Comments on: Am I Funny Enough For Stand-up Comedy Or Am I Just Wasting My Time?

By: David

David — Wed, 03 Jul 2013 13:40:59 +0000

Is it fair to say that the big difference must be between “telling jokes” and “delivering a message” — that is to say, many performers write jokes they can share with the audience, which may or may not generate laughter; but successful comedians identify, develop and share (and I use ‘share’ deliberately, as opposed to ‘present’) their personal view of the world — i.e., issues that “matter” — with their audience, but do it in a funny way? If this is so, “writing” your comedy as a series of jokes is indeed a waste of time, challenging to structure, and difficult to remember. How much easier to simply share your unique point of view on various topics. You’d just need to think it through in advance, decide how best to present your ideas to make your message clear, and practice your delivery.

By: Trent Williams

Trent Williams — Mon, 22 Oct 2012 22:53:20 +0000

That’s good to know. I’m glad it only takes a short time to see if I have potential or not. I think I need to try material out in more places than just the one venue I speak at. I’m sure some of the material would be suited for a different audience. That also means, that I need focus on some material that would work better with the type of audience I have.

By: john hill

john hill — Mon, 24 Sep 2012 04:39:08 +0000

I’ve taken some time away from this site to read and study a few books on comedy to see if I found them useless. The first seems to be more a book about brainstorming and creating lists of potential topics from the print and news media. Just as you said in the video on this blog page, it’s all one-dimensional. The books i found are also quite outdated. I’m not sure how much procedural difference there is in a 20 year gap, but I didn’t recognize any of the jokes, only a few of the big names, so it’s really hard to know how funny the jokes were because I need to hear and see the other dimensions incorporated with it. Also, most comics adlib and don’t precisely follow a written script. I wouldn’t call the books “useless”, but they would probably make better fireplace material than stand-up comedy material.