you’ll find to help you express your personal style of being funny.
• Materials has a far greater impact on an audience when it’s reenacted as if it’s happening in the present.
• Once you begin to identify all of the Character POVs in your material, you’ll be astounded at how plentiful they are. The basic method for doing this is to never tell the audience what someone or something says or does. Instead, become that someone or something and let them say or do it.
• Portraying Character POVs is one of the most overlooked techniques in comedy.
• If you’re willing to be vulnerable enough to put your honest thoughts and feelings into your show, you’ll be surprised at how many people will identify with you.
• Acting out an experience as if it’s happening is a wonderful opportunity for honesty because there are no consequences. In comedy, you can say all those things you’ve been thinking, but were afraid to let out.
• Using Character POVs allows you to say or do things in front of an audience that you’d never do in public. If the audience finds it offensive, you can always blame it on the Character POV.
• Comedians interpret jokes in ways that make people laugh.
• Consistently making people laugh is an act of creativity; it takes a great deal of experience.
• As a teacher, I find students have many more performing problems that need to be solved than writing problems. Joke writing problems can usually be eliminated with practice, time, and effort, but performing problems will keep a student stuck at the same level until they’re solved.
• I’ve found that almost all performing problems are a result of improper rehearsal.
• How you rehearse is how you will perform.
• The lesson here is that since the performance state mimics the rehearsal state, it’s extremely important to use a rehearsal process that will bring forth your natural state of being funny.
• You must rehearse in two physically separate locations. One allocated to the critic, referred to as the critic spot, and the other assigned to the creator, called the rehearsal space.
• A joke is a response to some experience.
• Words are symbols that represent experiences. Since they’re just representations, they don’t affect us as actual experiences do.
• The classical rehearsal mistake beginning comics make is to redo a funny story about something that really happened to them to the things that were said, and then memorize those words verbatim.
• The problem is that a very large part of what makes a joke funny lies in how the comedian responds to the circumstances of the story.
• This is the crux of my Rehearsal Process. A joke is a comic response to some experience, so if you know what that experience is, you can recall it as a means of remember the joke.
• The only way for you to bring the audience into your movie is for you to rehearse your material as a sensory experience, remember it as a sensory experience, and communicate it as a sensory experience. Then, and only then, can the audience perceive it as a sensory experience.
• Ultimately, what I want you to understand is stand-up is not a presentation, but rather an interpersonal communication of bringing the audience into the comedy movie of your show. But before you can do this, you must first learn to rehearse it as en experience.
• Your goal in rehearsing is turning your material into sensory experiences from all relevant POVs as though it is actually happening to you.
• To truly communicate the comedy within this joke you must first understand what is happening within this mini-universe.
• An emotion is a response to an experience.
• Your job is to create an experience so you can recall the pictures, sounds, and feelings that will allow you to respond with this joke. The only right way is your way.
• The rule of thumb is: Hold the mike in your hand unless the bit requires your hands to be free; only then put it back on the stand.
• Do speak over the top of the mike. Most hand mikes are omnidirectional, which means they pick up sound just as well from any angle within a certain distance. Holding the mike at chin level, you’ll easily be within that distance.
• Your job is to be funny.
• My definition of comic timing is African dancing and drumming. The audience is following the comedian and the comedian is following the audience. The comedian doesn’t have timing; the comedian spontaneously creates timing based on how he or she is being affected by the audience. You can’t decide on it ahead of time because it’s an act of creativity that happens in the present.
• Be careful not to get arrogant after one or two good shows Stand-up comedy is like the wild animal; just when you think you have it under control, it’ll turn around and bite you in the ass.
• Remember, a good introduction can set the proper tone for your entire show. Just as a bad one can dig a hole that may take you some time to get out of. Introductions are important, so take the time to create one that’s right for you.
• It’s better to have an unfunny introduction that sets you up to get into your material than to have a funny one that puts you in the wrong light.
• Before a show begins, you’ll want to warm up so your comedy motor will be ready for the race when you step on stage. As a beginner, you’ll usually get about three to six minutes to perform. If you go on stage cold, by the time you hit your stride your time will be up.
• Some people need to be left alone before they perform. If this is your style, physically warm up, then find a place where you can be somewhat alone. But be sure to let the M.C. know where you are--you don’t want him to think you’ve disappeared.
• When a comic comes out and jumps right into his act, it’s often jolting. The purpose of the greeting is to familiarize yourself with the group of people in front of you and begin building a relationship.
• After you greet the audience, it’ll help you to relax if your first shot at being funny gets a big laugh. So having a great opening joke really helps. It can also establish who you are.
• If there’s something about you the audience might fixate on, you must address it so they’ll let it go and you can get on with your show.
• Notice the phrases and idiosyncrasies that all the hack comics are using, and avoid them like unsafe sex.
• Of all of the comics’ cliches, asking a question as a means of bringing up a new subject matter is the most frequently abused and the biggest waste of valuable stage time.
• Riffing is one of the only appropriate reasons for asking the audience questions, because in this case you really want to develop a comedic dialogue. If you’re going to ask the audience a question, be prepared to converse with those who answers. Otherwise, state your negative opinion about your subject, which will save you time and segue into your next bit.
• There’s nothing sadder than watching a comic mess up a series of really great jokes by performing them on fast forward.
• This is one of the best pieces of advice I can give you. If you don’t relate to the audience as individual, they’ll feel you don’t care about them. Take the time to make eye contact with several people.
• When the audience is laughing--shut up.
• Being a really good M.C. is a valuable skill and it can help put you in a position to get stage experience.
• Nothing will ever replace stage experience for teaching you what you need to know about being a comedian.
• When you take responsibility for your feelings you become empowered because you’re in a position to do something about them, rather than just being a victim of them.
• If you want to perform out loud, you must rehearse out loud. If you want to be emotionally associated, you must rehearse emotionally associated. If you want to play a character, you must rehearse playing the character. You must rehearse it as you wish to perform it or else you won’t remember it.
• If what you’re doing isn’t working--do anything else.
• Bombing isn’t just the suffering part of being a comic. It’s the learning part. If you never bomb, you’ll never learn. From bombing you usually learn what doesn’t work, which is just as important as knowing what does.
• A saver is a line that’s not regularly in your show but kept in the back of your mind for emergency situations. And bombing is an emergency situation.
• Most hecklers think they’re helping make your show better.
• Handling heckles effectively is a skill that is only acquired through a great deal of stage experience.
• The time to verbally cut down a heckler is when the audience is just as irritated with him as you are. If the audience doesn’t perceive that he deserves it, they’ll view you as an overly aggressive jerk.
• You can’t blast women as hard as you can mean, no matter how much they deserve it. You could call this sexism, and maybe it is, but it’s also a comedy reality. Everyone has a primordial instinct to protect women.
• Since most hecklers think they’re helping your show, sometimes just nicely asking them to stop can be enough.
• Give all the attention to the area of the crowd that’s being respectful and attentive. This creates a kind of rivalry for the comic’s attention. Since the ignored section wants the comic’s attention back, they’ll turn on the heckler and get him to shut up. It’s a smarter choice to get the audience to do the work for you.
• Remember, if something’s worth doing, it’s worth doing badly.
• Perform anywhere you can get in front of an audience.
• Do clean material .This is a recurring theme in this chapter for several reasons. If all of your laughs come from the shock value of foul language, you’re not writing jokes. You’re just shattering assumption of social propriety.
• If you speak at a Toastmaster meeting, there’s no reason why you can’t use your comedy routine as your speech.
• The ability to ruthlessly edit your own jokes is the most valuable skill you’ll ever learn in comedy. Most funny people hold onto their jokes as if they were their children.
• The sooner you’re willing to cut out the marginal jokes, the sooner your show will move up to a professional level.
• Before editing the joke out of your show, try to figure out why it didn’t work. It’s amazing how much information you can pick up about a joke just by performing it.
• If you have an intuition about the joke or feel confident it can be salvage, then play around with it to see if you can make it funnier.
• You’ll want to rearrange the jokes so the show ends with jokes that get the biggest laughs.
• People tend to laugh harder at sexual material than they do at nonsexual material. Since that’s the case, it follows that you should end your show with sex jokes.
• Conversational material often works better after you’ve gained acceptance with the audience. A routine that could alienate the crowd if you open with it may work just fine once you and the audience have become friends.