Zen and the Art of Stand-up Comedy by Jay Sankey

• Either you’re funny or you aren’t. But if you are a naturally funny person, I believe you can learn to be a stand-up comic.
• So though I don’t believe “funny” can be taught, I do believe stand-up can be taught to funny people.
• To be a stand-up comic is to be an actor, a writer, and a director.
• One a more primary, perhaps even symbolic level I’d be tempted to say that laughter is often the result of a sudden and surprising witnessing of things either coming together or coming apart.
• In my experience, most comics are extremely sensitive, relatively insecure, very insightful, highly intelligent, people. String individuals rather than group members, with a burning desire to share what they think and feel (at least while onstage).
• But alas, as things stand now, 99 percent of stand-up comics begin their careers by performing for weeks, months, or even years on these amateur shows.
• How do you know if you can be a successful comic? There’s only one way and that’s to try it. You think about it and talk about it and dream about, but it’s really all crap until the night you finally take stage in front of a living, breathing crowd.
• My only advice to anyone interested in the idea of being a stand-up comic is to call up a local comedy club, ask about their amateur night, and get u on that stage.
• One of the keys to stand-up is to try to make everything you say look spontaneous and unrehearsed.
• To write effective stand-up material, you need three primary skills. First, the ability to develop the “comic ear”, to be able to hear (and see) “the funny” in the things around you. Second, the determination to write a large quantity of jokes, the more the better. Many seasoned comics say you have to write a thousand jokes before you start to really become proficient. And third, the ability to be able to separate the good jokes from the bad.
• Write down every joke idea you ever have. Seriously every single one.
• Go through them on a regular basis, edit them down, polish them, and even go so far as to file them, perhaps by subject, in a file system or on computer disc.
• Remember, stand-up tends to focus on:
• Simple ideas that can be
• Commonly understood, and
• Verbally expressed
• Almost anyone can vent, blurt out thoughts and feelings, express themselves in one form or another. But to communicate is a whole other thing, because to be a communicator you have to care, not just about speaking, but also about being heard. That involves taking into account your audience. Their expectations, their perspectives, everything. All of which cannot help but influence material and your choice of subject, vocabulary, and speed of delivery.
• The difference between wit that gets belly laughs and wit that gets bored silence is not only a matter of the style the material is both written and delivered in, but also a matter of the degree to which the audience cares about the subject.
• If the audience doesn’t care about what you are talking about, they will not laugh. It’s really that simple.
• People will only emotionally invest in something they care about.With stand-up comedy, the success of the material often comes down to four elements:
• Surprise
• Credibility
• Truth
• Exaggeration
• To me, surprise is one of the true keys, not just to keeping an audience’s attention, but to comedy in general. It's also one of the primary distinctions between jokes that are merely witty and clever, and jokes that are gut-busting funny.
• A joke is more a matter of sudden, often ironic, insight.
• The power of the joke’s surprise often determines the initial momentum of the audience’s laughter.
• For a joke to be credible, it must be believable in two ways. It must be believable in relation to the character, and it must be believable in relation to the world.
• But there are few jokes strong or more dependable than jokes based on everyday truths. In fact, strictly speaking, because “truth” is more often thought of as an idea of the collective than a perception of the individual, any joke the majority of an audience laughs at must certainly contain some truth--a perception held in common.
• Effective comedy is more often about stretching the truth rather than breaking it.
• Most jokes are made up of two parts: the set-up and the punchline.
• This set-up/punchline structure is behind 99 percent of the comedy you will ever see getting laughs on a stand-up stage.
• A set-up is the information the comic gives to the crowd to establish an initial subject, content, and perspective.
• A punchline is the final information the comic gives to the crowd; it alters the meaning of already given information in a surprising fashion.
• Effective punchlines are more about surprise, irony, brevity, and imagination. A punchline shouldn’t just tap the crowd on the shoulder, it should be more like a shovel to the back of the head.
• Effective punchlines are often a single sentence, as short as possible, that dramatically changes the meaning, spirit, or direction of the joke, while giving any built-up tension a sudden and completely unexpected opportunity for release.
• Effective jokes tend to have at least one single, clear moment, usually at the end of the punchline, where the listener experiences already given information suddenly coming together in a surprising fashion, due to one last piece of information.
• Generally speaking, the more suddenly and clearly the comic communicates this past piece in the puzzle, the more powerful the click moment and the louder the laugh.
• Not only should your punchlines consist of as few words as possible, hut ideally the complete idea of the punchline should not come into full focus until the very last word of the joke. That’s one of the most natural ways to maximize the surprise.
• Do not use any key words in the set-up that you plan to use in the punchline. In other words, don’t repeat yourself.
• When writing jokes, it’s a good idea to avoid vague generalizations. [...] Strong writing creates a single image for everyone in the crowd, each person imagining a very similar thing.
• Instead of telling jokes about stuff that happened to your friends, your neighbor, or even someone in the news, whenever possible write the joke so it’s about joke.
• You are the audience’s primary connection between your jokes and their interest, so do everything you can to make the jokes about you.
• One of the reasons the number three appears in so many jokes is because comedy is all about breaking patterns--but to break a pattern, one must first establish a pattern. Something happening once doesn’t establish a pattern, but for it to happen twice, well that at least suggests a pattern.
• Breaking your information, especially dense punchlines, into groups of three is also a very effective way to communicate.
• In performance, the three-beat rhythm of the punchline plays a significant part in the joke’s success.
• Aggressive editing is very important in joke writing in general, but particularly so when it comes to punchlines.
• Basically, a comic makes a “callback” when he says a joke that makes reference to information contained in a previous joke.
• Having a constant flow of new material, even just a few jokes, can keep things fresh and interesting, if only for you.
• The last thing you want is for people who “enjoyed you so much the last time” to come out to see you again, only to find that you’re doing all the same stuff.
• By all means, try to focus on your own unique sense of humor rather than on trying to deliver material that doesn’t suit the person you really are.
• The most successful comics tend to play characters that are two things: real and exaggerated.
• When developing your stage character--or working on any aspect of stand-up, for that matter--it’s very easy to make things more complicated than they need to be. It’s keeping things simple that’s truly difficult.
• Simple isn’t easy, and keeping things simply and clear is a very different thing from keeping things stupid or superficial. It usually takes great intelligence and a lot of hard work to simplify anything.
• Fearlessly give of yourself, through your character, to the audience. Commit. Be there for them, and more often than not, they will be there for you.
• Whatever style you eventually adopt, when delivering your material strive to stay interesting. Continue to fuel the crowd’s curiosity. As always, the key is stimulation. The more stimulating your delivery, the more it will engage the audience, and the more they will really be there with you.
• While psychological pauses create tension and heighten curiosity, logical pauses, between both words and sentences, are more about giving the audience the time required for key pieces of information to register and “harden” in their minds.
• Another way comics sometimes highlight or emphasize a key piece of information is through repetition rather than pausing. Instead of planting a pause after saying the line, they repeat the line or perhaps just the last few words of the line.
• Our language is full of small, almost identical words and phrases that a comic can leave out or quickly pass over in his delivery.
• One of the keys to surprising or shocking people in a way that results in laughter is to try to challenge people without making them feel threatened.
• I believe taping your sets, especially during your first couple of years, is absolutely essential.
• The illusion of spontaneity is very important to a stand-up performance, so when first taking the stage and beginning to speak, you do not want to give the impression of beginning a pre-written monologue.
• Strive instead to give the impression that yes, you have begun to share your thoughts and feelings with the audience, but the thoughts and feelings have been with you all day.
• Generally speaking, good comics have a relaxed air of strength about them.
• To be said to have a “style”, a comic must in some sense repeat himself. The way he delivers his jokes, the subjects he talks about, the way he writes his material, something. So, strictly speaking, repetition is not a bad thing. However, there’s a thin line between having a style and being predictable.
• To become really good at almost anything worth being good at, you have to work at it pretty much every day. And one of life’s little ironies is that as you become good at something, it magically starts to vanish, to become a part of you.
• In the end, there seems to be only one way to become excellent at something, and make it look so damn easy, and that's by working so damn hard.
• Going too fast is much more common than going too slowly.
• Nervous energy can also be an excellent source of fuel onstage, especially if you learn how to make it work for you rather than against you.
• Rehearsing on a regular basis will also greatly enhance your memory. Every time you run through your set you are etching your material that much more into your memory.
• Unlike a punchline to a joke, which is often a sudden bringing together of things, a sudden clarification, a magic trick is often the opposite, a sudden, unsolvable mystery. And usually, when people are truly puzzled, they don’t feel like laughing.
• Arranging and connecting your jokes by their subject matter is probably the most obvious and most often employed means of segueing.
• It’s often a good idea for your opening joke to have unusually broad appeal.
• So at a very primitive level, to keep a crowd’s attention a comic’s performance must somehow have a uniformity about it as well as be perpetually surprising.
• Just as first impressions are very important, so are last impressions. And just as your first joke must establish you as a truly funny individual, your last joke, ideally, should leave a very strong impression in the minds of the audience that they were in the hands of a real comedic talent.
• Like your first joke, your last joke must be very strong.
• The key with a cold, quiet crowd is to break the pattern of whatever the other comics before you have done.
• From the moment you take the stage, you must immediately establish yourself as a powerful individual and capture the crowd’s attention.
• So play to the people who are listening to you, and try to ignore the people who are not.
• As a stand-up comic you must look like you are in complete control.
• The crowd is always looking to you to see how they should feel about what you are doing.
• One of the dangers of exaggerating your abilities and achievements is that you run a real risk of “overselling” yourself. Then when it comes time to perform, you fail to meet the expectations you yourself created!
• Almost every aspect of the craft of stand-up involves the idea of communication, the conveying of specific information to other people. The area of self-promotion is no different.
• One of the most important things I learned [in advertising] was the “AIDA Rule of Communication”, for Attention, Interest, Desire, Action.
• Typically [radio] interviewers are looking for you to be funny on air, so be prepared. One way to do this is to give the interviewer a short list of questions he or she can ask that will “naturally” lead you into some of your bits.
• For me, professionalism is more of an attitude, even a code of behavior.
• To me, to be “funny” is to be found to be funny by another person or persons. So if an audience doesn’t laugh, you aren’t funny, at least to them.
• If you’re so damn clever or smart or whatever else you call it, prove it and reach the crowd in front of you.
• Push yourself. Don’t rest on your tried-and-true forty-five minutes or your always charming character. The “greats” of almost any discipline or profession tend to think of themselves as amateurs, as students, forever trying to learn more about their area of interest or so-called expertise.
• Nobody gets great overnight.
• Twenty Tips:
• Smile.
• Leave the audience wanting more.
• Be flexible.
• Simple is better than complicated.
• Stage time is precious, don’t waste it.
• Play to the entire room.
• Beware talking too quickly.
• Remember, likeable and vulnerable.
• Commit fully to your material.
• Variety is good.
• Try to have fun onstage.
• Always be professional.
• Ask the audience for nothing.
• Do your time, no more, no less.
• Start string, end strong.
• Don’t just express, communicate!
• Tape your sets.
• Don’t wait for the audience to come to you. Go to them.
• Keep writing.
• Trust yourself.