Mastering Stand-Up by Stephen Rosenfield

• When a relationship is founded on comedy, there has to be absolute candor. Why? Because the truth comes out quickly in comedy. It comes out the moment you get in front of an audience. Either they laugh or they don’t.
• Here’s the truth: if you’re funny with your friends and family that’s a sign you’ll be funny montage and that you can be both a writer and a performer of comedy. You have the talent. What you need now is the craft.
• Craft is what will transform your comedy from an entertainment for friends and family to an entertainment for a mass national audience.
• Here is the stand-up comedian’s to-do list:
• Find your originality.
• Master the techniques of stand-up comedy writing.
• Master the techniques of stand-up comedy performing.
• Create your comic persona.
• Deepen your understanding of comedy.
• Study great comedians.
• Perform! Perform! Perform!
• Never blame your audience.
• Know the forms of stand-up comedy.
• Understand the business.
• Trust your nerves.
• Have fun.
• Get in touch with what is original about your sense of humor. Originality is a hallmark of exceptional art.
• Once you get your spontaneous comic creations on paper, you can start to apply the writing techniques that will transform your ad-libs into stage-worthy stand-up comedy material.
• A stand-up, like an actor, must have the ability to produce onstage the emotions that give life to his performance. He must be capable of creating this emotional life night after night, in a way that seems spontaneous and unrehearsed to the audience.
• To become a successful comedian, you must develop a viviee and distinctive onstange personality--a personality as individual as your real-life personality, only more so.
• Watching great comedians will help you learn and improve your act.
• The comedians you love are the comedians you want to study.
• To become a pro, performing must be a regular part of your workweek. Perform stand-up as frequently as you can.
• Because comedy club audiences have watched late-night TV comedians for years, they’ve been trained to expect laughs far more frequently.
• A joke that anyone can tell and get laughs with is the definition of a generic joke.
• In all art, including stand-up comedy, there is a form and there is content. They are two different things. Form refers to structure. Content refers to what is inside that structure.
• To this day observational stand-up is the go-to form for jokes about the news. These jokes are short, they can be written quickly, and audiences delight in hearing funny things about what just happened.
• The biggest laughs come when the audience thinks you’re making it up on the spot.
• There are three keys to transforming a funny story that your friends enjoy into anecdotal stand-up that can entertain a club audience. The three keys are as follows:
• Building frequent laugh lines into the story by…
• Organizing the story not chronologically but by subject, followed by laughter lines that…
• Seem genuine coming from your persona.
• Most stories are structured chronologically. This happened first, this happened next, and so on. That’s not the way comedians organize a story. They do it by subject. This is my first subject, and here are the laugh lines tied to that subject, and so on. Transforming a funny story into stand-up comedy material essentially involves formatting the story in this way.
• In good anecdotal stand-up the characters in the story are recognizable and their behavior is believable, even if the premise of the story is fanciful.
• Audiences laugh when the story matches up with the personality of the comedian telling the story.
• A stand-up sketch is essentially a one-person play where you act out all the parts. The comedian enacts the characters until the scene ends. He does not interrupt the scene with comments made as himself. It’s an uninterrupted performance of a single scene.
• The successful stand-up sketch has an additional key: its premise is believable.
• As a delivery system for laugh lines, the stand-up sketch can’t be beat. Once the initial setup is in place, the rest of the piece can be virtually all punchlines, nonstop laughs.
• Act-outs are another form of stand-up where the comedian acts out other characters or himself in a scene.
• It is better to show the audience something than it is to tell them about it. Let them see it. It’s almost always funnier.
• A great rewriting technique for a joke that is almost there, but needs punching up, is to retell it through act-outs.
• Put-down humor is comedy that gets laughs by putting someone down, making fun of them. Put-down humor has five targets:
• Celebrities
• People in your life
• Hecklers in your audience
• Innocent people in your audience
• And, of course, yourself
• There are two keys to creating successful celebrity-put-down jokes. The first is to be sure your famous people are famous, that your audience knows who they are. The second key is that your reason for ridiculing the celebrity must also be known to your audience, and they have to agree with you about it.
• Most of the time people laugh because they’re surprised by what you say. This isn’t the case with celebrity put-down jokes. They laugh out of pleasure, the joy they take in hearing the truth.
• To repeat: the person and the reason for ridiculing him or her must be well known, and the audience must agree with you.
• For a celebrity put-down jokes to work, a famous person must be lined up with his or her most famously recognizable foible.
• There’s one caveat about celebrity put-down jokes: they have a limited shelf life. After a while, people have heard enough, and it’s time to move on to the next train wreck.
• Don’t make the assumption that the audience is on your side when you complain about people they don’t know. For them to laugh at your jokes, you have to get them on your side first.
• A heckler is someone who is insulting you in a voice that others can hear. It’s important that you make this distinction between hecklers and loudmouth non-hecklers because you’re going to nuke a heckler with biting, comedic insults. You don’t want to nuke someone whose inhibitions may be down because he or she had too much to drink but who is enjoying your set.
• Let’s review. First, make sure the person is a heckler. Second, get the audience on your side by not responding at first. Third, have heckler jokes ready that keep them on your side.
• Your heckler material should do two things: First, it should get the audience laughing at the heckler’s expense; hecklers need to discover there is a price to be paid for their rudeness. Second, it should send a message to the heckler to shut up. If you don’t include that message, the heckler may feel that you’re inviting him to go tit for tat with you.
• You get the biggest laughs when audiences think you've come up with something funny on the spot. When you deliver a prepared heckler joke your audience thinks you’re being spontaneously funny.
• It’s important to know that, ultimately, you have the power when you’re being heckled. The audience is there to hear you, not the heckler. Because you and only you have a microphone, you can totally dominate the conversation.
• When you aim jokes at innocent people, the audience must clearly get from you that behind your insult jokes are feelings of fun and camaraderie.
• There’s a sound guideline in stand-up comedy that you have an expansive license to ridicule everything you are.
• Self-deprecating humor is a particularly endearing form of stand up. THere’s something liberating about someone who freely acknowledges his or her shortcomings.
• Comedy is a forum for unvarnished truth. It’s a [lace where we can openly and publicly face our weaknesses, imperfections, and fears.
• Ultimately, what gives an audience the license to laugh at your problems is a clear signal from you that you’re OK with them. If they feel you’re devastated by your problems, the audience can’t laugh.
• When a comedian invites a member or members of the audience to engage with him in a back-and-forth conversation, that is called “crowd work”. It’s a form of stand-up that, in addition to being entertaining, is enormously useful in a variety of specific circumstances you’ll encounter as a comedian.
• When you do crowd work you need people to engage with you in conversation, so you want to make it simple and easy for them to participate.
• They key to writing crowd wok is asking questions to which you can determine the range of answers, and then writing jokes that are set up by those answers. Written crowd work is accomplished by letting someone in the audience do the setup to your joke and then you delivering your written punchline.
• The biggest laughs you get onstage happen when the audience thinks you’re being spontaneously funny. Written crowd work creates the illusion of spontaneity, and for that reason can be a high point of your set.
• When the stakes are high, go with your tried-and-true material.
• The comic flaw comedian must not be aware of his or her flaws. The cheap person doesn’t know he’s cheap, the dumb person don’t know he’s dumb, and so on.
• Audiences often love comedians who master the comic flaw--in part because their vulnerability is so out there. THey make no attempt to disguise their flaws because they don’t know they have it. This creates a persona that is so very human and identifiable.
• To some degree, all successful comedians creat who they are behind the microphone. Sometimes their creations are drawn from aspects of their offstage sevles. And sometimes, as in character comedy, they’re entire works of fiction. As long as you get consistent laughs, you, behind the microphone, can be anyone you want to be.
• Look hard enough and you’ll see what the great comic playwright George Bernard Shaw saw in his own time and place: Our problem is not that we fail to live up to our ideals. Our problem is that too often we do live up to them, and too many of them are corrupt and self-serving.
• The duty of comedy is to correct men by entertaining them.
• Think out the special requirements of your act and make sure either that the club has what you need, or that you can provide it yourself and make it work at the club.
• To successfully perform a specialty, you have to get really good at it. You have to nail your impression, your song, your magic trick. You don’t get a pass because you’re performing these feats as part of your comedy. Performing the specialties well is a requirement of doing them at all.
• If you do impressions in your stand-up, it’s not enough to master the speech and physicality of the celebrity you’re impersonating. YOu need to create comedy with your impression.
• This can be done by exaggerating one of the celebrity's vocal or physical traits [...]. Another way to create comedy with an impression is to put the celebrity into a situation for which he’s hilariously mismatched.
• The trick is to learn how to deliver written material in a way that seems so spontaneous, the audience thinks you’re making it up on the spot.
• When a club pays you to perform, and an audience pays to see you perform, you can’t take the risk of ad-libbing your entire set. Material that has never been performed before is bound to be hit and miss.
• For a person who knows how to make people laugh, comedy writing is work--nothing more, nothing less. And the harder you work at it, the better you get.
• I’m a believer in this maxim: talent is work, and brilliance is obsession with work.
• When you get good at writing and performing material that consistently delivers [laughs], people will start paying you. So get good at capturing what you think, say, hear, and see that is funny.
• What ultimately gives your writing originality and freshness is not your subject, but your way with the subject--how you think and feel about it.
• There is a challenging discipline involved in creating a successful first draft, and it comes into play right at the outset: do not throw anything out.
• IN writing comedy, nothing gets thrown out until it’s tried out. If you think something is funny even for a nanosecond, write it down and hold on to it: the odds are that something funny is there.
• The problem isn’t that you've stopped coming up with funny ideas but that you’re snuffing them out as soon as you have them.
• Sometimes what we initially think is a setup to a joke turns out to be the punchline, and you don’t want to mistakenly cut it because you think you don’t need it.
• Trying out the material will enable you to locate where the laughs are. Once you have a good sense of this, you’ll be in a position to make cuts without inadvertently cutting laugh lines.
• Develop each funny idea as a stand-alone piece of material. Once the first draft is developed into tightly written jokes, you will determine how to order the material and how to get it to flow.
• Don’t worry whether it’s funny or not. What we’re looking for in a first draft are strong comic ideas--funny ideas.
• Part of the craft and art of performing stand-up comedy is creating the illusion that you're being spontaneous on stage.
• Write about people, places, and things that annoy the hell out of you.
• Established stand-ups try out new material at small comedy clubs. TYpically, the new material is interspersed with tried-and-true material--material that has proven to reliably deliver us laugh. This way, if the new jokes don’t do well, there are still plenty of solid jokes in the set to entertain the audience.
• There is no better way to evaluate new material than performing it in front of a paying audience.
• An audience that includes paying customers is a more reliable gauge of new material than an audience made up exclusively of beginning comedians waiting to perform. Often other stand-ups are more focused on reviewing their own material than taking in a colleague's performance.
• Focus on getting laughs from the audience out front. Inside jokes can sometimes get big laughs from fellow performers but fall completely flat with the paying audience.
• Feedback should resonate with you; it should feel right. If it doesn’t, reject it. The only feedback you cannot ignore is the laughter or absence of laughter that your jokes receive from paying audiences.
• Stand-up comedy is a subject a lot of people think they know about. But in fact, it’s a rare person who can read or hear a piece of stand-up comedy material and have a good sense of how it will play in front of a club audience.
• The benchmark of great comedias is their capacity to get lots of big laughs. This has always been so, and so it will always remain.
• The setup is the essential information the audience needs in order to get the punchline.
• Part of the art and craft of comedy writing is the ability to identify and eliminate words that aren’t needed to get the laugh. The first move a comedy written makes to punch up a joke, then, is to shorten it.
• There is one exception to this short-setup guideline. A long setup is justified when its purpose is to ratchet up tension that will pay off in a big laugh.
• If your long setup builds tension and pays off with a big laugh, it’s OK. If your joke doesn’t require tension to set it up, keep it short.
• The best technique for keeping setups short is to make sure they contain only one subject. Rookies don’t know this and end up creating overly long setups.
• One attribute of a good setup is that it has one, and only one subject.
• Most of the time people laugh because they’re surprised by what is said in the punchline. So another feature of a good setup is that it protects the surprise of the punch. It misdirects the audience so they can’t tell where you’re going.
• If the audience can tell what your punchline is before you deliver it, the laugh will be weak or nonexistent.
• In summation, here are the attributes of a good setup:
• It is concise
• It is clear about its single subject
• It is clear about your attitude toward the subject
• It leads directly to a punchline
• It protects the surprise of the punchline
• The punchline is what triggers the laugh. Usually in stand-up it’s expressed in words. But it can also be a facial expression, or a piece of physical comedy, or a sound effect.
• If your punchline continues after the audience gets the joke, you’re stepping on your laugh and you may kill it.
• A punchline usually needs to be a surprise. Often this surprise is created by an unexpected shift in attitude from the setup to the punchline.
• Let’s review. A good punchline is:
• Concise
• COmes as a surprise
• Clearly expresses your attitude
• Part of the art and craft of comedy writing is learning not to get in the way of the laughter.
• THere’s an important variation of the setup and punchline format. It’s called a roll. A roll is a setup followed by multiple punchlines, all of which key off the one setup.
• Part of the art and craft of comedy writing is learning not to get in the way of the laughter. Rolls, by having a single setup with multiple punchlines, are a great way to accomplish this.
• After you’ve tried out your first draft, you need to work backward in order to format the material into setup and punchline jokes.
• Knowing where your punchline is enables you to write a concise setup.
• A setup needs to be clear about the subject and also clear about how you feel toward the subject.
• If you tighten up the writing of a joke and it gets less of a laugh than the original did, restore the cut words. You need them.
• You want your audience to get who you are, right up front. YOu want to be a vivid presence onstage. So another factor in determining which jokes to open with is to identify the ones that establish your comic personality.
• The more you write and perform, the clearer your comic personality will become.
• If you want to be edgy or shocking up front, keep in mind that you have to take the audience with you. THey have to like you to go along with your edgy material. You don’t want material up front that pushes the audience away from you.
• You want to end your best jokes.
• In stand-up, you are the transition. It is your comic personality that ultimately links together all of your jokes.
• Energy onstage is essential for a performer. Your energy stimulates the audience and enables you to dominate the room. Low-energy, listless performers bore their audiences.
• The ability to communicate to your audience, “I am so excited to be up here talking to you,” is the single most important part of performing stand-up.
• Gifted comedians create a distinct comic persona; they’re so clear about who they are that we feel we really know them.
• Being emotionally full means that the audience knows moment to moment how you feel about what you’re saying. It doesn’t mean that you’re expressing your feelings loudly. It means you’re expressing them clearly. Your way of expressing feelings will help define who you are to your audiences.
• Remember that every setup should be clear about its subject and about your attitude toward it. Your punchlines should also be grounded in clear emotions.
• A stand-up always performs the form of emotion, not the real emotion. The reason for this is simple: in order to laugh, the audience must know the stand-up is all right. We can’t worry and laugh at the same time.
• For a stand-up, there is one simple key to acting: know what attitudes you’re playing and act them out.
• Some new stand-ups don’t realize that performing stand-up is acting.
• For a comedy club audience to give its full attention to a stand-up, they need to feel that he or she is talking not at them or even to them, but with them, as if they are in a conversation with the stand-up.
• Make eye contact with people. It’s important for them to know you see them.
• People in the audience pay full attention to you when they feel you are paying full attention to them--when they feel that you are not up there delivering a speech to them, but rather are convivial conversing with them.
• The factors that constitute delivery are pacing, timing, emphasis, and pauses.
• Pacing refers to the overall speed of your delivery--you either talk fast or slow or in between. For a stand-up, the optimal pace is slow. Slow is funny. Underline that last sentence please.
• Going slow while maintaining strong energy is one of several performance skills that separate the pros from the wannabes.
• The key to effective timing is knowing the specific attitudes that underpin each of your jokes.
• To put a finer point on this invaluable piece of advice, there is always one specific word in the punchline that triggers the laugh--the punchword. Frequently the punchword is obvious: it’s the last word in the joke. BUt there are times when this isn’t the case and the obvious choice may be the wrong one.
• Identifying the punchword and the setup’s key word will help guide you to the right emphasis for your delivery.
• There are two places in every joke where a pause is necessary. The first is before the audience starts laughing. After you’ve delivered your punchline, if you don’t briefly pause, you’ll step on your laugh; the moment you start talking again is the moment they stop laughing, and you don’t want that moment to be right after you’ve delivered a punchline.
• The second place where a pause is necessary comes after the audience start laughing. This pause is called a hold.
• People can’t hear you while they’re laughing.
• During the hold, you want to silently keep performing the attitude that underpins your punch.
• A pause can build tension, create suspense, express confusion or astonishment, to name just a few. Working out the delivery of your jokes in performance will guide you to where a pause will contribute to getting the biggest possible laugh.
• The way to memorize your set is to repeat it over and over again. This will hardwire it into your brain, so that it’s there for you when you need it.
• Our first impressions of people based on how they look. Use this to your advantage. Pick out clothes that will help the audience see you the way you want to be seen.
• Also keep in mind the old show business rule of thumb that you want to be at least as dressed up as your audience is. You can be more dressed up than they are, but not less.
• An important part of establishing a comic persona is finding the right look.
• Do not drink alcohol or do recreational drugs before you get onstage. When you perform stand-up, your workplace, essentially, is a bar. It’s a place that encourages its patrons to drink. You are not a patron; you are a performer. Don’t get this confused.
• The signal light signals you to either wrap it up or stop. Make sure you know where it is. If you don’t have someone point it out to you. Also, be certain of what the signal means.
• The important thing to remember no matter how you are feeling is this: it doesn’t matter how you feel. What matters is that you give a solid performance. That’s a big part of being a professional stand-up (or a professional anything).
• The first thing to do when you get onstage is to adjust the microphone; you want to make sure the audience can hear you.
• When you handhold the mic, put the stand behind you; don’t leave it center stage. You should be center stage, not a metal pole.
• You have no idea how an untested spur-of-the-moment quip will be received, and the worst place for a joke to fail is right up front. This is the time the audience is making up their minds whether or not you’re funny.
• The time to take changes with untested material is after you’ve already got the audience laughing.
• The sooner you embrace the following concept, the sooner you’ll get good at stand-up: If you have a good time when a joke words, your audience will have a good time. If you have a good time when a joke doesn’t work, your audience will still have a good time.
• A save is what you say or do to acknowledge that a joke didn’t work. It’s another way of being in the room.
• Saves have to be used sparingly. If done too often, they bring attention to the fact that a lot of your jokes aren’t working. Used sparingly, they enable you to get laughs on jokes that don’t work.
• Every comedian bombs. It happens. The only people who never bomb are people who never perform. Don’t blame the audience; don’t get angry at them or at yourself. Finish up and thank them. Afterward, work to figure out why you bombed.
• Bombing doesn’t mean you’ve failed. It means you’re engaged in the process of becoming a professional stand-up.
• Never apologize during your set. When you’re performing stand-up, you are your own public relations firm. Don’t put negative thoughts about your work into your audience’s minds. Stand-ups who end their performance with that apology are inviting a friendly audience to suddenly question their work.
• In order to start getting paid as a stand-up, you need a set that elicits an unbroken string of strong laughs from beginning to end, consistently, night after night. This is what I call an all-”A” set.
• If you have an all “A” 5-minute set, you’ll get paid nothing. If you have a 10-minute all “A” set, you may get paid by a headliner to be one of his or her opening acts. [...] If you have 20-minutes of “A” material, you can start getting booked at roadhouses.
• The featured performer, who needs to have about 30 minutes of solid material, is usually paid in the high three to the low four digits.
• The headliner--who needs to have an hour of “A” material, television performing credits, and/or a very large social media following--can easily make 10 times what the featured act makes.
• Headliners can make between $40k and $70k to appear in shows over a weekend.
• The more you write, the more “A” jokes you’ll come up with--and the more you’ll get paid.
• I urge you to schedule time during the week to write. Don’t make the schedule idealistic, make it realistic.
• Treat [writing] the way you treat your other work-related responsibilities. Because bottom line, stand-up comedy is a business, and it’s a business that you own. If you get good at it, people will start paying you to perform.
• An actual recording of your performance is a far more accurate means of capturing the audience’s response to your jokes than your memory is. When you record, leave your device in the back of the club; don’t bring it onstage with you.
• The primary thing you want to capture is the audience’s laughter.
• Make sure the setup has only one subject so that you’re pointing the audience clearly in the direction of the punch. Make sure your attitude toward the subject is clear. See if you can restate the punchline in fewer words.
• The essence of punching up a joke is taking out all unnecessary words.
• The final and ultimate way of moving a joke up to an “A” is to change the attitude underpinning the joke to its exact opposite.
• If a joke has potential but needs a significant rewrite, the best way to start is by coming at it with an attitude that’s the opposite of its original one.
• Audiences have to feel that you’re talking about things that are red-hot issues for you right here and now. In comedy, the past is only funny when it still has you by the throat.
• It’s important not to forget the discipline of the first draft:
• Don’t throw anything out until you try it out
• Be an easy grader at the outset of a joke’s life
• The biggest mistake you can make in a first draft is to throw out a joke prematurely. If you apply the same rigorous standards to a new joke that you apply to the jokes you’re already using in performance, the chances increase that you’ll throw out material that could become “A” material jokes.
• Don’t forget that it took you time and effort to hone your tried-and-true material. It’s a mistake to get too conservative.
• Trying out new jokes is a risk, but it’s a risk you need to take in order to meet the demand for fresh material and stay vibrant and alive as a comedy artist.
• Big laughs are invitations to write more about those subjects.
• Learning which subjects work for you and, just as important, which one’s don’t, helps you to crystallize your persona.
• By writing more jokes about the subjects and with the attitudes that work best for you, and by eliminating the subjects and attitudes that don’t work, you will, over time, find your persona.
• The best way to find the subjects that work for you is to talk about whatever enters your comic mind. The second thing is to be emotionally full when you perform. The way to find the emotions that work best for you is to vividly perform a wide range of them.
• What makes people memorable both offstage and on is their personalities. Successful stand-upds develop memorable personas.
• The people who successfully break the rules are people who know them.
• The bottom line is the audience has to believe you. If they don’t they won’t laugh.
• Achieving genuineness starts with your joke writing. What comes out of your mouth doesn’t have to be true. It has to seem true.
• Don’t write generic jokes. If you do, try to sell them to generic stand-upds. Write jokes that no one else could possibly tell as well as you.
• The more the audience likes you, the more they will laugh. If they don’t like you, they won’t laugh. If they love you, you are on the way to becoming a star.
• Whatever you’re talking about in your stand-up, strive to make it personal; make it clear how strongly you feel about it and why it matters to you. And position it so that it’s something you’re struggling with not in the past but right now--this moment onstag.
• WHen the audience sees you wrestling with something that really matters to you, they laugh and they love you, because you’ve just made their own struggles easier to bear.
• It’s important to realize that having a struggle does not make you a victim. It makes you the leading character in your comedy. It makes you the person the audience is rooting for.
• Good entertainment provides us with the opportunity to exercise our feelings.
• So an important key to gaining stage presence for a stand-up is to write and perform jokes that convey to your audience how you feel about everything you say.
• A performer succeeds to the degree that he or she engages the emotions of the audience, moves an audience, provides them with a heightened sense of being alive. The performers who are capable of doing this are the ones who have learned to use their medium to express, in their own way, a vibrant emotional life.
• A lot of what is credited to talent is actually the result of hard work. Studies of people who excel at what they do [...] have shown that such people have one thing in common: they work harder than their colleagues.
• You can be as funny as you want to be if you are prepared to put in the work, if you refuse to settle for so-so laughs.
• As you add higher-quality material to your set, what once was a killer joke may now be marginal. That’s why the joke is bombing. This is the best reason in the world to cut a joke. You’ve become a much better writer and your old stuff is not up to your new stuff.
• In order to host, stand-ups need to have a conversational, cordial, and convivial dimension to their comic personalities. If you possess these qualities, you can and should seek opportunities to host shows. If you get good at it early on in your career, it will open up more gigs for you.
• A good MC is an essential component of a good show. Good MCs know how to get an audience laughing right up front. Further, they know how to maintain the laughter and decorum in the room throughout the show.
• The key to MCing, revealed to us by Mr. Sullivan, is to be enthusiastic. Be enthusiastic about everything--the show, the club, the waitstaff, the audience, and the acts. Remember, the audience feels what the performer feels.
• Traditionally, a flashing red light means wrap it up and a solid light means stop.
• A good MC never brings a performer to the stage when the audience is dead or inattentive. Never.
• For skilled comedians, business is always good. It’s the business of presenting stand-up that changes.
• Training under the guidance of a gifted stand-up teacher will speed up your development, and fortify your decision to pursue standup as a career.
• Perform as often as you can, anywhere and anytime you can. The techniques you learn from good stand-up comedy books and classes can significantly speed up your development. Applying what you’ve learned over and over again in performance will deepen, expand, and advance your stand-up capabilities.