How To Start Doing Stand Up Comedy

1. PROMO BABY!: Hey, I'm Brennan Lemon. I'm a 17 year veteran of stand up comedy have performed comedy all over the U. S. Canada. Europe was in the Edinburgh Fringe Festival couple years ago and I have a comedy special on YouTube that I will give you three keys toe watch. But here's the thing. I want some people you want to do Comedy. I want people who are curious. I want people who are looking for trying to expand their sense of humor, their sense of self really suck the marijuana light and get on stage and make some people laugh. And here's the thing. This course how to do stand up comedy for beginners is going to teach you how to write jokes. It's gonna teach you how to get on stage, how to prepare five minutes of material, the jokes toe handle five minutes of material and ultimately get you on stage at a local open mic. Try that material out. Is it scary? Heck, yeah. Scary. Are you afraid you're gonna fail? Heck, yeah. You're afraid you're gonna fail. But you know what? Comedians work through that. Anyway, if you want to expand your horizons if you want to learn how to be funny if you want to be the funny person at a party. And if you want to impress your friends with how to do stand up comedy, maybe you lost a fantasy football league. But the point is, this video is for you to learn how to do some stand up. And you know what? You're gonna love it. So we're gonna spend time how to write, how to refine that material, how to get that material organized into a five minute bit and how to get on stage locally and how to handle audiences. This is gonna be a great time, so check it out. And I'm glad you're about to take this course piece. 2. Why Stand up Comedy?: So why stand up comedy? Why would you want to get on stage and make yourself uncomfortable and maybe bomb and probably bomb in order to try and make people laugh? Why would anybody want to do that? The answer is pretty simple. It's a ton of fun when it works. It's got to be at least the hardest drug in the world, getting on stage and getting people to laugh at things. It's a great way to get your thoughts out. It's a great way to try out things. It's a great way to explore yourself. A lot of times I'm at bars or I'm at parties and people ask me what I do And I say I'm a stand up comic and they go, Oh, man, that's amazing. I never had the guts to do that. I could never do that. Well, the truth is that you could You just don't want Teoh, and maybe you don't want to, because you just don't. Maybe you're not into getting in front of people. Maybe you're not into talking to people. People have different interests, but maybe you actually want to do it. Maybe you're actually a little bit interested in doing it. And maybe you're not doing it because you're actually kind of afraid. And here's the thing. Stand up. Comedy is the most direct feedback. You will get its direct feedback on your thoughts. It's direct feedback on your ideas. It's direct feedback on who you are. And as the ancient adage goes, know thyself. You will understand so much more about yourself. People are always afraid of bombing. That's what they say. When I met these parties, they go all men. What if I bomb? The truth is this you're gonna bomb. Learning how to do stand up comedy is like learning how to box. You're going to get punched. You're going to get up on stage sometimes and it's not gonna work. You're gonna think you have a great joke. You're gonna think you have a great idea. You think Oh, my gosh, this is gonna be so funny. You get on stage and it doesn't work. Who knows why? But this process is gonna help you examine it. It's gonna help. You understand? It's gonna help you understand yourself. You know, a lot of people do stand up for different reasons. Sometimes their faults from childhood. They never got enough love. Maybe that's me and they get on stage and they want to get the adoration of the crowd. Maybe that's you. It's fine. It's be easy to do when you get it to work, right? Sometimes people like to do stand up comedy because they like the attention. Sometimes they like to do stand up comedy because, honestly, it helps them meet women sometimes or men there. If you're you know, of that persuasion, sometimes they like to do it because it helps them try out ideas for public speaking. Sometimes they have to public speak, and they they just want. And a trial of how very concentrated amount of that stand up comedy is more difficult than public speaking. It's actually very concentrated, bit of public speaking, boiled down to doing one thing. But there's many reasons people want to do it. And the thing is, whatever your reasoning is, it is a great place to learn about yourself, try out different ideas and ultimately grow very quickly. As a person, you will never have a better sense of self than after you've done stand up comedy and especially after you've bombed failure and the embracing of it is very important to stand up comedy. Many people live their lives and quiet, small boxes of fear that there is ah lot of things that people would dio. Maybe you're one of them, but they're afraid to dio, If you're sitting here and looking at this course and thinking, why should I do stand up comedy? You know, if you're taking this course and wondering, why am I doing it? What am I gonna get out of it? I would encourage you to examine this specific thing. Think about yourself. The most successful comedians always dio They start out on stage talking about themselves, talking about who they are, where they're from, what they're doing. Stand up comedy, ultimately, is the exploration of self because of the self can only be explored with others, Bruce Lee famously said. If you want to know yourself, observe yourself with others, while a great way to do that is by getting on stage and trying to talk about what you think is funny, a unique perspective on the world, trying to refine and focus that unique perspective, and to try it out in front of others and When you get their feedback, you'll know so much more about yourself and your ideas. So that's why stand up comedy. Also, it's really freaking fun. You'll meet a lot of really cool people. You'll have a great time and laugh all the time. That's why I've been doing it for 17 years. And I love doing it. I'm gonna get up tonight. In fact, on stage. So anyway, that's why. Stand up comedy. Thank you for taking the course. 3. Word of Warning: a quick word of warning before we really get into it in this course, and that is, it's gonna make you uncomfortable. Getting on stage in front of people is gonna make you uncomfortable. It's one of the top fears. It's one of the biggest fears. Uh, Jerry Seinfeld is a famous joke where he says public speaking is a greater fear than dying , which means that people who attend a funeral would rather be in the casket than giving the eulogy. It's true. It can get very uncomfortable. I use the analogy of boxing in the previous video, and it's very similar. Getting into a ring and fighting a guy even if it's just practicing and sparring is uncomfortable. Exercising is uncomfortable. These air things that make you healthier doing comedy could be uncomfortable, and it's gonna be. And I just want to give you a fair word of warning that in this course you will be asked to go outside of your comfort zone. Hopefully, that's why you're here. Hopefully, that's why you're thinking about doing stand up comedy. In a course like this, you're going to be asked to do things that are a little bit outside of your comfort zone, You're gonna be asked to maybe explore emotions that are all not immediately comfortable to you. Maybe some of them are a little odd. Maybe they're things you've never thought about before. Maybe it it's stranger. It feels like hard work to go through these things. The answer is, it is. Sometimes comedy comes to you naturally. Sometimes it comes in a brilliant flash. Sometimes it's, Ah, heavens, open up and you're inspired and your pen writes in a notebook. Or you open up a memo on your phone and start recording or your on stage and things just come to you is you're talking. Sometimes it happens at your computer, but not always. Sometimes it requires a lot of focus, and Jerry Seinfeld is famous for saying, and at least among comedians, that most people will fail at stand up comedy because they don't go deep enough. So stand at the precipice of this course. Get ready to jump in and get ready to go deep, because we're gonna explore things in here that are gonna help you be a better person by confronting uncomfortable truths potentially in your own life. And I would say to you act boldly Getting on stage and talking to people is a bold thing. It's not wrong when people say at dinner parties, Oh, man, you've got a lot of bravery to get up on stage and do this. It's it's brave. But you know what? With practice, it becomes fun. It becomes just another thing that you dio and then you get good at it, and at the beginning it's difficult. And as any comedian will tell you, though, doing out any new material going out on stage and trying on anything new, it's like trying to figure out how to do it again for the first time. So confronting fear is something comedians do a lot, and you're gonna confront some of it. In this course, it's just a word of warning. But I believe in you. Let's do this and I'll see you in the further videos 4. Course Prep: Let's talk about the prep for this course. So starting out, trying to do stand up comedy doesn't require too much. Uh, mostly, if you want to be a comedian, it requires you and an audience. You don't really have to have anything else. You don't need the microphone. You don't need the speakers. You don't have to have a mic stand. You don't need a a stage or a stool or anything. You really just need an audience and yourself and honestly, for a lot of comedians that audiences themselves. Most of the time. When I try to write material, it's because I'm trying to make myself laugh or I'm trying to make just a couple of people around me laughed, and then that translates on stage. But for this course, I want to talk a little bit about prep and what you can expect in it. You're gonna have to go by a notebook now. It doesn't have to be anything fancy. I can show you I have more than one notebook and I'll show you mine right now. This is a mole skin extra large notebook. Pretty simple. I just right in it, and you can go ahead and do the same thing with your notebook. I also have a pocket notebook that I'll show you now would encourage you to buy one of these. This is field notes. I have a fancy little leather case because I'm pretentious, but I also happen to have this pen, which is always kept in the notebook from now on. During this course, I want you to always carry a notebook on you. Whether that's a big notebook or a small notebook doesn't have to be any certain. Brand doesn't have to be any kind and walk up to your local drugstore. Probably pick up a whole pack of tiny note pads for a dollar to and a bunch of big pens. And honestly, if you have him on you, that's better than even some open mic comedians. But the idea is this. You want to be ready to record thoughts that you have. The other thing that I typically use a lot is my cell phone you can see here. It's very broken. Hopefully, yours is not, but what I like to do is record notes to myself also. So the idea is that in this course where you're gonna be doing is a lot of writing. A comedy people will say is 80% writing, 20% performing. I don't know if it is exactly the case, but there is a lot of writing and there's more than writing. There's a lot of revising. There's a lot of rewriting and a lot of people will tell you writing is really just rewriting. So in this course, what I want you to dio is have a notebook on you at all times. We're gonna be practicing writing. We'll talk about that later and practices of writing that you can get into toe, try to mind for more material, but you don't want to have any thoughts. Cross your mind or things that you say or things that other people say, or that you over here without recording them. So every once in a while you're gonna have a funny thought. You gonna go? Isn't it weird that you know the garbage is in New York City always just overflowing outside? They don't have alleyways here. Isn't that weird? It is kind of weird, considering most of the city was built in modern times and the new alleyways worked. It's a little weird that they don't have him. Is that a funny thought? It could be, but it might not be yet. But if I don't record it, I'll never know. So what I want you to do when you have a thought like that, Isn't it weird? Or isn't it strange that my dog loves me but hates the mailman? Why is that the case? Mehlman could give him a treat every day, but he still barks at him. I don't know why that's the case either, but it's maybe worth writing down. I'm not gonna tell you what you should write down, but you need to train your brain. And the point of this course will be the train your brain to notice those thoughts, thoughts that every person has. Larry David is famous for saying that he just has the same thoughts everybody else does, and he just records them and keeps him around in case they have an opportunity to come up in a project he's working on now. I don't know where David might have different thoughts than the rest of us, but he doesn't know, and neither would you if you never wrote those things down, so please keep a notebook on you at all times a pen on you at all times. I would advise to notebooks a big one and a pocket one. You can go to the store and buying very cheaply. Also, keep your phone on you for voice recordings and really, that's all you need. Later, I'm going to be talking about using computers to make lists. We're going to see that that will be part of the writing, and I'm also going to talk about using some things you can order on amazon dot com, very simply to help rehearse at home and give you the sense of being on stage. But you don't really need those things either. And this course I'm gonna put together a list. You'll find it in notes for this video off things that will be helpful on when they'll come in handy in terms of later videos. But for now, just focus on getting those notebooks and those pens and get ready to have a great time as we dive in 5. 1 Developing Your Sense of Humor: welcome to the first lesson of this course. The actual lesson. We're gonna get into it. And what I want to say to begin is that this is about developing comedy. This is developing stand up comedy. This is about developing your stand up comedy, and what this is about specifically is developing your sense of humor and your confidence in sharing that sense of humor on stage. That's really what comedy is. Actually, someone's once said that there is no such thing as good comedy. There's only good comedians, and really, there's no such thing as good comedians. There's only such a thing is good comedy taste. There's only such a thing as a good sense of humor. So before this course even begins, you've got homework to Dio, and maybe you've already done of it. You maybe you've already done a lot of it. You could have done it your whole life, you might say. So what I want you to do is develop a good sense of humor that's gonna help you that's gonna help train your brain. It's gonna help give you that slight edge. It's gonna help make you into a good comedian and ultimately a funnier person, and that's the point of this course. So what I want you to Dio is to do your own research. Now you've done it your whole life. You've laughed at things before. Of course you have. It's part of the reason why sometimes people feel that comedy is difficult to do is that audiences think that they know more than the comedian does because they know what's funny. Ultimately, funny is what they laugh at Now. You can't argue someone into laughing at something they don't like. That's a difference between comedy and drama. You could see a dramatic movie and not like it, go out, have a discussion about it afterwards and say, You know what? It wasn't my cup of tea, exactly, but I can see why it was a good movie, and maybe I'll go give it a second chance in the future. But the comedy Freddy got Fingered, which is a terrible film. Maybe you disagree with me, but in my opinion, and the opinion of a lot of other people is a bad movie. No one is going to argue into laughing at just not the way that laughing works, not the way that a sense of humor works. So your first bit of homework is to do a lot of research and to keep track of these things . So one of the first things I want you to dio it's going to YouTube. It's free for everybody. Just look up, stand up comedy. I'll have some links in this lesson would encourage you to watch them. But what I want you to do is focus on just laughing and then recording what you're laughing at. So you could do this today. I would encourage you to do it every day, at least for the next week. Maybe for the next month. At the end of this course, you're going to be doing a five minute stand up comedy bit or four minutes or three minutes or seven minutes, depending on what your local, uh, open mic allows you to dio. But you're gonna be doing a few minutes, and I would encourage you from this point until that point to take note of the things you find funny. Maybe they're Hannibal Burress videos. Maybe their cat videos. Maybe it's just funny, goofy things on YouTube that, you know, I make you laugh. Maybe it's baby shark, which is popular in the year that this video is made. And if you don't want to blow your brains out because it's bothering you so much, don't go Google that baby shark video. It's completely ridiculous. I have no Children and I don't want to because I don't want to play the Baby shark video anyway. What I want you to do is go look up, stand up comedy. Gullible Look up old SNL sketches. If you have Netflix, go to stand up comedy and start watching different specials. I would encourage you to start with some of the classics and some of the greats. Go look up, Chris Rock, bigger and blacker. Go Look up, Chris Rock. Bring the Pain. Go Look Up, Dave Chappelle The Bird Revelation Look up, Dave Chappelle, Killing Them softly. Look up, Patton Oswalt. Look up! Louis C. K. I know he's sort of tossed out and kind of persona non grata in 2019 when this video is being made, but Louis Ck's Live at the Beacon is a classically good stand up comedy special, so go watch those things. What Some classic comedy specials also watch watch Jerry Seinfeld back in the nineties. Watch Tim Allen in this first comedy special on HBO. Look at the roots of where comedy came from. Look at the things that you find funny, and if you don't find them funny, that's fine. To note down what you don't find funny and maybe try to figure out why you don't find it funny. Developing good taste is going to help you be funnier parties. It's gonna be helpful for you writing material for even revising material now, whether or not you end up continuing doing stand up comedy after this series of videos in this course, you do want to continue having a good sense of humor, and I would encourage you to keep track of these things. Just keep your ideas now and no down what you like and don't like. Now one of the coolest things to do is have a good and informed opinion of something socially. So if you're at a cocktail party, for example, and some new Netflix comedy special comes up, maybe it's Amy Schumer's The Leather Special or something like that. It was rather controversial when it came out. You could have some opinions on it. Yeah, it's not my cup of tea. I don't like it. I didn't laugh at it very much. But then again, I'm not its target audience. And then that was the same thing. Didn't really care about it too much myself, but I could see why other people liked it. But I can talk about these things and I do know what I like. As soon as Patton Oswalt's gonna drop another special, I'm probably gonna lose my mind that guys so funny I can't wait to see Hannibal. Burress is next special. Also has been around here in Chicago working new material. It's gonna be fantastic. So develop your own sense of humor. Do the research, read some books, read the very short introduction to comedy. That is a fantastic book, a very short introduction to humor, I should say, and I'll link that in this as well. So that's a book that you can get. Look at the Wikipedia article for humor for stand up comedy. Go do some research and figure out what you are naturally attracted to and why you're naturally attracted to it. Because what you're gonna find is that when you sit down and start writing. Your exact sense of humor is going to come up, and it's going to reflect some of the influences that you've had. Some people tell me that I sound a little bit like Bill Burr on stage. I think it's because I'm angry and white, but potentially it's because I also really like Wilbur and I listen to him a lot. People have told me that I sound a little bit like Louis C. K. Sometimes it's probably probably because I really like Louis C. K. And I like some of the things and how he describes them, those types of things, those movements, those motions. It's almost like how you can hear the musical influences of one band in another band. Those things are gonna come out through you. So what I would encourage you to do is try to absorb as much as possible. The list I've already given is pretty good, but I'm sure you have some of your same that you like. If you've liked them in the past, go back and revisit them, open them up, take a look right down, even write down the jokes that you like. I would encourage you to do this a lot. Hunter S. Thompson, who's a famous writer Hopefully you're aware of used to take F. Scott Fitzgerald books and copy down word for word the passages he liked the most. In order to kind of absorb the music of the words, I would encourage you to do the same thing Jerry Seinfeld is. We'll see in a clip. I'm going Toe Link later in this course talks a lot about how writing comedy is a lot more like writing music than it is anything else. So the influences you wanna have you want to be, you want to be conscious off and you want to know what your taste is because it's going to come out later and developing that good taste is the first step in really developing good comedy. So this is where it's fun. This is where it becomes really fun to go check out all the things you've always loved and liked to laugh at, You know, all the way from old Disney movies to the most recently dropped YouTube comedy clips from some of the edgiest comedians out there. So I would encourage you to do that and good luck on this course, because all of this is gonna come out later when you get into the meat of writing. 6. 2 Local Comedy: I want to do a quick other video about local comedy that I would encourage you to go see local comedy. Whether that's stand up, improv or sketch, I would encourage you to please go see some local comedy. Support it. You're gonna be part of it soon because you're gonna be doing stand up in an open mike. I would encourage you to go to an open mike. Look it up, Look up, open just Google Open mikes in my area and find one that's about comedy. You might live in the middle of nowhere. You might live in a country where this thing doesn't happen very regularly. It's OK. Try to go find something. You don't have to participate yet you don't have to go and talk to these people yet, but I would encourage you to go do it. The second thing I would like to say in terms of developing a good sense of humor is being funny with your friends. And a lot of people are funny socially, And sometimes when I speak to them about doing stand up, they say things like, Well, I'm funny with my friends, but it's a different context. I'm not really funny. I wouldn't be funny on stage. That's not true at all. Most of the best bits that I have come from things. I sat in front of other people in a moment and then wrote down and later figured out later , I worked it into a stand up comedy. But it was just this funny on stage, if not funnier than it was when I originally said it with the people I was with. Now some comedians believe that there's only really one way to get funnier, and that's by hanging out with other funny people. Very signs follow this one of those people, He says that hanging out with comedians is really part of the reason why he is so funny. I think that's probably true. Most of the best bits I've ever come up with, and most of the best times I've ever had have just been hanging out with other comedians around comedy shows. So before you even get on stage, I would encourage you please go check out local comedy. It'll be awesome to support it. You'll see what it's really like. You'll get a sense of why people do it cause it's so much fun. And also you'll begin to cultivate a social group of people who hopefully have some comedians in it, and you'll begin to understand those people a little bit and absorb through the process of osmosis socially, their sense of humor and doing that is going to help really take you from not just being a funny person to an extremely funny person. So like putting rockets on your feet as you attempt to send this mountain of comedy. So please do that. Take a look. Locally, go see some comedy shows, just Google comedy in my area. Go to Facebook and type in your biggest town locally and then put in comedy and you'll see what groups come up. Go ask to join them. Go follow those comedians and see what's going on. I'm sure something is happening this weekend in your area, and you should go check it out 7. 3 Introduction to Writing: so the first real meat of this course writing well before we even get into it, I should say the writing bit on this course comes before the technical explanation of jokes specifically so stand up Comedy is about a couple of different things about writing jokes about telling stories, writing stories. But really, it's really about one thing, which is just being in front of an audience and making them laugh. It's about doing whatever you gotta do in front of an audience to make them laugh. And many different comedians call that writing. A lot of them will call that jokes. I mean, technically, if you were toe, push me on it and say, What is the stand up comedian? Do I go with Santa? Comedian tells in rights jokes. But especially lately, there's a lot of comedians who don't necessarily just Talon write jokes. You can think of Zach Galifianakis. Um, you could think of Bo Burnham a little bit there. Comedians who do lots of different types of things on stage that you might say, or not necessarily classically jokes or classically stories. Now, maybe you want to be one of those people. Maybe that's how your brain thinks in stand up comedy in a little bit. Is that process of figuring out what it is you're actually doing to be funny? What it is your brain is doing to interpret. Funny. So after you've done a lot of research which by now I hopefully you've done, you are gonna get a sense of it. So what I want to offer in this particular point before we go on to talk about jokes specifically is the nature of writing and the process of writing and what writing is and why comedians do it, how I do it and hopefully how you can do it now. The writing process, ultimately, I should say, is whatever it is, you figure it out to be for yourself. So for some comedians, like a guy who was a big influence on me, Mike Green, that process is him getting up on stage and just talking through things until they're funny . Sometimes that Bill Burr, I would say it does the same thing. Sometimes it's sitting down and actually crafting jokes very specifically and meticulously until they're almost perfect on rehearsing them in getting them on stage. Dimitri Martin does that But for each comedian, it's different, and you have to figure out what your processes. Now, if that sounds a little bit difficult for you. If you're somebody who's a let's say, Ah, technical type, maybe, or a computer programmer or something like this, and you're like Oh my gosh, this course isn't gonna teach me anything about how to do this. Technically, hold on, Hold on it will. I'm going to get into a process for writing. I'm gonna get into a process that you can use that works with everybody who a teacher, too. But the reason I say this originally is because your process might be different. So I don't want to tell you that there's one writing process. There's one writing process, and that's whatever process works for you. So before we get into technically, how jokes Air written, I want to talk you through writing, show you how I write and show you different methods for writing. And when we get into joke writing specifically, which comes before editing in this course, and there's a reason why I'm going to walk you through the writing process. So if you can't for some reason in your brain handle learning writing before learning specifically jokes. Go ahead and watch the joke course first, but this one is for writing, getting in the habit of writing, understanding, good writing and understanding how writing is relevant to ultimately doing five minutes of comedy in front of an audience on stage, which you will be doing at the end of this course. So thank you, let's dive into it. 8. 4 Establishing the Habit of Writing: Oh, hi. I didn't see their Well, welcome to my home office. I thought we would move here for the lesson on writing. You see, comedy in writing and especially everything about comedy really is an infinite grind in writing is no different. So what I wanted to talk about when we jump into this writing, uh, lesson is the practice of continuously writing. You know, Jerry Seinfeld once said that he was walking to the club one day he was walking to a comedy club in New York, and he passed a bunch of guys on the street who were working. There were just workmen working on the road in New York, and it occurred to him right then that he was like, You know what? These guys get up every day and they go to work, so there's no reason I can't right every day and go toe work. So for the next a bit of your time between now and when you get up on stage and do your five minutes, I want you to be writing every day. It's a practice that is really good to get into for a number of reasons, but what I want you to do is set aside 30 minute today and write for at least 25 of those minutes. So maybe you sit down. You set your alarm clock on your phone for 30 minutes. Five minutes. You take to John. Kind of just chill out, take a deep breath, maybe get some coffee and drink. A little bit of it. Gets your brain working. Maybe you, you know, look at your phone for a second. Watch a funny YouTube video, set it down. And then for the next 25 minutes, you do nothing but right. You write longhand, you can write on your computer, whatever it is, I want you to write for 25 minutes and what I want you to do is get a calendar. This is my little planner here. You can use whichever one that you'd like yourself. But what I do is I right in here and I mark down every day when I actually write. When I actually sit down and get it done, I mark it down. And as I go back through my calendar, I can actually see all the times that I continue to write. It's not only rewarding cause it makes me feel like I accomplished something. But getting into that habit is really good, both because establishing a habit of creativity conserve you and the rest of your life, but also because it's encouraging to feel like you know what? I got a lot of stuff going on, and once you start building up a lot of different material, you're not gonna use it all on stage. In fact, mostly in most comedians use a very small fraction. Mike Birbiglia, the comedian, is famous for saying, You can write 100 jokes. You only use one on stage that's about true. And we'll talk about that a little bit when we get into punch lines specifically because there's a reason for that. But you're going to write a lot of material, and you're not going to use a lot of it. But sitting down for 30 minutes is actually really effective and really particular. When you sit down, turn your phone off, turn it on the airplane mode, get into a quiet place where no one could disturb you. I like to play jazz music or, for some reason, the Beastie Boys. I play a lot of play a lot of the Beastie Boys Anyway, What I want you to do is get into this habit because it takes your brain about 15 minutes to actually get into a creative tasked with means. If you're sitting down for 30 minutes, you're actually only getting about 15 10 minutes at the most of actual real creative time. But that's OK, because that's better than zero. Now, if you want to sit down and do this for more than half an hour, if you want to sit down and do it for an hour, that's totally fine. I would encourage you to take a break every hour if you want to do it for more than an hour , and I would encourage you to do it for at least 30 minutes. Don't do it for less. Sit down 30 minutes, 25 of which you write non stop. It doesn't all have to be funny taken just It just has to be your thoughts and ultimately your unconscious brain, your non conscious, your subconscious mind. However you want to think about it, your deep brain is going to produce things that are funny because your intention is to sit down and be funny, so eventually you'll come up with something and you'll know it. When you come up with it, you'll laugh out loud. You'll you'll hit it. You'll think about. You can write about anything. It will be a conversation you had the other day. Something funny. Pull out your little pocket notebook that I talked about earlier and write down some notes . Um, I have a couple here that are just kind of ridiculous that I want to make sure I build out further. One of them is the key to devaluing. Your stuff is getting basic white girls toe like it. Here we go. Is that funny? I don't know if it's that funny, but it could be something that I want to explore. So I would take that. And then I would write down with my notebook, and we'll talk about this in a second and now would use the 30 minutes to explore it. Sometimes I'll build a list, which is another thing we'll talk about. Sometimes I'll sit down and I'll try toe, maybe come up with a whole bunch of different specific things to write about. Sometimes I just free right I free associate. I just continue to write about things. Sometimes I ask questions, and I'll continue to write questions about something. But the idea is to get into a process of 30 minutes a day. Were you right? So established that get a calendar and keep track of the times you're spending writing. Mark it on your calendar every time you do it and spend at least 30 minutes set your alarm and turn off your phone. If you want to do it for more than that, that's totally fine. But do it for at least 30 minutes. Get into the habit of writing. You're gonna produce really good stuff, and whether or not you end up using it for stand up, you'll use it for something. It's never a waste. 9. 5 Freewriting: So for the first section on writing, we're gonna talk about free writing, which is something that I'm a big fan off. It's something that all creative people do all creative people have done since time and Memorial. And it's something that you could build a practice in for not only your comedy writing, but for life. Really? And that's to take a notebook like this one. I've already asked you to get a big notebook. Hopefully, you have one by now, and you're gonna sit down. You're gonna open it up to a page at the top of the page. You're just gonna write down the date and then you're gonna start free writing now, sometimes you can write down the name of a subject. I did one recently about whales. For some reason, I want to write jokes about whales. Go figure, but you write down the name of the subject. Maybe you write down the date for sure. And then you just go. You just start writing. You just write sentences, you right. Thoughts. You write questions, you write anything that comes to mind. And for 25 minutes you don't stop moving your pen. You go from thing to thing to thing and you get your brain into the concept of free association. If you come up with a really good question, you put it to the side. If you come up with a thought that maybe you want to expand on later or reflect on you, write it to the side. You get back to writing into the purpose and we're gonna show you here in a second how I do it. But I would encourage you to do it this way again. Set your time for 25 minutes and just go at it. You're gonna write down anything that comes to mind? You gonna write down lists, you're gonna write down questions, you're gonna write down facts, you're gonna write down thoughts and feelings, and I feel this way about whales. The first well I saw was this such and such a year. I've never seen a humpback whale in real life. I wanted to go whale seeing, but I'm afraid to go to the Pacific Northwest cause there's gonna be an earthquake one day , any of that stuff? The idea isn't to discern right now, the idea isn't to use discretion. The idea is to be indiscriminate. It's still let free flowing things come out of your mouth, come out of your pen, come onto the page and really just get out into the world. Your you all day long, you walk around whatever your waking life is with the filter and you have toe filter in and make decisions about what you're going to say and what you're going to do. And the process of free writing is to get rid of that filter. You want to get rid of it because deep inside your brain is really creative stuff that you've probably never been able to see your here and not even not even know if it exists. You might not share with your friends. You might not even share with yourself. It might come up in your dreams at best. But if you start free writing, you're gonna get a sense for what you're deepmind even thinks about. And that is a powerful thing. So let me show you how I do it myself, and we'll do the voice over as I show you my writing process in the notebook and how eventually and we'll show you how we can translate this later in the editing process. So get ready, get your pen ready and let's hit it 10. 6 Freewriting Example: Okay, so here we are ready to write. This is my note book is you guys can see maybe this will be the least interesting or exciting part of this course, but I think you guys know how to free right. But just in case you absolutely need to take a look. This is basically what it looks like. I'm just gonna go ahead and put the date today, Uh, which I should have gotten before I shot this video. But here it is in 7 11 Ha ha ha. It's 7 11 Everybody. Isn't that funny? 7 11 Okay, get your Slurpees ready. Anyway, actually, let's do that for this. This ah, purposes of this video, I'm going to write about 7 11 the actual we're gonna put it 7 11 You can't read my handwriting because it's bad, but you get the idea. So I'm actually just gonna talk about 7 11 in this free right, and I'm just gonna go ahead and start right now. So the 1st 7 11 I knew was at ah Warren in Canton Center Road. Ah, I remember brain freezes. Uh, freezes after middle school in 1997. So 1997. I totally remember. I also remember the day surge came out, which is Ah, really super sugary drink. Uh, there was a line for the surge Slurpee, uh, at 7 11 And, um, my mom didn't want me to get it, but I did. My mom was mad. I gotta search, Swifty. Uh, so then you just keep writing like this. Like the idea basically is, You just want to continue to write down this page. You wanna flip, go to the next page and just continue the writing? Um, I remember some other things about 7 11 So these things are like facts, memories. Whenever I want to say I remember there was a guy named Vinod who worked behind the counter even though it was in Canton, Michigan. Um, I should put that down. Canton, Michigan. And gonad I remember I could Could not, um, Couldn't understand him. Ah, and because I was young, it was really awkward to pay him. Ah, and I remember I always wanted to get the, uh I always wanted to get the playboys behind the counter. Uh, so I would try Teoh, try to get those, and he would kick us out. So, like there's not anything yet that's come up. That's a joke. Necessarily. Again. We'll go over jokes in the next section. Maybe you've already skipped ahead to that video. But the point of this is that I just wanted you to see this is basically how this works. There's really nothing to it. You just continue to write. You continue to write memories. I mean, these are things that are true for me. I they they all came up. And if I continue to write like this, I'm going to stumble upon something that I either wanted later at it and try to expound on or something that funny in itself. And you can see if I go back through my notebook for a minute. I do this a lot. These are the kinds of things that I have written over time jumped into. You can see I have thoughts and then jump over to other thoughts. Ah, and you know, some of it is very dense in terms of stories and questions and things like this. So take your notebook. I wrote kind of lot large on purpose and right, like this, 25 minutes Go ahead and do it. That's your assignment for this. Write down something like 7 11 or whatever and just jump into it. That's your homework for this section. I'm sure you are going to crush it. Thanks so much. 11. 7 List Making Method: so welcome to the unit on list making. And this is going to be the time when Ah, whole bunch of you guys, I think, really get a sense for how to write. So free writing is hopefully something you've done something that I would encourage you to do a lot of and continue doing. But this little bit here list writing is really where a lot of you I think you're gonna make sense of this. So some common criticisms that other comedy courses get is Ah, I thought we dive more into writing. How does writing work? How does joke writing work? Um, isn't there a system? I don't understand what I'm supposed to do. Um, there's unsigned mint that I have posted with the last video, the one on free writing that I want you guys to check out. It's the one where Jerry Seinfeld rights. That's a great system. Um, I would encourage you to continue to free right. You have to, of course, find your own way of writing. But this is a system that I was taught by Gilda Hauser. I started doing stand up comedy back in 2002 in Detroit, Michigan, And she was a really good stand up comic then, and she still is, and it doesn't do as much of it. But this is the system that I was taught from her and from a couple uncles of mine who also did stand up comedy. And basically, it's it's pretty simple. Essentially, you're going to sit down and you're going to just write a list. So using the example of 7 11 from the last time that we started Ah, free writing. I want to go ahead and and work this way. Also, we're gonna use it. We'll use the same subject. We're just going to use it in this list lesson here. So what do you list out? Basically, what I want you to do is open a document. I use Evernote, which you can see down here. Evernote is a great doc. Ah, system to use for keeping things like I can access it from my phone. Um, but you can use anything you can use a piece of paper and a pen. You can use a Google doc. You can use just about anything. Um, I happen to use Evernote, but just open it up. Click create a list, which is this little tab right here and now. What I want you to do is list out every fact you know, from your mind about the subject. So it doesn't have to be a fact. That's, you know, correct in the scientific way. We think about facts. It's just a fact. So 7 11 might be, um, like I said, Warren in Canton Center Road. Uh, oops. Ah, I might say really? So just anything that comes to mind, Slurpees, I don't even have to have any context. Ah, sticky floors. Um, I bought a ton of energy drinks when I was 12. Ah, 7 11 I used to pass on my way home from high school. Ah, whatever. You guys can see my terrible writing typing here. Um, I usedto passing remotely home from high school. Um, let's come up with a couple more of There were always weird people smoking outside. Ah, that 7 11 was there as long as I can remember. So all of these things are true. Um, also 7 11 responsible for more childhood. Ah, diabetes than anyone. Alice in the country. That's not really true, But it doesn't matter. it's a fact again 7 11 Just to explain to any of you who are not familiar is a just a convenience store here in America. Um, and we'll say it will say this. It's not true, but we'll se 7 11 Also number one employer off Indian in Pakistani immigrants in the nineties, in the eighties and nineties. Also not true. Maybe he does, Maybe it's not, but it's just a fact for the purposes of this, um, of of this Ah will say eight flavors of Slurpee that may or may not be true. Um, so what I want you to do is go through these and basically come up with as many as you can and why you should just keep writing. It doesn't have to be anything in particular. It doesn't have to be. Ah, there's no rhyme or reason to it. Basically, it's just a list of things that you're throwing out. And ah, you should keep going until it kind of becomes like you're having second and third or maybe even four thoughts about what you're doing, like coded already, right that, or is there anything else to Dio and, um, when you come up with it. It should be pretty exhaustive and we'll show you what to do with this list in a minute. But basically, you just want to go ahead and continue writing. So let's take a look at this. This is a list that I've already put together for something else I'm working on. I'm working on Ah ah, A list for ah, my office were working in offices and you can see it's just a whole bunch of different things in here. I worked a minimum of 45 hours a week. John is a bully. He really was. He was total like I was awful. It was like playing a game of Missile Command or Lucy and Ethel in the chocolate factory went to a ton of events. And then I listed out all the events we went. Teoh. Every conference is the same. I have sub lists. So this is great because you might end up finding a topic like every conference is the same . Or we went to a bunch of events on, like, eight flavors of Slurpee. I might do this. I might tab under it and then put Coke Cherry um, pena colada. Ah, blue just blue was a flavor. I mean, there's maybe a joke there eventually. And when I'm trying to do is just sort of figure out where you know what, where could a joke be? So you want to go ahead and do this if you're typing, you know, on a on a page of your if you're writing or typing, you want to do at least one page, maybe two pages, depending on how deep in the subject you want to get. Maybe three pages. But if you're writing out specifically, you should write out at least two pages a single line of just a list. And again, you're you're not gonna used these specifically what you're getting as much knowledge as you can out of your head and onto the page. So that's the way we approach list. In the next lesson, we're gonna go through how we begin building out lists by asking questions to get pretty in depth and interrogative about the subject. Were writing about 12. 8 Writing Questions List Making Method: Okay, So here is the second lesson in our list making approach to writing. So this is the second step. So after you get a list and hopefully you have a list, that's ah, bit longer than this list. Actually, we need ah, whole bunch, but we'll just use this one. For the time being. What I want you to do is get on another piece of paper or maybe a separate document. I've got one here, just on again on Ah, never note. Just asking simple questions. And what I want you to do is focus on asking questions. And so questions are exactly what they sound like. They're just anything that has to do with the subject you're writing about in what you want to do is use your list here to inform those questions. They don't have to necessarily be about the questions, but they probably should be something that you're curious about. Or that you're thinking about your wondering about and you want to dive slightly deeper into. So when I see this, I see you know, Slurpees can't Senator Warren, Um, here's a good question. Why didn't anyone think of the Slurpee? Ah, before 7 11 also. Why doesn't auto correct? No, the word Slurpee automatically like, Isn't that a part of our lexicon already? Um, whose programming? Auto. Correct. I'm really terrible. A typing. Ah, if you couldn't tell which is why I mostly write longhand. But, ah, why doesn't automatically know about Slippery? Wasn't there a 7 11 in that person's town? Um, and maybe that's a good question. Is who Who doesn't know about Slurpees? Maybe there's people in the world who actually don't know about Slurpees. And you know what? I'm gonna take this opportunity to add toe. Add this to ah, to add this to you know what? Forget it. I think I'm gonna leave that in the video. Why not? It's funny. Okay, so anyway, who doesn't know about Slurpees? Like, who in the world? Like, why do other countries have seven Elevens? That's a good question. Um, who worked at my local 7 11 So and this is the point at which maybe some of these questions start to actually make sense and had to have the list out, because if you remember, um, when I was making this list Ah, I was saying 7 11 Also the number one employer of Indian and Pakistani immigrants that comes from the free writing I did where I said I knew that guy local my 7 11 His name was a nod and he was clearly Indian or Pakistani or Bangladeshi. Perhaps I'm not sure, but he was. Who's from that area? He was. He was. Ah, Asian, you know, subcontinent. Ah, man. Ah, and I didn't know who he was, really? But I know that he he spoke with a heavy accent. I couldn't quite understand. So I said, Who worked in my local 7 11? Maybe who worked in my soul 7 11 And do other countries have seven Elevens? Start to make sense is a question. So maybe I'll think of a question that's like, um, does India slash Pakistan slash Bangladesh hoops Pakistan. Um, oops, There we go. So AutoCorrect is good for something. Have a 7 11 associate training program. Maybe that's why that's a stereotype. Is that they just trained mawr of those people. So I'm not sure. Um, what was the most popular flavor of Slurpee? So what you want to do is you just want to continue going on these questions and write them until you kind of can't really think of one or two in a few moments. Like if it takes you between 20 and 30 seconds to think of another question, then just go ahead and stop. You have enough. But it should be another page, maybe page and half of questions, and there are good things to write. Like who? What when, like, when did the 1st 7 11 open? That's a good question. Ah, and did it open at 7 a.m. Maybe it opened earlier. Maybe it opened later. Who knows? But anyway, these sorts of questions, or what you're gonna use to begin giving yourself more ideas for material, and you're going to start getting more ideas for setups and we're gonna talk about setups in the next lesson. So go ahead and do this right yourself, a whole bunch here on the subject that you have chosen about Woops. Think of friends trying to get hold of me and ah, and we'll dive into it for setups in the next lesson. 13. 9 Writing Setups List Making Method: Hey, and welcome to the third part of list writing. So this is where things begin to get a little more interesting. Hopefully, you dove in on the questions and got about a page page and 1/2 from your list of facts. And hopefully those questions were pretty interesting. You really, I hope, are finding questions that are intriguing that really get some kind of tickle from you when you write on. Hopefully that's like a feeling of Oh, that's interesting, right? Oh, that's kind of a funny question, or I wish I did know more about that. So in this section, what we're gonna do is we're gonna start writing setups. Now, After this, I'm gonna explain it What set ups really are? And, ah, go into further detail about joke structure that's gonna occur in the next unit. Um, really, This is kind of a situation in which it makes sense sometimes to maybe learn about joke structure before returning and actually writing punch lines, which is what we're going to eventually move to after writing set up. So I would encourage you to think about maybe skipping the next lesson in terms of punchline writing and then going to the actual joke structure unit, and we will get into greater detail about joke structure there. However, you don't have to do that. You could move on directly to punch lines as well. But for the time being, we're in setups. And what are setups? Will set ups are the first part of a joke, and they're not the same as a premise, which I will get into in joke structure. But there's something that sets up a premise, and what I like to do is do what I'm doing on the screen right now, basically, ah, which is go through and create spaces in between each of these. Ah, each of these bullet points. So we're gonna return a couple of times and get a little space in between each of these bullet points and what ah set up basically is, is it's a signing, an emotion to the question. So it's essentially taking an emotion like anger, joy, curiosity, frustration, depression. Ah, contempt. You name it whatever emotion or motive language you want to have. That is what you're assigning to the question and your rephrasing it to be a statement. So this is a little bit odd to try toe two to wrap your head around, but we're gonna do it a few times, and you're gonna get the hang of it yourself, and you can go ahead and do it. So for each one of your questions, whatever your first emotion is, that comes up. You want to go ahead and just write it down. So my first question is, why didn't anyone think of this Slurpee before 7 11? I think that is, That's an interesting question, but my real take on it is, I bet people did. They just didn't have the technology. So my set up is, um, is going to be It's awesome that we have the technology to have Slurpees that auto correct . I still didn't fix it awesome that we have the technology to have Slurpees. Imagine how much better we have it than literally everyone in the past. So this you can see this is starting to go in the direction of a bit. That I would just say, um, it's amazing that the first Slurpee was created in what's a 1980 1982 and nobody had a Slurpee ever before then and then this. This this is just getting my brain thinking. And I might say, Ah, Gutenberg guy who? Ah, who invented the printing press? Not Steve Gutenberg. Just to be clear. Neil Armstrong. No smoothie. You're no Slurpee. King Henry. Henry The eighth. No Slurpee. Oh, my God, That's so stupid. Okay, so but that this is the set up. So I just want to be clear with this, and we're gonna do a couple more of these, so you completely get the concept before we move on, because it is something that's very important to the list writing method of comedy. But the question was, why didn't anyone think of the Slurpee before 7 11? And my emotion that I signed to it was awesome or lock or positivity, that we have the technology to have Slurpees. We're lucky that we have that we live in this time. It's awesome is another way to put that I could also rewrite it. We're lucky toe live in a time of slurpees. You mean that no one in the past have never had one before? 1982. I don't even know if that's true, But that's just what I wrote and it sounds plausible. So let's go ahead and use it for now. Maybe I'll look that actual time up later. But then I came up with a second set up. So this is actually a different set up than goes with this question. But that question was so good that it got me to get more than one set up on of it. How? Imagine how much better we have it, then literally everyone else in the past. That's why we're lucky. So I've got three setups here all together, and I could I could use just one of them. I could use all three of them, but we're not gonna do anything with them yet. The point of this is just to write as many setups as possible. So that's Ah, the next set up that I wrote which came from this question also was It's amazing that the first Slurpee was created 1982 and nobody had a Slurpee ever before then. So I got four out of that one question, But you can see here little I said, Why doesn't autocorrect no, the word Slurpee automatically? Um, I could just say to the audience, Did you know that. Ah, auto correct. Doesn't know the word Slurpee. Did you know that that's a That's a set upon itself. Did you know that? It's a question. It's a question that I'm that I'm using, and it's a question in the set up, but it is actually a set up. I could also just say, Isn't it? Isn't that weird? That might assign the emotion to it. And the the point that I'm getting to here is that each one of these has to have some emotion assigned to it. Who doesn't know about Slurpees on? I could have a number of different ways. I could take this. I could write something like I did some research. Goodness, I am so bad at typing. I did some research and found out that there are people who really don't know about Slurpees. It's true, and the immediate idea that comes to mind it could be another set up. It could be the punchline of the joke. It's just something. But the immediate thing that came up for me here is, uh, I'm establishing a ah charity to deliver Slurpees to the less fortunate, who have never heard of them. I mean, that's a set up in itself. I'm establishing a charity to deliver. Oops. I'm establishing a charity to deliver Slurpees to the less fortunate, who have never heard of them to other countries. Have seven Elevens. Um, I could just say something like, uh, it's ridiculous that America is the only country with a 7 11 with seven Elevens. It's, ah, human travesty that every country doesn't have one. So there's a number of ways I could take it. I could say we're lucky that we have them. It's ridiculous. In America is the only one that has them. I'm angry that America only has them. Um, I I'm wonder why America only has them. Is it a coincidence that Onley America has them? And also we are the most economically rich country in the world? I don't know. I mean, those are just a bunch of different things I could take with that. Just a xai as I write through these. So So the idea just to review and we're gonna videos going on for a while. But the idea just to review is that you want to take these questions. You wanna assign emotions to them. Awesome. um how much better we have it? We have it better is an emotion. We're lucky. It's amazing. Ah, did you know that auto correct Doesn't know the words larvae? Isn't that weird? Ah, I did some research. Find out there are people who don't really know about Slurpees. It's true. Isn't that sad? That's the emotion. So sometimes the emotion is implied and I've been doing comedy a long time. So you have to forgive me because when I write some of these, I know the emotion. And I know that I can convey the emotion by inflection of voice. We will cover that in the performance and rehearsal sector of this, of course, but you want to go ahead and write it down. Isn't that sad? It's sad that I did research and found out that there are people who really don't know about Slurpees. It's true. Um, it's ridiculous. Those were all good emotions. So you want to make sure that you have that inflected emotional language as you go through here and those are the setups and they're gonna move on and talk about punchlines next. So go through each one of your questions, write down a set up, at least one set up for each of them. Um, and if you're really racking your brain, go over something crazy. Go some to go the opposite of your intuition. Just really get creative here and right down a lot. And at least do one for everyone. Hopefully, if you did a page and 1/2 of questions, you should end up with about two pages of setups. 14. 10 Writing Punchlines List Making Method: are your here, you've made it. Now it's time for the punchline writing section of the writing unit. So here's the thing. Ah, trying to describe how to write is a comedian is a little strange when you're trying to go through it, because punchlines are their own unique animal setups. You hopefully got the idea are are pretty simple to right. They're not too tricky. You basically take the emotion, throw it onto the question. You get an idea of a statement that's an expression of, hopefully, truthfully, how you feel about something, and it's a little interesting. It also gives you a direction to move in. That's called the premise, but we'll go through that. The next unit punchlines air Strange because there's many different ways to to do them. And what I would encourage you to dio is you can watch this section first, or you can go watch the joke structure portion. It's a unit unto itself in this course, and the punch lines in that we will talk about in that unit are going to help you for the punchline writing of this bit now that doesn't mean stop here. Go ahead and watch this we're gonna talk about an approach to writing punchlines, whether or not you're going to actually use the punch lines from the punchline section or the approach to punch lines from punchline section. This is an approach to writing, and you don't need to know about punch lines from the punchline section in order to do this , although it would make sense and it does help if you take a look at him. But what you see that I've done here, let's jump into it, is that I've separated out Ah, punch lines in their own separate space. I've cleaned it up a little bit, too, because we see over here that I still have the questions. Um, you know, this is why doing it on a computer if you're using the ah list writing method makes sense. I think it's a little harder to do in a notebook like this, but you can still do it. Hopefully you're using a computer. Obviously you have one. If you're watching this course, that would be a little weird if you weren't. I guess you could be watching it on your phone, but you could do this on your phone, too, So Anyway, what you want to do is take these bits, which are the bits that you wrote and toss them into here. You want to toss him into this side in their own space, and what you want to go and do is create two spaces in between each of them. And I'll explain why in a moment. But it gives you a lot more room here if there's any questions or setups that you have that you maybe aren't interested in. For some reason, um, you don't have to put them over here. You can get rid of them. You don't have to translate them. I would encourage you to only use the ones that you kind of are interested in exploring, although sometimes if you throw an uninteresting one in, you could end up finding interesting punchlines. But this is the approach that we're gonna dio so punchline. Writing can be a little challenging because this is the part that comedians get paid for. Anybody can write really good setups. Chris Rock once said. Not writing good setups is a good way to have bad jokes, which I think is true. But writing setups is not where the money is made. The money is made in punchlines. Punch lines are difficult to write. That's just get it on its face. I'll probably write a whole bunch from here. They're not very good. And you're gonna be like, Why did I pay for this course? And you're gonna go demand a refund. But hopefully you're cleverer than I am here, but you have your own less in front of you and encourage you to do this. Roseanne Barr once said, And this is the method we're gonna use here that you should write 10 punchlines for every joke. 10. It sounds like a lot. But she goes, You should keep the first and you should keep the 10th. And the reason is because it it it causes your brain to go with its first impulse, which is normally good. And then it's last thought. You got no more gas in the engine, you're out of places to move. You're gonna throw up the most ridiculous thing possible and that potentially is going to be funny also. So what you want to basically doing well, dive into this again? Maurin, The punchline section is just right. 10 of these things that basically address and continue the premise or the set up that you have here. So I'm gonna actually go ahead and create a list for each one of these. And I've already kind of started writing the joke here because it comes naturally from the set up. We'll talk about that. Hopefully you have some of those also, but I'm gonna go ahead and create for each of these a ah list. And we're gonna go through and start writing the punchlines together here. So you get an idea. It's awesome that we have the technology to have slow. Please Imagine how much better we have it, then literally everyone else in the past, how many wars were fought because people couldn't drink cold stuff? How many Slurpees? This is really a continuation of the same thing. How many Slurpees could have saved ah, people's lives? Um, you could even expand that, and I would just do it in the next punch line, which is, um, you can name specific historical events. Nobody who marched to Selma, Alabama, had a Slurpee. If the police in Selma had just been given a Slurpee, by the way, you can tell I've Ah, I've let let my machine know what a Slurpee has been. Given a Slurpee, they The civil rights movement would have been over in a few weeks. Maybe that's a joke. Maybe it's not, but it's Ah, it's one. We're gonna keep going with it. Imagine how much better we have it than ever. Literally everyone else in the past. Um, which is kind of scary, actually, because ah, imagine the Slurpees the future will have, um they could be amazing. They're gonna be, um they're gonna be uranium flavored. That's so stupid. Uranium flavored moon Slurpees. You know, like moon pies. Except Slurpees. Ah, there will be zero g, which is you drink the Slurpee and groups not supreme Slurpee, and you go weightless. Ah, that that actually just gave me a new idea for a set up, which is that eventually there will be a 7 11 on the moon. That's an idea first. So hopefully that should be happening to you, too. As you go through. This is you'll be getting new setups these things work through. Um, it's actually got a fun, isn't it? Where I'm having a good time. Hopefully you're having a good time. 6.5 minutes into this video s So we're gonna keep going. We're gonna I'm gonna try to do 10 for this. It will be a little bit, but we're gonna work through it. Um, imagine future service. How much better we have it, then? Literally everyone in the past. Um, maybe scientists will divide history into pre and post Slurpee time reckoning like we have a B, C and a D or be ce slash c e. Uh, we were gonna have pre pre Slurpee in post Slurpee. Maybe Maybe the Slurpee will come to be understood as histories. Greatest invention. Except I'm just thinking, as I'm writing this, that it's not actually. So maybe maybe. Ah, the hit of slippy was invented in 1982 and nothing interesting has happened since. Remember, we went to the moon in 1969. Ah, last moon mission was the year. I don't know when it was, but let's say the year the Slurpee was invented. No Mars mission. Ah, nothing good. Nothing good has happened. The Slurpee, The Slurpee was the culmination of history. Ah, Even though you could say the USSR fell, I guess. Ah, Maybe I'll take that and actually put that back up into post Slurpee time Reckoning. USSR fell. So you can see that we already have two different ways to take this joke. Um, and I'm only on number five, so I got five more to go. You guys are probably gonna skip this video. This guy sucks a comedy anyway. Ah, imagine how much better we have it. The literally everyone else in the past, Slurpee was invented 1982. How much better we have it in the past? Um, I would say Ah ah, animals can't have Slurpees. Ah, and eventually, philosophers will call that animal cruelty. Ah, is that the Eventually animals should have them that we need to make them available for all people. That's kind of similar to that joke that I was coming up with down here. Ah, what else? And it's awesome. We have the technology to have slurpees. Um, I think Slurpees not having Slurpees will be the biggest problem in the apocalypse. Um, they will be the biggest problem altogether that the first bullets that will be fired after society collapses will be four slurpees. They're gonna be hunting those Slurpees down. Ah, there's gonna be There's gonna be there Just the first apocalyptic battle. World War Three will be over Slurpees. Um, it's maybe kind of funny. Um, the the word technology is what stood out to me there. Um, you could just keep it going. Let's let's do the last three here, and then we'll move on. So, technology of Sobers Imagine how much better we have it. Literally everyone else in the past. Um, I think, Ah, I think the u. N should, uh, open to Ah, Slurpee drank by everyone. And every country should have their own should have their own local flavor. Ah, like so France should have. Ah, you know, cheese flavored Slurpees. We'll call that or maybe sham board, which is justice. Ridiculous. Germany should, of course, have brought worst flavored Slurpees. That makes sense. And then immediately all of the African and and ah, Latin American and ah, Asian tropical Third world countries, which I know is a bad word now. But whatever, Third world countries will become massively popular because they've got all the tropical fruit. Suddenly, everybody wants toe hang out with those guys in the U. N. Lunch room. So There's a punchline. Ah, let's keep going. Ah, technology slippers. Imagine, homes. You're literally everyone in the past. Ah, maybe Maybe maybe we don't. Maybe maybe people have imagined slur. Imagine Slurpees from all of history. We've got cave paintings Ah, of Slurpees in in the less go caves in France and ah Onley now Onley in Ah 1982. Could they be this Seifert? But we can't make them because they require Ah, Sabretooth Tigers and they're extinct. Ah, just another reason that we should be careful about our global environment. People of imagine slippers in all of history, Leonardo da Vinci had a drawing of a Slurpee in his notebooks. Um but ah, but he But he died before he could get there. Not too funny. Kind of sad. Whatever. Let's go to the 10th punchline. Finally, we're here with the most ridiculous part of this. Hopefully 12 13 minutes and you're still paying attention. You're going along with me. You're thinking of these at the same time. May be different things to write, um, people we have literally better than everyone else in the past. Ah, so maybe all of this modern, both bullshit is worth it, um, taxes. Ah, taxes And, ah, Donald Trump in social media and ah, other B s global warming. It's all worth it to get a brain freeze. There we go. So are any of them funny? I think some of them are, and some of them are going to be expanded on, basically. But this is what each of the should look like. Does this seem long and time consuming to you? It's been about 13.5 minutes into this video. We've done this together. I think I've repeated this in my to you about 15 times. But this is how you do it. So I want you to do this to each one of your setups. And again, if you hit a set up that you're like, maybe not that interesting. Um, like this, for example. Maybe you start doing auto correct, and you're like, actually, it's not that interesting of a thing. Ah, well, then you can just go ahead and not do. You can move on and do another more interesting set up because you wanna you wanna do it. But I would encourage you to do this for all of them. You will write 10 of them, go through him, and then what you're gonna dio and we're gonna go through this in the, uh in the punch up and editing and how toe sort of edit material. Because not jokes are not just written edited. Ah, we're gonna cut out the ones that are not interesting and expand on the ones that are interesting. So Ah, that's your 10 punchlines. That's how to go about writing punchlines, looking forward to making this work for you. 15. 11 Intro to Jokes: So at this point, you should be writing into punchlines, getting some setups done. And this is the first bit that we're gonna talk about joke structure. So stand up comics. We write until jokes. Basically now I mentioned it before. Sometimes those jokes are different. They're not really a structure joke. Necessarily. There may be some kind of bit like Zach Galifianakis does. Where it's goofy, it's off the wall. But every joke has the same structure because even if it's an old joke, even if it's not exactly what I'm about to share with you somewhere embedded underneath whatever is happening, whatever is causing the funny. This structure is also still there. So the structure is this. There's a set up in a punchline. That's it. So that's the whole joke structure. You've probably heard this before. You might have seen it somewhere else. Online. If you're interested in doing comedy writing jokes, understanding stand up comedy, other people have probably mentioned this. This probably isn't total news to you, but it could be so that's it set up punchline. Why did the chicken cross the road? To get to the other side? That's a set up that's a punch line. So these kind of jokes and I have another example. It all using Second for my own act that these kinds of jokes, that's that's That's the basic of what it is. It is a premise which is a set up. I'll talk about setups and premises in a moment. You've already written a bunch of setups that are also premises and then punch lines. You've hopefully written some punch lines. We'll go through exactly what and how punchlines are, and you could go back and edit and revise them. But in a high level, just understand that even in situations where a comedian is doing something very Ault, they're doing something very strange. They're not exactly standing up with a microphone and just telling jokes like one after another there still embedded underneath. There is a set up in a punchline. So few other examples of this would be stuff for my own act. I have a joke that goes like this. I just turned 30 recently like 39 months ago, just turned it. The set up in the punch line is obvious. I just turned 30 recently. Is the set up recently is the word, and then the punchline is just 39 months ago. Just turned it. Uh, obviously, that's not recently. That's the joke. It's an inconsistency. The punch line is that it wasn't at all recently. It was a while ago, so I'm 33 years old. That's the joke. So the joke again set up and punch line. The punch that comes is that it wasn't at all recently, like I could say at that joke in many different ways. I could say I just turned 30 recently, like 3.5 years ago. Just turned it. I could say I turned 30 recently, 1026 days ago just turned it. I just turned 30 recently. Actually, I didn't. I'm not the third. I just turned 30 a long time ago. I mean, essentially, that's the same structure in each way. Now, whether or not any of those is funny or how funny is to one another, how it is while there said how I delivered them. That's a style choice, and we can talk about that. But the basic structure is the same. There's a set up. There's a punchline. Why did the chicken cross the road to get to the other side. Why did the chicken cross the road? Because it was there. Why did the chicken cross the road? Because who knows why? I once told a joke when I was five. That was why did the chicken cross the road? Because there's he did climb a tree. He wanted to climb a tree. It's not really a joke. I mean, it is a joke and as a structure of a joke, but it doesn't really have any is nothing funny about it. So some jokes aren't funny that they all have the same structure. That's the structure set up punchline. With that, we're gonna dive in and take a look at the difference between premises and setups and take a look at the difference between punchlines and how to write punchlines and different things you can do with them. 16. 12 Setups and Premises: so set up some premises. How are we going to talk about him? This is what makes comedy happened. Setups and premises. This is what it is, is what it's about. So here's the thing. Premises and set ups are slightly different. A premise is a theme that you can continue returning to, and a set up is the individual words that you're using. T actually set a punch line up. That's why they're called setups. You can use many setups within a premise, but of premises, an overarching theme that you could have a handful of different jokes that are setups and punch lines that fall under. So one that I have in my act is I'm getting older. I just turned 30 recently, 39 months ago. Just turned it. I use it from the previous example. I'll do a bit of the act here. You don't have to laugh, but if you don't, I'd be hurt. Anyway. The jokes are I'm getting older, so I'm getting older. I can tell because I wrote a letter to myself 15 years ago that I just got when I said just anybody, Has anybody ever done this in the audience? I did this. I wrote a letter to myself 15 years ago, and my mother actually just got in the mail. They live at the same address and she called me up and she was like, Hey, Brain And I got a letter from you, and I was like, I didn't write you anything. And she said, uh, no, it's a letter from you in the past, and I was, like, in the past on my living there, an episode of Black Mirror. And she was like, No, it was from the past. I'll send it over to you. She sent me the letter. I was actually excited. I was very excited. Was like, Oh, my God, Brendan of 2000 and four. What were your thoughts? What were your dreams? I was about to graduate high school. I was super excited. I tore into the letter I started reading. I was immediately disappointed and went like this. Dear Brennan in 2000 and 19 1st of all, I bet you 1000 bucks you're reading this on your private jet. And I was like, I'm not reading this on my private jet. I'm reading this on the number 77 bus in Chicago, Illinois, pregnant of 2000 for so also with money habits like that. No wonder I didn't get a private jet. I bet you 1000 bucks. Jeez, that guy's an idiot. Here's the thing that's a whole bit, but it all fell. All of those steps fell with under the premise of I'm getting older. How do I know? Because I got a letter that I wrote to myself and then underneath that or a whole bunch of other jokes that are going along with, I'm getting this letter that I wrote to myself. So it's me in the past, right into reading that running to me in the future. Me now reading a letter from the guy in the past. All thing. I think I lived that in this video anyway. But I keep going. Once I finish that whole bit, which goes on for four or five more jokes, they return to it again. You know, I'm trying. I'm getting older, so I'm trying to keep in shape. I started doing CrossFit because I'm a stand up comedian. I'm halfway to being an asshole. I might as well just finished the race so these, This is the thing. A premise is a theme that you can continue to return to. So if you're writing bits, it's important to distinguish this because if you're writing, let's say the 7 11 concept, all of that, that's that's That's a big topic. But underneath that we can have premises that we can continue to build out jokes for. And those individual setups can be about those jokes that we felt punchlines in four. So one of the premises could be 7 11 was a totally weird place. That's a huge, overarching theme that I can write about. Seven. Lemon was really weird. It was super weird because it always had the weirdest people outside of it. Now I go into a whole bunch of different setups individually. For the people outside of the 7 11 there was the guy who was always smoking. There was the guy who never spoke English. There was the guy who was the Serbian guy who was playing super loud music out of his Trans Am. Whatever. I just made those up. Maybe we'll end up in a bit, but the idea is that you want to logically go into your topic using your premise to set up your setups. Does that make sense? Set up is a larger theme. Subject themes immediately are set ups there very specific, and they're setting up your punch lines. Hopefully, that explains it. So the premise is a large thing. You can drop smaller ones under now with that, let's dive into more into setups and then we'll talk about punchlines. 17. 13 Types of Setups: So for this presentation of setups and two types of setups to try to explain the concept of setups deeper, I decided to set up this little presentation that I want to give you. So here's the thing. Set ups and stuff setups in you. How can you set up water setups? How did they set up punch lines? How does the actual structure of the deep language work such that you're going to deliver the punch line? How does it actually set it up? And here's how. Remember how I went through this series of lists that you went through? You first made the list of of, ah, facts. Then you made the list of questions. Then you turned those questions in a setups. Those questions were meaningful because there are two types of setups there implied questions and inherent questions. So essentially what you have to understand is that every set up is asking a question. It's it's implying a questioner or bringing up a space in the mind of the audience that a question occupies. So question actually sets up the the answer, which will be the punchline. That's how setups and punch lines work together. So Here's some implied questions. Uh, I'm just gonna go ahead and use the premise we've been working with, which is it's awesome that we have the technology to have Slurpees. It's awesome that we have the technology to have Slurpees. That's not a question. That's a statement. That's Ah, it's a discursive statement of of, ah, opinion. Ah, it's a ah, it's what you might call an analytical statement, I think, according to David Hume, if you wanted to jump into the deep language. But if we keep going, I say it's awesome that we have technology have slurpees. There's some implied questions that come out of this one. How awesome is it that we have the technology to have Slurpees? That's an implied question. It's awesome. Well, how awesome is it? And you can think about this. Rodney Dangerfield is a good example that he used to deliver jokes where he would go. I get no respect, no respect at all. And then the question, obviously, is how little respect do you get or it was so bad. Then the audience goes, How bad was it? That's the implied question that they're bringing up. It's awesome that we have technology have Slurpees. How awesome is it that we have technology toe have slurpees, but you don't necessarily have to take that question. It's not always the 1st 1 that's on answer. And sometimes setups don't work well because the comedian won't properly set up the punch line, because the implied question that the comedian is answering is not lined up. Ah, with the question that the audience gets from the set up. So meaning? The answer that I'm giving is not the question that's being asked or implied in the actual set up. So some of the other implied questions that we might want to think about when were writing punchlines for this set up our How much worse could it be if we didn't have that technology ? It's awesome that we have the technology to have Slurpees, but how much worse could it be if we didn't have that technology? And you could even add this in slightly into the edge of this set up when you're refining and revising your materials? Awesome that we have got technology have slurpees because it could be way worse. That's this way to set this up. It could be way worse The implied question, of course, now immediately becomes How much worse could it be? And then we right punch lines that outline how much worse it could be the 3rd 1 here. Ah, how much worse was it in the past that they didn't have Slurpees? So if it could be worse, it must have been worse in the past. So we could say It's awesome that we have the technology to move Slurpees today. It was way worse. In the past. They didn't even have that technology. That's another implied question, and you can see I'm starting to point at punchlines. This is the punch line show to emerge naturally out of setups, and we're gonna show you here when I get into inherent questions, some punch lines that sort of come up naturally. Um, finally, another implied question. How much better our Slurpees than other technology? So you can see here, Let's go back to the language. Language is very important in comedy. We can see it's awesome that we have the technology to have Slurpees Well, technology is important to that. So how much better our Slurpees than other technology? But it's also we have the technology and make Slurpees. It blows that we have technology to make atomic bombs. That's a bunch line right there. I just came up with one on the fly. So then there are inherent questions, or what I might call explicit questions. These are questions that you just ask when you're on stage. Jerry Seinfeld famously had this bit about the bugging. The moon buggy. There's a car on the moon. Why do we need a car on the God damn moon? That's a question in itself is maybe a punchline because of his delivery and the absurd nous of the of the question. But it's just asking the question directly. It's an inherent, explicit question, So let's just go with this one. How awesome. Our Slurpees. That's a straight up set up. You have to answer it pretty directly. It doesn't always imply an answer. I don't have any punch lines that come to mind when I say how awesome. Our Slurpees. Ah, I would say Slurpees. They're not very awesome because they have a lot of high fructose corn syrup and they can hurt you. You ever gotten a brain freeze? That's not awesome. So that's one way to answer that question. It's asked directly, and I answered it directly. Unfortunately, that's not a very funny joke, although it does have the structure of a joke. Do you know how much worse it could be without Slurpees? I could has asked that directly to the crowd, so I could say, Let's just return to this for one set up. It's awesome that we have the technology to make Slurpees because we could not have it. It's It's it's not in, You know, it's not an inevitability that we got the technology to make. Slurpees that's a set up. Do you know how much worse it could be without Slurpees? That's a different kind of set up, and it's asking a different question, but each of them are using the same route. Do you know how many lamer things have been invented than Slurpees? And then right here, I just decided to imply the punchline. Mustard gas, the baby shark song, racism, all three of those things are pretty awful and were all invented and are also lamer than Slurpees. So before the audience thinks Slurpees air pretty lame. Just remember that they're better than mustard gas. Okay, although you could make a mustard gas Slurpee, which would maybe be maybe, does that even out? Does that come out in the middle between mustard gas and and Slurpees? I don't know if slavery's air, like an eight on the scale of awesome and mustard gas, is a one. Does a mustard gas Slurpee meet in the middle? I guess if somebody had to ask me, would you like to get mustard gassed? Or would you like a mustard gas Slurpee? I think I'd probably go. I think I'll take the mustard gas Slurpee. All right, anyway, that's called riffing. By the way, that's writing on stage. You're my audience. I just did it. Just go back to that writing lesson, all right? Finally, some other inherent questions. How unlucky or people from the past to be born before Slurpees? That's a direct question. You can ask the audience, and it's a set up. Instead of delicious frozen corn syrup, they got the black plague and famine. That's pretty. That's pretty he's had. I think that's kind of funny myself because it's an accident of history that we happen to be born after Slurpees ah, or or live in a post Slurpee world. The Slurpee was invented during the lifetime of some people listening to this, but many of you who are of Generation Z or the Millennials you grew up with Slurpees, and you could have easily have been born in a time before, let's say antibiotics and instead you were born in a time of Slurpees, so lucky you, you've won the historical lottery. Anyway, these are the types of set up with. One thing that I really want you to take away from this presentation, and this bit is that it's important to understand all setups, ask questions and punchlines. Answer those questions. Whether it's explicit, an inherent or it's implied all punchlines. Answer those questions. We will be getting into punch lines in the next unit, baby. 18. 14 Punchlines and You: so punchlines and you punch lines. These are the most important part of jokes. This is where the money is made. This is where people really become famous. This is the secret sauce. Anybody can write setups. You can sit down. You can write set ups all day. Some are better than others. But punchlines, buddy, that's what that's what it's about. That's what it's about in comedy. Ah, so the question is, this is it magic or is just a dumb formula cannot be taught while cannon it can. I can give you some levers and buttons to push and we'll follow through with it right here . All right, so punchlines in you. Let's jump in punchlines, do a few things. You guys should understand this. Ah, punchlines do a few different things. Ah, they answer the implied or explicit inherent question of the set up. So remember we went over that. The idea is that you have the audience hanging on to a question. What is what is inherently or explicitly placed or implied in the set up? And what you're doing is answering that question. Oh, it's awesome that Slurpees are invented today. Well, okay, well, how awesome is it? They want to know that they want you to go answer that question for them in your punch line and that becomes the punchline of the joke. They also reframe a re contextualize something that we already thought we knew. So you know, this lovely example is a good one. It's pretty great, you know, Slurpees air pretty good. You have a slippery You like Slurpees. You've had him before in your life. But you've never thought about them as the greatest technology in the history of mankind. And your opportunity is to reframe a re contextualize something you already thought we knew . This is part of the reason why comedy has taken over news. Ah, and comedy news shows are so popular is because they can re contextualize information we already thought we knew and explain it in a very humorous way. It's a natural way to do it in the revelation of that information is actually the punch line. They also make us laugh when we right when we write them, if they're good. So as you're writing jokes, is your writing punchlines? If you laugh out loud, it's a pretty good sign that you've got a good punch line. Um, sometimes punch lines don't seem funny when you write on, but you try him out on stage and then suddenly the audience thinks they're funny. I wrote one about tall people a while ago where I said, too tall people were speaking to each other like two lanky great Danes, and I didn't find that terribly funny when I wrote it. I guess I find it kind of funny now. Anyway, you should be laughing out loud. You don't have Teoh, but if you do, it's a sign that you've got a pretty good a punch line. Um, also, they cause an emotional reaction in the audience. So don't ah, don't try not to go with shock humor or what we call blue humor, which is humor that's overtly sexual or disgusting. Ah, but this is actually what they dio, And that's part of the reason that people laugh. And there's a theory that laughter is a surprise of fact that comes from the thought that something dangerous might have happened. But instead something pleasant happened. Think about peekaboo with the child the child hides, you know. Mother hides their her, her face and she's like, Where did I go? On the child's afraid her mother disappeared. And then suddenly Oh, I'm right here. And so it's just your mom. And then the child laughs. It could be something scary, but it turned out to be something pleasant. So shock. Humor is a way that some comedians do. This blue humor is a way that some comedians do this, and some comedians like to do that, and some audiences also like it. But intentionally moving into that space intentionally moving into that shock or blue humor is not a great way to Teoh. Move into comedy originally, so you're gonna be building up to a five minute routine here. I would encourage you to not have shocking or blue jokes in your routine. I would, if you need to write them. If you're doing a free writing, if you're if they're coming to mind, go ahead and write him. Don't censor yourself, but ultimately, when we go through, editing will probably cut a lot of that out. Also, they punched the audience in the F ing face. Eso humor should be funny. It should also be in your face a little bit. It shouldn't be passive. It should be active. It should be going into the audience to be making the audience have feelings, to be making them do things. It should be causing thoughts. You're actually messing with the brains of your audience when you're when you're doing good comedy. So it should actually do that. Should actually punch the audience in the face. But above all else, they make the audience laugh. Punchlines make the audience laugh if they don't make the audience laugh. They weren't really a very good punch line. So there are two types of punchlines. Okay, here's what you need to understand. There a couple of different types of punchlines. Funny, Not funny. You probably wrote a bunch of not funny loser. No, I'm just kidding. There are different types of punchlines, and here they are. We've got got a few of them. This isn't all of them, but this is a few of them. I want to explain. There's a bunch here that you can use to go through your setups. And if you're if you're at a loss for how to take the joke, you could just refer to one of these and then try it out. Just try a few of these different lovers or callbacks. We're gonna go through all of them. So this video is probably be, like, 20 minutes long. Ah, I could cut it up into different parts. But you know what? Let's just do it in one long haul. What do you say? Okay, let's jump in future past. So this is simple, describing a projection into the past of the future with details that draw attention to the absurdity, juxtaposition or injustice and the original premise. So at its core, what you're doing with any set up and with any punchline is drawing more attention to a contrast to a juxtaposition to two things that are next to each other, that that seem like there's some kind of irreconcilable difference between the two. And the more you highlight that difference, the funnier it becomes. So future and past is a way to do this. If you project something into the future, you can talk about how in the future we will be viewing the president or how we view the past and the light of the present or any of these kinds of things. Here's an example joke that I wrote, You can't change the past. It's already happened. For example, I used to be a Gotham High school. I can't get in a DeLorean and back to the future that out of the school year book. So I wrote this a while ago. I actually did used to be a Gotham High school, but the idea is that it was at the time and in the air in a few inherent assumptions in this job. But the audience normally gets it that at the time, I thought being a God was pretty cool, and I actually have another joke about that. Right after this, I say, I thought, um, I want I once wore a spike choker to my French to class because I thought I was trade bad ass. But turns out I was Trey a douchebag, and that just outlines that assumption, which is that I thought I was cool. But now I know it's not cool, and unfortunately, I can't change that. It's already happened. It's in the past, so I can't get in a DeLorean, which is, of course, a reference to the time machine and back to the future. All of that stuff is just just language in this joke with the basic set up is you can't change the past. It's already happened. The punch line is I used to be a god in high school. I can't do anything about it now, no matter how bad I try. So it's a future past. Ah, joke. I would encourage you to go check out how to write a couple of these using the setups you have developed. Finally, also, puns, puns. You could also call these dad jokes. They're using the actual sounds of the words and the logic that comes with the actual words to add additional absurdity or play with the concepts. If you're listening to this class and course and you live in the UK or you live in Europe or potentially, you live in ah ah, Asia even a little bit, especially East Asia. This this is actually a really people in your area love this, Especially in the UK, Puns are a big time thing. I went to do the Edinburgh Fringe Festival a couple years ago. People love these. Why did the electron leave the Adam? Because it had its eye on something else. Ah, uh What a funny joke. So here we know electrons are articles and Adams, and an eye on is what happens when Ah, Adam loses or gains an electron. So if you didn't know those things, don't worry about it. That's why puns fall apart. And there they're bad jokes. Mostly, they're mostly bad jokes, but they're still jokes, and people sometimes laugh at how dumb are absurd They are, and that's fine. Get a laugh anyway. You can. Actually, in a strange way, when you do a lot of comedy, you start appreciating bad jokes almost as much as as good jokes. Let us continue act outs so act outs. Or when you see a lot of new comedians doing this act outs or when, and the actual comedian becomes a character in a tiny one person seen Or maybe they they play two different people talking to each other. Eddie Izzard does a lot of this. Um, he's very good at it. It's It's fall back for a lot of new comics who either come from an acting background or potentially an improv background. Um, I would ask you to shy away from this. I think that you there is a time and place for you to write this, Um, you should write it. If it's coming to mind, you should absolutely do it. But if you find yourself going to it a lot, try to write handfuls of different other types of jokes and you know you're gonna be writing 10 punch lines per joke, so you have a lot of opportunity to write, not act outs. But act outs typically can are pretty funny. And when they get a laugh, they normally can get your largest laugh. This is one of the jokes that I have in my act. How did Germans even tell jokes? Can you imagine a German person telling, Why did the chicken cross the road? So that is a foul wound. He is attempting to traverse the autobahn, so that gets huge laughs in front of audiences. You might not have laughed listening to this, but audiences really like that joke, and it's because it's ridiculous. A German person using the wrong words attempting to describe this chicken crossing the road joke obviously to joke, we all know inherently in the English language. Why did the chicken cross the road to get to the other side. So there is a foul and he's attempting to traverse the autobahn. But I'm using a German accent to do it. All of that compounds on itself and, ah, and there's many different levels or layers of humor, so act outs can be very powerful. But for Nova stand up comics, they tend to rely on act outs rather than trying to actually figure out the language of a joke and act outs. And you can see this here. I I could not do an accent, and I could still tell this joke, and it would probably still get laughs. It's just the accent and the character help sell it. So think about writing some of these. Don't write too many of them. Let's move on Comparisons. Comparisons are very popular in comedy, and you're gonna start seeing these a lot, especially if you go watch a lot of stand up comedy on Netflix or on YouTube. People use comparisons all the time again. Any type of comedy is just highlighting the contrast between two things. So using analogies of phrases like that's like or it's just like to highlight the contrast absurdity in the situation or comparing it with another situation that similar is a great way to do this. It's a great way to highlight the juxtaposition. This is a joke I wrote a while ago with prostate cancer. Most doctors follow a wait and watch strategy that's like coming home and finding a strange man in your house and just waiting to see what he does. It's so insane because it's like you can see the strangeness year if you have ah, polyp on your prostate as a man and your doctor says, Hey, just wait for it. You would never come home and find some strange person living in your house and being like , Well, I'll just go to sleep and see what happens. You would never do that. So the comparison immediately draws the ridiculousness to the original situation. I would encourage you to look at how to write lots of these because they're very good. Lists are always very popular in comedy, I would always say, Do three. Either do one or do three. Don't do more than three. Don't do to. You can if you're gonna do, too. I mean, a comparison is essentially ah to item list, but if you're going to do to you might as well do three, especially if you're just listing them off. A comparison is describing to situations by analogy. Lists are just listing three things or listing one thing. Sometimes people do five. But there's this ruling comedy called The Rule of Threes, and it means that all things in comedy come in threes. If you're gonna do something, do it three times. So here's a Ah, here's a joke that, uh, I wrote earlier You guys were here for the U. N. Should open a Slurpee stand in the lunch room. Each country would get to serve its own. Germany would be the bratwurst flavor. French would be came and bear in India would be curry. So those are obviously all awful flavors before for a Slurpee. Ah, I think a further punch line to this joke would be. And suddenly all of the tropical Third World countries will become very popular because they're the ones that have the best fruit. Of course. I mean, nobody wants a curry flavor Slurpee. Anyway, you get the idea. These lists are a great way to provide fodder for punch lines. Um, you can see the set up the U. N. Should open a Slurpee stand lunch room. Every country will get to serve its own. That opens the door immediately to what countries would do what. And this is just a list of those three things moving on callbacks. So callbacks are powerful. These air a special kind of punchline that calls up human from earlier in the routine and then repeats it again later, even not that funny jokes can get powerful callbacks. Chris Rock is a master of this. I would encourage you to watch bigger and blacker because there is an amazing call back later in the show. I'm not going to reveal it for you here, but you will notice it when you watch it and you can see that this is a great way to generate lots of humor and really make the audience feel like you're a virtual. So they're like, How did he or she do that? How did the comedian do that call back here that I've written? Let's check it out. Don't trust Adams. They make up everything. Remember? Remember a while ago when I talked about Adams? Here they are. They're back. That's a call back. Ah, you can Onley. Really? Right callbacks. You can't write them. You, But you can find them. Is what I was told by Gilda Hauser, the original woman who taught me how to do stand up comedy. You cannot write a callback. You confined a call back and we will talk about that when we're arranging our material later comes up in the editing and rehearsal process moving along 180 degree turn. This is when you suddenly do the opposite of what you were doing before and immediately highlights the contrast basically, by pushing it directly by explicitly stating that it was 100 native degree turn. Aziz Ansari Ah, released a new comedy special just recently this week. Ah, in July of 2019. I think it's called right now. Um, that special has a lot of 180 degree turns in it. It's great. It is a great way to throw in front of the audience something that is absurd. And you want to point out the absurdity of Here's the example I have. And then Barack Obama got elected in 100 years of peace and prosperity reigned over America psych. That didn't happen. We elected Trump and everything fell apart. So you can get a laugh out of this because people can see Not only is there some absurdity because 100 years of peace and prosperity did not reign over American that can already see it. But 180 degree flip is me talking about how awful things are now that Trump got elected. Now, I don't know what your politics are, but just leave that aside for a moment. Appreciate how this is 180 degree flip on this joke. And it wasn't real life, too. It was terrifying. If you want your money back over that, go ahead. I don't more. I'm all right with that moving along. Exaggeration. This comes in three varieties, and I'm gonna explain all three of them because they're slightly nuance and it's worth understanding. There's the double down, the Reducto ad absurdum and the over inflation. So when we move into the double down, what we see is oh, did I say he was odd? Because I meant to say he was the weirdest person who had lived ever. So what you're doing is you're saying one thing that's a little bit and then you're doubling down on it right in front of somebody, and there's lots of different ways to do this. I have some friends who talk about. They're like, Oh, man, yeah, I was so crazy. I smoked a bunch of weed and, man, it was like I was so wired for hours and oh, wait a minute. Did I say I smoked weed? I meant to say, I smoked meth. That's a double down. You're taking one element of the punchline and you're throwing another heavier layer on top of it. You're saying, Oh, is that plus one? Because it's actually plus 10 and the audience can feel it. They cause an emotional reaction. It's very funny. I said this, this part of did I say who is autumn? And to say he was the weirdest person who had ever lived ever was something that I said during routine about a roommate of mine who was a very strange person. Super strange, very weird guy. Let's move along. The next type of exaggeration is the Reducto ad absurdum. This one comes from Ah, the world of philosophy, and what you're doing is you're taking one logical component of us of the set up or a statement, and you're exaggerating it to the point where you're reducing the concept beyond a breaking point. So ah, many philosophers use this to find faults and flaws and other people's thinking and logic. You'll use this on stage to an absurd degree, Teoh, because humor. So here's one I saw. This is not my joke. This is another joke from a friend named Alex. He's very funny. I saw a sign that said Obama raise taxes. Hitler raise taxes. Obama equals Hitler part of me. But I didn't know that there were people who thought the height of Hitler's crimes was raising taxes. That's why I love this joke. This joke is so funny because, obviously, obviously the height of Hitler's crimes was not raising taxes. Like nobody's looking up in a history book and saying, Well, wait a minute, Hold on a second, this Hitler guy and he goes further in this joke. He's like this Hitler guy. He's pretty bad. Did you know that he raised taxes over 8% like it's so it's so completely ridiculous that someone would make a comparison between Obama and Hitler because there is no comparison. So we're reducing the logic of that argument to its breaking point, which is that there isn't anybody who believes that the height of Hitler's crimes is raising taxes, which is what the comparison from Obama takes place. Must obviously be an idiot. So that's That's where this joke is coming from. That's reductio ad absurdum. Think about this, especially if you have setups that are causing a logical case that you're not trying to make but you're observing in the world. This is great for observation, all humor. There's a lot of things that Jerry Seinfeld does that air, this similar type of situation. Um, if you're making a case, I don't tend to use a lot of these because I make I make the case. I'm the the change agent in the stand up routine, but if you're more of an observational person, this is ah, really good, productive way toe right? A lot of jokes. Finally, let's talk about over inflation, so over inflation, you could also call it hyperbole. It's a little bit different than doubling down. It's not Reducto AB ad absurdum. It's basically pushing Mawr energy into something and in building it up even larger to an absurd degree. So let's look into this. The average whale is a brain 5 to 7 times larger than the average human. So, you know that paper you wrote about Old man in the sea? Ah, Whale wrote a paper that when he was wrote that paper when he was three and it was a hit song. So we know Whale saying, We know whales have brains 5 to 7 times larger than humans. Look it up, It's true. And you wrote a paper probably one day about Old Man and the Sea, because everybody in America and High School does that well, that whale was so smart that he wrote that paper when he was three and it wasn't just a paper. It was a hit song. That's the over inflation. So when I'm making cases for things on stage, I tend to use this one a lot. It's it's it's Ah, it's just pushing mawr into something than would be there. So obviously whales don't write papers. They do sing songs, which is why that that logic of the joke kind of works, and it's maybe a little bit of a pun in there, but the over inflation is that there's there's no way a well would do this. So I would encourage you to t check this out as well. For ah, for a lot of different types of jokes that you're writing again, you're gonna have a lot of punch lines so doubling down reductive at observing over inflation or great sources. And you can use all of them on just about every joke that you're writing. Finally, understatement. Understatement is a little bit like exaggeration, except it's drawing attention to a difference by deliberately under playing it by deliberately under reacting to the emotional content of the premise or the set up. So, um, it's, you know, if you live on the continent of Europe, if you're a French speaker who's listening to this the French, for some reason, do not understand this kind of sarcasm. The English very much understand that this is something you probably do in your daily life if you're British, but the French don't understand it all. For some reason, I'm not sure if the broader European continent gets it, and I'm not sure if ah, Asian or African continent's get it. But understatement is something where you go like, Oh, that's great when it's very much not great. Let's see the example here. My girlfriend and I have an open relationship, which is cool. I thought I was coming out on top when im we made that deal, but it turns out her on bottom a bunch of times. This is a joke that I do in my act will probably do it next week when I'm doing featuring, and it basically is. The understatement is cool. Understatement is Ah, yeah, that's cool. And why is it cool? Because I thought I was coming out on top when I made that deal. But it turns out it was her on bottom a bunch of times, meaning she's having a lot more sex than I am. Ah, and I'm dealing with a little bit of the language. So there's some pun in here, too. I thought I was coming out on top, but she was coming on a bottom a bunch of times, so because you could be on top or in bottom when you're having sex, that's the joke. But the understatement sets that up properly because the emotional content of that second and third sentence of the joke. I thought I was coming on top, turns out on her own bottom a bunch times. That's something that I could say that's stupid, which was stupid of me. Or I could say like I did in this, an understatement, which is cool. Now the audience is almost hooked into Why was that cool? Ah, it it's just a different way of approaching this, But you can, you can say, um, you know, if you're just to use another trump thing here If Trump got elected, which was awesome, it's using sarcasm to pull the audience into a specific type of emotional space where something can be explored. So that's a good way to do. It is to understate in order to a draw attention to the difference. But altogether, above all else, puns, punchlines, exaggeration, punchlines, anything. They make the audience laugh. So even if you don't have, even if it's not a category that I've written about, even if it's not something that even make sense to you. But you laugh at it and the audience laughs at it, then it's a punch line. You should go ahead and do it. People have tried Thio Thio. Figure out how comedians do what they do and, ah, lot of people sometimes are. It's a mystery. Exact Alphin, Akkus, um, Eddie Izzard. Sometimes they're not really sure exactly why the audiences laughing You're when you're watching them. But you know what? They just make him laugh. So that's that's the best. And, ah, I would encourage you to just go ahead and and explore as much as possible what is possible with all kinds of punchlines. And if it makes the audience laugh, it's a good punch line. Ah, thanks so much. This has been 25 minutes, so I'm glad you're still holding on. 19. 15 Intro to Editing: Hey, So in this next section, we're gonna talk about editing that I have mentioned before that writing is actually just really rewriting that. There's a lot of actual editing that goes on in the stand up process. You can see from the punchlines I was writing early. You were probably like, Yeah, these air. Not that brilliant. Yeah, they're about Slurpees there, off the top of my dome. They're not that brilliant. It's true. They're not. Nobody is brilliant at first. Rough draft. Nobody's brilliant. On their first try, you got to go through a whole bunch of different types of editing and writing, and we're gonna dive into it. But the basic premise is this You want to get is close of possible between this set up in the punchline that you want as little time as possible. You want to get rid of the, uh anything that's in the way of the set up in the punch line. You want the mental furniture of the of the set up in the logical components of it to be immediately next to the punch line. You don't want to delay it at all. Although we will talk about pauses and delays in the rehearsing section. But in terms of editing, you don't want anything there. That's not gonna be there. You want it clear and crisp, the way Bill Burr says. It is not an ounce of fat on it. You want a very crisp joke. You know, it doesn't make any sense of someone who was to say, Why did the chicken cross the road? Um, well, because he had lots of things he was thinking about, and ultimately he just thought, I'm gonna get to the other side. Nothing needs to be in the center of that joke. It's just Why did the chicken cross the road? To get to the other side? That's there's There's no space between those two thoughts. They're right next to each other. So that's how you want to get at a high level with the everything that you're doing. So we're gonna jump in, and I'm gonna show you what I dio we're gonna get and use the computer. You can do it in a notebook also by trying out different words, cutting out words, cutting out even syllables. J. Chris Newberg, who's a ah, good friend of mine and who I started with in Detroit years ago, spent on television a number of times, he likes to say, cut out syllables that don't even need to be there. The way Jerry Seinfeld thinks about it is it's like a song you need to. You need to move along in a certain kind of way to pull the audience along with you, so you want to make it simple. You want to make it easy to digest and understand. That's the basis behind editing, and you want to get those to emotional components next to each other. Let's dive in and take a look. 20. 16 Editing Jokes: so welcome to the unit on editing. We're gonna use one joke for this that I have what we came up with together from the 7 11 routine. It's awesome that we have the technology to have Slurpees. Imagine how much better we have it than literally everyone in the past. Ah, that's the set up. And we've got our 10 punchlines, and we're gonna go through and try to figure out which one is the best. And then cut this down. This ultimately is gonna become a ah, very particular kind of joke. Let's go ahead. Zoom in a little bit. It's gonna become a very particular kind of joke. And right now it's It's a lot. You can see this is a ton, but let's start with the set up itself before we even jump into it. What do we want? It's awesome that we have the technology. They have Slurpees. Ah, imagine how much better we have it, then literally everyone in the past. What can we cut out of this? I think just to start out with, um, we could say it's amazing that the technology to have Slurpees exists that just cuts down some of those words right away. We have it so much better then literally everyone in the past. It's pretty short. It's cut down a few syllables from here, but it's a little crisper. I would encourage you to do this with your setups, so let's go through it. You can read each of these individually. We'll take a little bit, but we'll try to figure out which one we like. How many wars that were fought because people didn't couldn't drink cooled stuff? How many Slurpees could have saved people's lives? Not really. Punch line. It was my first attempt at going at somewhere. I could write something further about that, that drinking something cold would have stopped so many different historical events. I think I just I think it moved on to number two here. With that, the police in Selma had just given a celebrity. Several rights movement would have been over in a few weeks. Ah, I don't know if that's that funny. Maybe we'll come back to it. Imagine what the slurpees of the future will have Will be amazing. Uranium flavored moons. Slurpees zero g. Slurpees. You think a Slurpee? You could go weightless, actually, like this, but I don't think it's good for this joke. Let's move on and toss that down here by itself. And what we might do is write a second joke about that. Ah, afterward. But right now, we're just gonna go ahead and leave that. In fact, I'll cut it. Maybe scientists will divide history in a pre and post Slurpee time reckoning B C A D B C E c Preissler be in post celebrity. Maybe the Slurpee will come to be understood as history's greatest invention. USSR fell after the Slurpee. This is kind of a funny idea. Um, I don't really know if it lines up with this set up, though. That's part of the issue. It's good that I created this. I actually think I'm gonna keep this one to the side also. So we're gonna head and put that down here. This could be a joke of its own, or could be a tag which could go onto a joke later. And just to be clear, a tag is a punchline that happens after a punch line. You, the punch and a couple other little things afterwards that keep the humor going. So maybe that could be something, but I didn't think it was good enough. Toe stand on its own Slurpee was invented in 1982 and nothing interesting has happened since Moon in 1969 Last Moon Missions a year. The slipper was invented. No Mars mission. The slope was the culmination of history, and that actually is pretty funny. I think I think that's pretty funny. But again, it doesn't feel like it's a continuation off this set up necessarily. It's another good one. In fact, I think I might break that off and pop it over here because it seems like it's a pretty good joke that runs along with these two. So we're just gonna go ahead and get rid of that one. Also, animals can't have Slurpees. Eventually, philosophers will call that animal cruelty. Uh, not really sure that's a joke. Let's go ahead and get rid of that one. Not having slippery is the biggest problem in the apocalypse. The first bullets that will be fired after society collapse, it will be four Slurpees. World War three will be over Slurpees. Yeah, it's kind of a lot lot moving around there. Don't think that's a great joke either. U N should have an open, slippery drink by everyone, and every country should have their own local flavor. I think that's a pretty good joke. I used that in the punchline video. Let's move forward. Let's hang on to that for a second. People have imagine Slurpees from all of history. Cave paintings. Let's go caves in France, Onley in 1982. Could they be deciphered? But we can't make them because they require saber tooth tigers and they're extinct. We don't DaVinci had drawings of flour, beans, the notebooks, but he died. This is pretty good. It is a logical continuation off this set up. Actually, it's one of the first ones that I wrote. With the exception of maybe this one, that actually is a logical continuation of that set up. I could alter the set up. Um, you can always do that. You can always return to the set up an altar to fit the punch line you want. Actually, a lot of comedians do that. Dave Chappelle is famous for creating punchlines first and then looking for setups to complete them until, like a puzzle game. But that's not the point of this exercise necessarily. Uh, all of this modern bullshit is worth it. Taxes, trump, social media, other BS, global warming. It's all worth it to get a brain freeze. That could be cool. But then I would have to talk about, I guess, why Slurpees Air so great. I have to build up a lot of it. Seems like a lot of work to do in this joke. It doesn't fulfill the set up again. I could break that often. Do its own joke. I think this one. People have imagined Slurpees from all of history. That's pretty funny. The idea that the Lesko caves in France and we could only decipher them in 1982 because the syrupy had been invented. Leonardo da Vinci having drawings of a Slurpee in his book, We just immediately thinking a couple of different ones. Egyptian depictions of mummy's or of pharaohs. Mommies don't drinks Slurpees Mummies air dead with Slurpees. We could maybe save in something like Roman emperors having slaves crush up ice but hadn't invented corn. Hadn't discovered corn. Pardon me so no corn syrup. So what you want to look for is when you're editing is options to continue to develop. So that's what this is. I just found this. This is a good joke in itself. I had that one written earlier. Um, these air pretty good. I like nobody who marched on Selma had a Slurpee. That's kind of funny. But honestly, this one, I think, makes the most sense for this joke. So I'm gonna go ahead and get rid of all of this, and that's gonna be the joke. Now, this is actually the joke. So what I'm gonna dio is pop that out and just go ahead and write this out completely. So ah, we'll go ahead and write this language out completely by itself. This is how I edit and put things together. So that's the entire joke. Let's forget these for a second. I think they're pretty good. We might go ahead and build those out in the next couple of videos, but for right now, let's look at I don't know if these air actually spelled a lesko, but there's caves in France cave paintings. It's always good to be specific in comedy. This is a good time to learn this lesson. You want to be specific. I could say cave paintings and just left it at that. But the Lesko Caves and France are a specific reference. It's very interesting. For some reason. Specificity causes people to latch on. It makes a very clear mental image. Cave paintings is General Lesko Caves in France is specific. In years or specific, I could have said on Lee after the slippery was invented. Could it be deciphered? But Onley in 1982 and then I could add on after the Slurpee was invented could be deciphered. So we know we're trying to build that mental picture. So now that we have, let's let's try to go through and continue to added it. We have it so much better than live literally everyone. In the past, people have imagined Slurpees from all of history cave paintings that let's go caves in France. So I could just say the Lesko Cave paintings in France could on Lee be deciphered in 1982 after the Slurpee was invented. But we can't make them, but we can't use them. They actually have recipes for Slurpees, but we can't make them because they require Sabretooth tigers and they're extinct. Doesn't sound like a delicious Slurpee. So that's a full joke. And it started Ah, without having necessarily the full joke. Completely there. So this Leonardo da Vinci s drawings, or so brings no books. But he died, Okay, But he's dead. Yeah, I don't know why that follows, but that's kind of funny This I might try that out on stage, actually, but he died. Is kind of a funny punch to this set up. Ah, because I don't say anything about it. It's almost ah non sequitur, which is ah, type of joke in which the punchline that follows has nothing to do with the set up that began it. Egyptians, depictions of pharaohs with Slurpees There are once again I can't type Egyptian depictions of pharaohs with Slurpees. Ah, what can we say about them? There are Egyptian depictions of pharaohs with slurpees. Um Ah, there, uh, mummified remains. Ah, lightning bolts show the evidence of brain freeze. Roman emperors having slaves to crush up ice. Roman emperors had had slaves, Karkovice. But there was but every flavor of slurpee was disgusting because nobody in the old world had corn syrup. Corn syrup is specific. That's funny, because that's what slippers and made out of. So now you can see here I've built this out and I've kind of additionally added some components to it that add contacts with writing. It sort of flows better. Now let's gave let's go Cave paintings in France going to be decided 92 after the Slurpee was invented. Ah, we could say something. Before that. We just thought it was, um, you know, cups of coke or something. I don't know. There's a ridiculous, but I don't think I had that in. They're actually have recipes for Slurpees, but we can't make them. Ah, because they require Sabretooth tigers and they're extinct. Doesn't sound like a delicious Slurpee. Let's get rid of that because it we have this punchline later. Bang, Leaner. And DaVinci actually had had a drawing of a slurping his notebooks. But he died. Yeah, not that funny. Let's go ahead and cut it out. Also strange different time, period. There are Egyptian, just depictions of pharaohs with Slurpees. Mummified remains, lighting bulls to show the evidence of brain freeze. That's its own punchline. Roman emperors had slaves to crush up ice, but every flavor of slippery was disgusting because nobody in the world in the Old World had corn struck. So as actually a full, this is a full joke. It's the rule of threes. Or in here, Um, let's go Cave paintings, Egyptian depictions, Roman emperors. Let's go through and see if we can cut down even more. People have imagined slippers from all of history. People have always imagined Slurpees. So we know that's true because we already talked about it in the past. There's no reason to repeat that again here, um, it also immediately drives towards this point the Lesko Cave paintings in France, uh, could only be decided in 1982 after the Slurpee was invented. Now that asks the question. Ah, well, what did people think it was beforehand that might imply that question. I don't know if I want that implied, because I just go straight into they actually have recipes for Slurpees. Um, I might just cut this out. Bang Moscow cave Paintings and friends actually have recipes for Slurpees, but nobody could make sense of them. But we can't make them because they require saber tooth tigers and they're extinct. That's decent. Maybe that's funny. Maybe it's not. I'll do that on stage, I would do it on stage. In that form, there are Egyptians. This pictures of pharaohs were Slurpees. Moment five remains lining both show the evidence of brain freeze. No, if I remains, doesn't need to be here. There are Egyptian depictions. High Rogel. If ICS There we go Still can't spell higher Olympics of pharaohs with Slurpees Lightning bolts show the evidence. Lightning bolts pointing to the head show the evidence of brain freeze. That's kind of funny. Now it clears it up. It's very direct. Hire Olympics. Is this a specific word? Ah, pharaohs with Slurpees lighting bolts disappointing that had to show the evidence of brain freeze. I might just get rid of that show. Brain freeze. Everybody knows what a brain freezes, and the evidence offer some words that maybe don't need to be there. Roman emperors have slaves crush up ice, but every flavor of celebrity was disgusting because the Romans didn't have colon corn syrup clears this up. So what I would do is continue to cut that language down. Hopefully, you can understand. I want to get rid of words and even syllables that don't need to be there. I want to cut out things and cut it down. This went from is you could to see previously the entire page of all kinds of different jokes and punchlines to this one set up and then a handful of punchlines and jokes that are really short. Ah, if you can reduce this even more, I would encourage you to do it. Ah, I'll have it in the assignment. If you can reduce it more or even parse it out into other jokes like I've done here, that would be completely fine. Also, you can actually get a lot of material from a really crisp and well crafted joke because it implies other things. So that's the basic approach to editing. You can see it's taken us about 15 minutes to go through this. It takes a while, but once you find out what you want and what you want to do on stage, it's great. This is really only one joke. Probably take me about a minute, maybe to do this on stage. But ah, you do 20 of those and then you've got a 20 minute feature bit, so you're gonna be doing probably between five. And I would say 10 of these, probably about eight to fill out your five minute bit 21. 17 Arranging Jokes: so welcome to the next unit on editing. This one is about arrangement. So after you go into the actual words the diction of your jokes, you're gonna have a handful of different ones that you want. Toe. Uh, use may be on stage. You want to arrange those in a way, that sort of makes sense from a thematic standpoint. To build the premises, you work through your bits and your routines. Ah, So what I've done here is I've clean this up a little bit. I've This is the same document we were using before the 7 11 routine talking about Slurpees . Um, maybe all you end up using some of this on stage and ah, and popping the video on here to culminate the course. But the ah, the bits here are divided up in a way that maybe doesn't make the most sense. So I've got there first joke here. It's awesome of the technology to have slurpees exist, were so much we have it's so much better than literally everyone else in the past. Imagine Slurpees of the future will have that could be amazing. Uranium flavored drink in glow in the dark moon Slurpee zero g. Slurpees, You drink Slurpees and you go weightless. Um, all that kind of stuff. Slurpee was invented in 1982 and nothing interesting has happened since moon in 1969. Last moon mission was the year the Slurpee was invented. No Mars mission. Slippery was the culmination of history. Maybe scientists will divides history into pre impose Slurpee time reckoning BC 80 Preissler pre post Lerby ps and P s. Okay, so maybe not those. Maybe this lovely will come to be understood as history's greatest invention and not vaccines. There are no anti slippers out there, actually. Really, actually really like that joke. Ah. So where do we want to do where we want to put these? How do we want to arrange them? It doesn't really make sense to start out here and then move through in the way that they have. We do have a little bit about Imagine the Slurpees the future will have. So we have the future. We have the past here. That kind of makes sense. The Slurpee was invented in 1982 and nothing interesting has happened since that could be Maybe scientists will deserve to be sir. People coming to be understood of history's greatest invention. Ah, that's pretty interesting. So let's maybe move this here on top of this. We already know what should go there, because, ah, it doesn't make sense. It makes sense to go from the slope was found in 92 maybe the slip. It'll come to be understood as history's great invention makes sense to have these two kind of next to each other. Um, I think it makes sense to have Slurpees in the future after ones in the past. I think that does make sense. Um, and then this makes sense to divide history into pre and post Slurpee time reckoning. Maybe between them, actually. So we're gonna move that up here. We're gonna get rid of that one here. And I think that having these two moved to the top before this actually makes more sense also something. Go ahead and get rid of this. Now we have a different looking bit. Maybe the survey will come to be understood as history's greatest invention, not vaccines. There are no anti slippers out there. That's cool. So it has to be greater than vaccines because no mothers air refusing to give their Children Slurpees. Slurpees were invented in 1982 and nothing interesting has happened since Moon and 69 Last Moon missions, years sober was invented. No Mars mission. Maybe if we had held off the Slurpee for a few years of Beyond Mars, the Slurpee was the culmination of history. It's awesome technology that is exists tohave it with so much better than literally everyone in the past. So it's see here it flows along a little more logically, a little more fluidly, in fact. Ah, you know, the fact that we have Slurpees makes it literally better than everyone in the past. So there I can already that that's that set up. I've cut down tremendously because we've already introduced the concepts here with a couple of different jokes. So this is how this works Now. When we get to, we have Slurpees, we have slurpees, so we have it so much better than everyone else. Literally. In the past, people have always imagined Slurpees. Since time and Memorial Jalisco cave paintings in France actually have recipes for slippers , yada, yada, yada. We get the rest of the joke. Maybe scientists will divide history. So now that I've introduced the concept of Slurpees and history have introduced slow, please hear Greatest invention invented in 82 that introduces the idea of history. When I talk about this joke, which is a little pun PS and PS, that's kind of ridiculous. That's a little Dad joke. And then imagine those Slurpees the future would have. So I'm actually moving through this pretty logically from, ah, from a concept development standpoint. So what I want you to do, is, is is once you edit your jokes individually to make them work, now you want to start thinking about how can I introduce them in a way that makes sense to talk about on stage? It makes sense to go through this routine in the way that I did. If I had bounced around in it from just one to the other, it would be all over the place. This actually leads the audiences, uh, thinking in a way that that actually makes sense. So go ahead and do the same with your material. Obviously you want to build up to about five minutes. Material should be maybe 2 to 3 of these little bits where They're a handful of different jokes on one topic. Um, you know, ultimately, your five minute bit should have probably to two, maybe even three topics. No more than that, probably, and should be more than one, though. So move through him and and arrange them in a way that makes sense. Even when you do this, you might find that some jokes that you thought made sense here don't and maybe they need to be rewarded. You could find new ways to cut them down like I did. It's a really good way to tighten up your bits and routines. 22. 18 Intro to Rehearsal: welcome. Welcome to my apartment. It's good to see you here. And welcome to the introduction to the unit on rehearsing. So here's the thing. This is not the stage. We're not at the stage. I do have a microphone. I do have a mic stand, as you can see, but this is not the stage yet. This is my apartment. Because this will be your apartment, not this actual apartment. Hopefully hope I'm gonna stay here. But you will be doing this in your own apartment. So we rehearsing is the name of the game. Now, most comedians were hers in one of two ways. They either rehearse in their own mind and like me, maybe at home with ah, Mike or, ah, recording device, which you definitely have. You can use your phone or they rehearse on stage by getting on stage and just going for it a lot of the time. That's actually what I do also is I get on stage and I just try material out. But since this will be your first time on stage and since you're gonna be doing five minutes at a time, you're gonna actually try this out in your house first, so you don't have to get a mic stand. But what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna link in the description off this episode. Ah, and lesson A a link to Amazon so you can pick up basically this mic stand and a microphone if you want. You can even plug your microphone directly into your phone in your recorder and go ahead and try your material out. Why is this helpful? Well, it's obviously helpful because you get to move around with a mic stand. You could see how the Mike moves. You get to feel the weight of it. Most places you're gonna go to, we're gonna have a Mike and Mike stand. It's really one of the one of the few things that people feel they need to have when they do comedy. Of course, you don't have to. All you need, like I said in the first bit, is yourself and an audience. But you can order these things you don't have to. When I first started doing comedy and for many years I didn't own any of this equipment, I just used my phone or when I first started doing it back in 2002. I literally just used a voice memo recorder. You want to listen to it? You want to record it. You want to listen to it back. That's the name of the game. When it comes to rehearsing, you wanna listen? You want to record. You wanna listen back? You want to do that over and over and over again. The same material. The point is, this internalize your material you don't want to over prepare. It's strange because when you see comedians, especially new comedians, they write their jokes. They really want their jokes to be successful and they over prepare. They come in a lot. They do this when they try to memorize every single word. I'm not gonna have you memorized every single word. It's really difficult to do that. What's important to understand those to internalize the parts that are very particular that are very particular to get the words correct, and you'll know those parts in your own bits and own material. You'll have edited them by now. You'll have him right in front of you, and you're gonna read them very slowly and record you reading them. Then you're gonna listen back to it and internalize those words. This eventually will get to a point where you can speak extemporaneously and you'll have internalized all of your material. So we're gonna talk a little bit about how to do that. In these lessons, we're gonna talk about pacing. We're gonna talk about how to rehearse and where to rehearse and things like that. But it's important to understand that I won't be going over too much about how to use the mike or the mike's stand or any of this that will be for the intermediate course. For the beginners. This will be about how to record yourself, how to listen back to your material, how to improve it, and then how to eventually prepare yourself mentally for getting on stage to do your 1st 5 minute bits. 23. 19 Pacing Rehearsing Lesson 1: everybody and welcome to the first lesson in rehearsing. This is on pacing. What is pacing mean? Pacing, basically, is how quickly you're speaking. How fast you speaking. How fast are you talking? How are you going through your material? How fast do you get through it now? One of the biggest issues that new comedians have is that they tend to want to get through their material. They think that if I go quickly, if I get through the jokes, that's what makes them funny. The truth is, that's not what makes them funny. Delivery is what makes them funny. There is a great joke about comedy and pacing, and it goes like this. What is the number one rule of comedy? Timing. So the problem, of course, with the joke you could see it is that timing. If it's the number one thing about comedy, it can't be rushed. You have to actually time yourself properly, and that's what pacing is now. The first bit of advice I ever got with pacing came from my uncle, who is a stand up comedian in Detroit, and he said, This pacing is simple. Go slower than you think. You should be going. It's that easy. If you slow down, slow way down and you go slower than you think you should be going. You're actually going to go about the correct pace because your brain, when you're on stage, is gonna be moving a mile a minute. It's gonna be going very quickly. You're gonna be thinking all kinds of different thoughts, and you're gonna want to move through your material because your heart rate is going to increase the first time you're on stage. This will definitely happen. So this is why I want you to rehearse and record yourself. Speaking very slowly, I want you to internalize the words that you're using. The first lesson is this. Slow down, slow way down. If you have a mirror in your apartment and your recording, watch yourself. Watch your body language record very slowly. If your joke is, why did the chicken cross the road to get to the other side? Slow it way down. Why did the chicken cross the road to get to the other side? The point of the rehearsing is to get these words into your brain to make muscle memory out of them, to feel yourself saying them. And then if you're doing it in front of a mirror, you can see yourself saying them You might find new places. Teoh, to do things like Gesture will talk about that in a bit. Will also, you'll you'll see different ways for you. Deliver this material by inflection, but right now it's just through pacing. You'll feel your body. Want to speed up. You'll feel your body. Want to change inflection, but right now, just focus on doing it slowly. Continue to do it because in the moment when you're on stage, you will do those things. But first you need to internalize the slow cadence of speech to make sure you're not rushing your material out on stage. So move slowly. Go through all of your jokes, take out your phone or your voice recorder. Or, if you've picked up one of these mikes, take out your mike and record yourself saying it very slowly. It should take longer than five minutes, and that's a good thing 24. 20 Pausing Rehearsing Lesson 2: The next lesson in rehearsing is gonna be pausing. Pausing is something that you're gonna do on stage. But you need to build it into your routine because understanding how you deliver jokes is gonna be very important. So pausing works like this. I have a joke. I've said it already once in this in this in this series. But the joke is this. I just turned 30 recently like 39 months ago. Just turned it. There's a slight pause between I just turned 30 recently. Pause 39 months ago just turned it so the joke would not work if I said I just turned 30 recently, like 39 months ago, that would go right past the audience. So when you're speaking on stage, you have to allow time for the audience to absorb what you're saying. So especially if you have a lot of heavy words, words that are multi syllabic words that are 34 syllables long. You really want the audience to be able to catch up with what you're saying in the way that you do that is by pausing. Pausing also builds tension. It's hard for you, the comedian, to do that But if you rehearse it, it actually can provide a lot more punch to your material. Because, let's remember, punch lines are about audiences releasing or having an emotional reaction and building tension is a great way to do that. Comedy comes from the relief of tension. Remember me talking about the peekaboo with the baby and the mother so that tension is comes from pauses. So every time you come to a point like a set up and you're about to go into a punch line, you should pause. Rehearse those pauses, do it. Get in front of your mirror, take out your memo, um, read three or material and make sure you're pausing before you go into a punch line. Any time you have a big word pause for half a moment before moving forward. Now, the first time you do comedy, you're gonna be excited. So if you don't rehearse these pauses, you probably won't end up hitting them. It's a lot going on. Your body doesn't know what to keep track of the first time you're on stage, so it's difficult. But if you rehearse them, you'll be able to do it. So look through your material. I used to put a small asterisk like a little star and extent, any point that I wanted to pause or learn how to pause. And then when rehearsing it, I would pause there. So not only are you gonna go through it slowly, you're also going to pause every time you hit one of those points. So go ahead and do that. Mark up your actual material, whether it's on a computer or in your notebook or on a print out, and then read through slowly and pause where you notice it. 25. 21 Inflection Rehearsing Lesson 3: The next lesson we're gonna talk about in rehearsing is inflection. So inflection is just changing or modifying your voice a little bit to put a little more emphasis on one word or another. So this works in many different ways. One of the punchlines. It's definitely involved with his understatement. So if you're saying, Oh, man, Donald Trump is a great president, you can all hear that I changed my inflection a little bit there. Now, as you go through your material, you tighten it up, you edit it together. What you want to do is find moments where you can add inflection that will reinforce the emotions you're trying to deliver in a punchline. So if we go back to a joke and say Slurpees would be great in the U. N. Because they need, they could have a sweeping machine. The lunch room. Every every country could have their own Slurpee. Ah, you could see I'm excited going through it Now if I start going through and I'm going, you know, it would be amazing. Is India could have curry. That's immediately Boop. I'm dropping the energy now. If the punchline was things are gonna be great. and then you. And then you reinforce how bad something is gonna be because of the inflection you're putting on your words. It reinforces the emotional delivery of the punch line, and the audience is going to get that. So the way that I do this, when I go through my materials, I'm market up by using italics or underlining to reinforce which words I want to perform in which way when I rehearse. So I would encourage you to do that. Also is when you read through your material, were her saying a word one way or another just a little bit, and you don't have to do it too much because this will come out naturally onstage. But the helpful things that will help you internalize where you want to take it now may be in the moment. You're gonna want to make a different decision. That's totally fine. But being able to have that rehearsal is going to reinforce that muscle memory so that when you're on stage, you can actually deliver those words in the way that you had intended. So go back through your material. Rehearse again. I know this is the third time now but you're gonna have to do it a lot. Ah, those exact wording. Slowly, with pauses and now with different emphasis, go back and do it. 26. 22 Gesture Rehearsing Lesson 4: now, this is gonna be a unique lesson, because this is gonna be on expression and gesture. Here's the thing about expression and gesture and comedy. Stand up comedy has a mike, and it hasn't mic stand. So part of what you're doing is going to be spoken for by the fact that you have to have a mike that you're speaking in. You don't necessarily have to use the mic stand now for the first a few years that I did stand up comedy and by years I actually mean years. I was too scared to actually take the mic out and start talking with it. It's pretty simple. He describe it, Pick it up, move the mic, stand to the side and now I'm talking with you extemporaneously. I can move the mic around Aiken gesture with both hands. I can move the mic up. I can move the mic down. If I'm tryingto express positivity, I can go like there's like, Oh my gosh, can you believe it from trying? Express negativity. Aiken. Bend down. I could just her downwards. I could even point using these things, but you don't have to do that. Let's return to this and just start with the most basic types of gestures and movements. One is going to be very simple. It's just gonna be standing behind the microphone. You can go ahead and do it like this. Just stand and just talk. Now, if you're rehearsing this without a mic, all you have to do is take your recording device and just hold it like this up in front of you. Don't move around. You don't have to gesture that much. In fact, some comedians air so low energy, but their comedy is so good that they just stand here and they just do this. I would encourage you to do that yourself. You'll feel it in your body if it's right for you. Now, if you want to move around a little bit more, you can take the mic stand. You can lean over with it. You can turn to the side. There's a great comedian, they a J. Leu Becker in Los Angeles who really does this a lot. He puts his foot on the base of the mike stand, and then he leans into it. Turns it around, looks at different areas of the audience. This is kind of a looming thing, but he holds on to the mike stand, keeps his energy right here. So if you don't have a mic stand, you can still practice that you're basically just holding your both hands, your memo or, ah, voice recorder or phone and just leaning over just leaning like this. Go ahead and try this out because what this is is a process of exploration. You're gonna imagine yourself in front of an audience you're gonna be reading your material . Might have your notes right in front of your computer right on your desk in front of you. You're gonna be imagining yourself, going through this, reading your comedy, doing it, slowly, adding and pauses, adding an emphasis. And you're gonna feel things in your body. I would encourage you to move around a little bit. Get loose, shake it up, go ahead and shake yourself out. Now go ahead and try it. If you feel yourself wanting to just stand there and read because you've just got lots of machine gun setups and punch lines, that's fine. There's a lot of one liner comedians who do that exact thing. I'm a guy who likes to move around a lot. If you can't tell. I have a lot of personality. I like to move myself in front of the audience. If you don't have a microphone and you want to rehearse taking the microphone out of the mike stand, just imagine it. Continue to imagine yourself pulling it out, taking the mic stand, backing it off. If you imagine this a lot, by the time you get up to your open mic, you're gonna be fine. It's really not that big of a deal now when we want to talk about gesture. What I want to talk about is how gestures can inflate or reinforce a punchline or even deflate a punchline. So let's move back to the mike stand and I'll show you how this works. When you're trying to make a point, let's say, let's say a point about Slurpees. Like I said, you could You could say something like, You know what? Slurpees are awesome. You see what I just did with my hands? They're amazing. Slurpees are so cool. People don't understand that. So cool People don't understand that pointing reinforces a point. That's something that you don't understand your a person I'm pointing at you. Be careful with this a little bit because people in the audience might, ah, might take offense to it, depending on the audience in front of. But the point is this. Moving your hands to reinforce the point helps bring the energy up and bring the energy down. Feel it in your body. You don't have to make notes on this when you rehearse it, but when you rehearse it, you should feel yourself moving with it. It feels a little bit like a dance, and you can move with the energy of the dance. That's really what comedy's about is moving emotional energy and moving it through the crowd, using the logical bits of language and the performative bits of movement in the body and the voice. So when you're rehearsing, what I want to do is feel the energy in your body. If you want to reinforce a point that sharp pointed the audience gesture downwards, maybe move your hand across the room, maybe turn a couple of times to very quickly reinforce. The energy is sharp if you want to in force very light energy, you can move your hand up. You move your hand down. You can sort of lean back and forth just a little bit, moving very lightly with things. I had a punch line where I would talk about anthrax at an airport just wafting through the terminal. This hand gesture reinforces the feeling of the wafting word that really brings the audience into it and allows them to feel that same energy. So as you move through it, ask yourself these questions. How can I use my hands? How can I use my body position? How can I use my facial expressions toe? Help Reinforce the point. Um, if you have glasses or a hat you can do these things to, you can take him off and maybe make a point with them real quick and then put him back on. Jim Gaffigan has a famous clip where he talks about glasses. I would encourage you to look at that. I'll link it in the notes and finally, just make sure that when you're rehearsing, you don't have to do the same movements every time. But I want you to become aware of what your body wants to dio that is going to make a huge difference when you get on stage, you're gonna feel a natural way to do things, and it's gonna come out. You're gonna feel comfortable, and it's gonna make the audience really buy into your routine. So when you're rehearsing, go slowly at and pauses at an emphasis. And now add in gestures. Keep going. You're gonna do great. 27. 23 Best Practices in Rehearsing Rehearsing Lesson 5: Here's a final word about rehearsing that I want to talk to you about as you've been rehearsing. You've got your jokes you've been reading through them. You've been recording yourself. What do you do with these recordings? I said, listen back to him before, But specifically, what do you dio? What I want to encourage you to do is put on your earphones and go for a walk. I want you to go for a walk. Maybe if you can't go for a walk, just sit down and meditate with them. And what I want you to do is begin speaking the same lines, the same jokes, the same set ups at the same time as you're speaking them in the recording. So say them out loud at the same time you're listening to yourself. Say them in the recording. Why do you want to do this? Because this will really help you internalize those words. It's not just the saying them out loud. It's the internalization and then the speaking through them also, you're gonna go slowly. You're going to speak slowly. You might even feel awkward a little bit walking around. If you live in a city with people passing you is you speak these things out loud, doesn't matter. Do it anyway. Go out and do it because you're gonna have to break past your feeling of discomfort because you're eventually gonna say them on stage. So just accept that this is the first barrier you're gonna walk through as you're attempting to overcome your fear of stand up comedy. So as you're walking around repeating these things eventually, I want you to move away from using that at all. I want you to move away from using the recording. I want you to move away from using this sheet. I want you to just stand in front of a mirror in your apartment whether or not you have the mike stand. And I want you to go and perform your stand up comedy. Feel it in your body. Feel your feet on the floor. Watch yourself. Do it. Look yourself in the eyes. If it feels awkward, it is a little bit awkward, but it's going to be ah, lot better when you get on stage. This is the time for you to improve. This is the number one thing that you can do before you get on stage is rehearse in this very specific way. Internalize the words now do them in front of a mirror and don't necessarily do them in front of your friends. If you want to do that, you can. But do them in front of a mirror and be your own judge. But encourage yourself. Think about all the things you're doing, right? Oh, man, I nailed that joke. I got that pause. I gestured in this way that I thought was really funny when I watched myself from the mirror. All of that is really good. Chris Rock, in fact, does this. He will rehearse in his own apartment with three different mirrors and watch himself deliver jokes from different perspectives. It helps him understand what he has to do to make those jokes the funniest. But what this does for you is just reinforce that you actually know what you're doing You're kicking a ton of, but by doing this course, and you're gonna kick even mawr when you're on stage. So internalize those words. Feel proud of yourself, get away from using the recording, get away from using the sheet and you're gonna have those words inside of you. Even if you start using different words that aren't exactly the ones you wrote down, it doesn't matter. You're gonna be great anyway, because you've internalized it. You're gonna get through your setups, you're gonna get to your punch lines. And the point of all of this is just to do the five minutes on stage. If you get even one laugh the whole time, you're on stage than you did better than the first time I ever did stand up comedy boy, Was that a downer? Okay, Anyway, this is the final word on rehearsing. Just keep it going. Winston Churchill once said that he rehearsed an hour for every minute he had in a speech. If that's true, then it means you're gonna need to rehearse for about five hours, which is great. That's about half a Knauer between now, a day between now and when you end up going up on stage, it will probably be in about 10 days. We're gonna look it up in the next lecture on this course, and that will give you enough time to really internalize this and kick a ton of. But when you're on stage, most open micro's never hurts that much. So you're gonna have a leg up 28. 24 Getting Ready to Go On Stage Rehearsal Lesson 6: Okay, so here we are. You've done the rehearsals. Hopefully, a bunch of times by now. Maybe you picked up your own microphone mic stand to mess around with. You've listened back to your recording. You've walked around the block, weirding people out as you talk out loud your jokes in a very strange and slow way with built in pauses. Anyway, that's all great, because you're gonna take that on stage with you and you're gonna kick atonal. But for five minutes, What I want you to do now is to go think about how to cut your material down to five minutes. So when you're speaking slowly when you're going through your act and you're speaking slowly and you get up to about six minutes of time, that's about where you want to be for five minutes. So when you goto on open Mike, you're gonna be able to go through your material. You're gonna be going mawr quickly than you did previously. But people are going to be laughing and they're gonna be laughing. They're gonna cause they're going to applaud. Maybe, um, it's gonna cause you to have more pauses and take more time between joke so it actually works out to being a similar type of time. So if you record yourself doing it slowly up to six minutes and cut your material down to being that many jokes which I said before, it is gonna be about, uh, depending on how long your jokes are between five and probably 10 jokes. This is going to take up all of that time. So now what I want you to do is confront the reality that you were gonna get on stage and you were gonna make it happen. And the way that you do that is by going to the computer and Googling a local open mic around you, I want you to place this for far enough out in the future that you still have time to rehearse, have time to refine your material. You have time to cut it down to the time it needs to be. But close enough that it should scare you a little bit. You should be like, Oh my God, I'm actually gonna do this. I would challenge you at this point. If you've actually been rehearsing your material, just go up and do it tonight. Just go straight out. Just go do it tonight. Go find an open Mike. If you have one call ahead email message on Facebook, whatever you need to do, maybe it's a show up and go up. Maybe it's a lottery you can show up in just doing your material. If that's if you do not, that scares you too much. If you're like no, I need more time. That's totally fine. This is about you in the pace that you have. But you need to get on stage and do this. That's the culmination of this course. So here we are. I'm gonna dive into the computer and show you a little bit about how to do that. Then we're gonna talk about a handful of more things in terms of lifestyle and philosophy to prepare you mentally for getting on stage. 29. 25 Finding An Open Mic: So now you've got your five minutes. You've got unedited. You've been rehearsing it. You got it A solid. You're rehearsing it to the place where it's coming in at about between five and six minutes. Normally, when you're on stage, if you're rehearsing slowly and then you're delivering faster time on stage in front of a live audience, your heart will be going quicker. Ah, you're going to get through that material faster. Things go from about five minutes and 30 seconds to about five minutes for 45. That kind of thing. You want to come in at about five minutes, almost open mikes, and that's what we're gonna talk about in this video are gonna function in a couple of different ways. It's either a lottery or it's what we call show up go up, which means you show up, you sign up, you get up when they call your name. And most of these mikes have a handful of rules and the host will tell you the rules at the beginning of the mike. Most Mike's have rules that are pretty simple. They're like we're gonna light you with one minute you're gonna do for minutes a comedy. We'll let you in three minutes or you're going to do five minutes. We'll let you have four minutes. One of those types of things. But what I want to do is show you guys how you confined open mic in your area. I know this is going to seem tedious and if you're like, he's just about to google this stuff, you're right. I am. So if you don't want to be here for the Google and you think you already know how to do this Ah, I would encourage you to just go ahead and skip this video. Um, but for those of you who are maybe really not sure what to do with this Ah, this is a great place to start, so we'll just type in and I'm just going to type in open mikes. Chicago thing Open, Mike. Now, this is what you'll get most of the time. Something with bars. Ah, something that's at the top. Like a reference site. This is comedy of Chicago dot com, which is run by a guy named James Camps here in Chicago. He's got a whole bunch of different open mikes. Ah, and show is listed on this website. We have also got open mic Chicago. It's the whole bunch of stuff that you can dive into. But what if you don't live in a major city? That's what I'm thinking. A lot of you are thinking about what? What? What? What if I don't live in, You can see some are popping up here. What if I don't live in a major city? What if I live in in the middle of nowhere? Let's do open mikes. Bismarck, North Dakota wants a comedy open mic. Um, here we go. Open Mike night on Facebook. Now, this is a great place. Facebook is amazing resource for you to go to. I'm not gonna jump in and show you my Facebook. But there are a lot of comedy groups in whatever area you belong to. That you can join on. Facebook's really simple You Have to Do is just right in comedy and then the area that you live in Comedy Michigan comedy Nebraska comedy, Omaha Comedy, Anchorage, Alaska and you're gonna get groups on Facebook that talk about these things. It's a super, super simple way to do it, but as you can see here we've already found one. Just Bismarck. North Dakota is in the middle of nowhere in the United States, and that's where it goes. By the way, if you're watching this video you live internationally. This is the same thing. So I do a show called Funny Planet, where in me and a couple other comedians we go around the planet looking for, ah, comedy scenes and comedians to interview that are interesting and international. And we found comedy all over the world by doing this from Reykjavik, Iceland, all the way to Amman, Jordan. You can literally just find it very simply by Googling and then by looking on Facebook. So what I want you to dio in the homework here is to find this open mic. Go ahead, find one in your area and plan to go there, contact the person who runs it and see how to do it. Just go. Hey, I'm new to comedy. I want to get up on stage on and try it out for the first time. How do I do that? And they, if they were real comedian, will probably take him a few days to get back to you and then they're going to say, Yeah, just show up or I'll put your name on the list or any number of these things And Ah, and you can see here Samson, Hurley, Tina Wentzel They've already got their their names on here. So you know who these people are, so I would encourage you to Google. Just use Google comedy Open mic and then your area. Or if it's not a comedy open mic. If there is no comedy open mikes and that can happen. I used to live in Boulder, Colorado. There were no comedy open mikes. There was a a regular open mic. And what a regular open Mike is just to explain. The difference is that comedy open mikes are focused on comedians coming in and telling jokes. Regular open Mike is just Anybody can come and do it. There's gonna be, ah, people with guitars. There's gonna be people singing. There's gonna be spoken word poetry. Ah, but you're gonna go in and do comedy, and it is going to be a little weird, but I would encourage you to just just stay strong, grab your bravery and go through it. I actually used to have to do a regular open mic where I in Boulder, I would go get up on stage in, in between people singing songs or beat boxing. And then I would do a bunch of jokes and it was a little bit awkward, but you get used to it really quickly. So if you don't have a comedy open mic, you should go to a regular open mic. But try to find a comedy open mic for your first time. 30. 26 Getting To Your Five Minutes: Okay, so we've talked about arranging your material, making it flow logically. And we've talked a little bit about how toe make a ah bit come together. But what I want to talk about in this video is getting to your five minutes and what that really means. So there's a handful things that you need to figure out when you're putting together. Ah, routine for comedy. And that is how much time are these jokes gonna take up on how much time you have Now, what this normally looks like for a five minute bit and what I want you to think about is it's gonna be between five and 10 jokes. Now, why do I say five and 10? There's a huge range, right? Well, you might have some very large jokes. You might be kind of a storyteller and naturally, is your writing material. Even though you try to cut it down, it feels like you need to continue to build out material a little bit. It feels like there's a lot of narrative that goes in there now. It could very well be that you have a lot of laugh lines, which is just where audiences will laugh within those stories. That's fine. Sometimes you don't have a laugh line. You just take the audience with you. And the story itself is entertaining, and you eventually get to a big punch line. That might be one joke. That's one whole joke. Might be an entire minute, 45 seconds to 50 seconds, maybe five seconds of, ah, applause or laughter over the course of the entire a bit. And then you get into your next joke. Takes a few seconds to transition. That's an entire minute. So it might be that you're just doing one liners and they'll be really quick about 15 20 seconds. Maybe get five seconds of laughter or applause or something. Maybe you rearrange yourself, then you do. Another joke takes about 20 seconds. You might get three of those done. Ralphie May is famous for saying the more punch lines per minute you can pack, the better he does. I think a punchline every 13 seconds or something like that's really amazing. The guy was, Ah, extremely good comedian. But the reason I'm bringing this up is because you're gonna arrange your material and have to think about how much time you're feeling out and how that's looking now, it's not just a logical flow of material, but how do you open? How do you close? How did those things happen? Well, for the purposes of this bit, which is the 1st 1 that you're going to do on stage, what I want you to think about is just opening with material. That's funny, that is, that is your second best material. And then trying to have that material be self, uh, exposing meaning material in which you're describing yourself to the audience. You might say something like, I'm the kind of person who or I am acts like one of my jokes when I open is and I've said it a few times is I just turned 30 recently, like 39 months ago. Just turned it. That exposes a lot of who I am in the audience. I'm talking about myself, and the audience is just getting to know you, and it helps to have that kind of material. So if you could put that first, that's great. You don't have to, but if you do, it's better than put it early. I say second best material because your best material is going to close. Comedians always put their best material last. Their best joke comes last. People remember the last feeling that you left them with and leaving an audience with that kind of material is fantastic because they're gonna all think you're great. And probably if it's your first time and you close on a good joke, the audience is gonna applaud, and they're gonna come up and be like Oh, my gosh, that was your first time. That was amazing. Let's hope it goes that way for you. And why not? Didn't go that way for me my first time. But the point is, is that you want to think about 5 to 10 jokes. You want a time yourself doing them, and you want to open with a self expressive, uh, material that's your second best. Have your best material last and close, strong. That's the way that you want to arrange that material that's getting to your five minutes. Then when you've been begin recording this and rehearsing it, we'll talk about that. The rehearsal section, uh, you want to begin cutting down time in recording time and having enough jokes to fill out six about 5.5 to 6 minutes of recording. So 5.5 to 6 minutes of recording time when you're listening to yourself going through your routine is about what it's gonna take to fill out five minutes on stage. 31. 27 Final Thoughts Before You Go Onstage: the last little bit of this course. I want to talk about a couple of different things dealing with hecklers and dealing with failure. They sound like two different subjects, but they're really about the same thing. And they're about this. You need to accept that this is not gonna go perfectly. And that's okay. And by this I don't just mean getting up on stage and doing stand up comedy. I mean life. I mean your life. I mean, everybody's life. I mean, living in the world. Things were not always gonna go according to plan, and you have to learn to roll with it. Now. I've had way more jokes fail on me in front of audiences. Then I've ever had work out. And you might say, Brennan, how is that possible? How can you be a professional comedian and have that happen? Well, it's tricky. You eventually learn what material works, and you start using it more and more. And that's actually how you develop a career doing comedy. But in order to get there, you have to have a lot of things not work out. You know, eventually you start having things work out. You get a better sense of it. You to bend their sense of how to deal with an audience. When you're on stage, you get a better sense of how to deal with hecklers. But when you're first starting out like you, when your first looking at trying to get on stage and do five and it's a comedy, just getting up and doing it is the wind. So before you even go out and do your first open Mike, I want you to sit down and to say to yourself, This is gonna go However it goes, it could go Well, it could go poorly, but this is gonna go for May, and I'm gonna be here one way or another after it's done. One of the things I talked to comedians about a lot, people who want to get into comedy, that is eyes how they will survive. They'll survive, and so will you. One way or another, you're gonna be here on the other side of you, getting up and doing five minutes of comedy, and I promise you it's probably gonna go great. It's not gonna be pain pain full. It won't be paying lists, but it won't be painful either. And on the other side of it, you're gonna be fine. In fact, you'll be a better version of yourself than you were before you got on stage. That's the way I want you to think about dealing with hecklers and dealing with audiences. Because here's the thing. Hecklers will always be there. There will always be people who are haters. There will always be people who will you not like? You. They're gonna say things like, you're the worst. You're terrible. They're gonna interrupt you. They're gonna They're gonna try to ruin the thing that you're doing. And they won't do this your first time on stage. Probably. So most of the likely what's gonna happen is you're gonna get up on stage and someone's going to say this is his or her first time, and everybody in the crowd is gonna erupt with applause because it takes a lot of guts to get up on stage and do this and you're gonna be supported by a group of strangers. Probably that's gonna happen, actually. But if it doesn't happen, that's okay too. It's okay because you did the thing you wanted to dio you sailed the ship through the rapids, and not everybody gets to do that. And now you're one of the few who did. Throughout your whole life. You can always think about that. You can always think about how you got on stage, and even if somebody decided to give you a bad word while you were up there, you totally nailed it. Now dealing with audiences is similar then audiences are like a wave. You gotta serve from Stewart Lee, who's a stand up comedian, is famous for saying, You have to play the audience you're dealt. You can't play a different audience. The audience here in front of is the one you have to deal with. I'm doing three shows, uh, this coming weekend, and I don't know which audiences I'm gonna have to deal with. And sometimes some shows they're very different from other shows. Sometimes material that worked in one show really well. It doesn't work at all in a different show, and you just got to make it up as you go along. But that's the beauty of stand up comedy. In one way or another, live comedy is exactly what it's gonna be in. It's gonna be unique for you as a performer, and it's gonna be unique for the audience. And you have to trust your gut and roll with it, and you cannot learn those skills anywhere else. You have to win them on stage. And because this is your first time on stage, you're not gonna have him. But that's okay, because you're going to learn them. You're gonna learn a lot of them the first time you get up. That experience is gonna whether or not you get on stage again, stay with you the rest of your life. And I want you to think about that because I would encourage you to continue doing stand up comedy. Try it 10 15 20 times. Try it for a whole month. Try at 1st 6 months. Find out every time you can go on stage in the next six weeks and do that. If you're living in a major city, you could probably do it every day. That sounds like a lot, but at the end of that time, you're gonna know a lot about yourself, and you could make a decision as to whether or not you want to continue doing it. Maybe you took this course because you wanted to learn how to be funny or public speaking. I think writing jokes and talking about gesture and things like this helped with that. Maybe took this course because you wanted toe learn stand up comedy specifically and know whether or not it was right for you. I think after you getting up on stage, you'll have a better sense of that. Specifically, after you get up on stage five or six times, you'll have a better sense of it. Maybe took this course because you just wanted Teoh understand more deeply how comedians developed the material and and get a richer on experience. When you go see comedy either on Netflix or live, and I hope you got that out of this course to, there's a lot of thought and a lot of work that goes into it. Maybe took this course to break through a barrier of fear that you know you've had. And I hope no matter what, you took this course for that you have now the tools at the end of it to appreciate moving past the barrier of fear. A lot of people will never try stand up comedy, and after you get up on stage and do it for five minutes, you won't be one of them. You'll be the person who did the thing they were afraid of. So when it comes to hecklers or audiences or any other of the 1000 or 1,000,000 nameless things that you might be afraid of when getting on stage and thinking that they're problems you have to solve before you get up, you don't You don't need to memorize your material. You don't need to know how to deal with a heckler you don't even know need to know how to surf a specific audience. Honestly, you don't even really need tohave material. You don't even need to have your material memorized. You actually don't even really need to have jokes, because what is stand up comedy at its most basic, it's an audience and the person talking to them, that's it, and you're gonna try to make him laugh. All you have to have is the impulse and the confidence to do it, and I think now, working through the rehearsals and the writing of the material and thinking about getting on stage and believing in yourself. I think now you have that confidence. So thanks for taking this course. I really appreciate it. There's going to be an intermediate course that goes more in depth in terms of not only how to do shows how to build time, how to get booked a little bit more, how to get paid doing comedy. And I would encourage you to take that course after you've gotten up on stage. Please do not hesitate to email me, leave comments. And honestly, I would love to hear how your first time went. If you have the guts, please record it and put it on YouTube and send me the link. I would absolutely love to watch it. I will even give you feedback if you want it. Take care. Thanks so much. I'm Brendan Lemon and I hope you guys had a great time and I hope you have a great time getting up on stage.