I’m going to say that there will always be a great difference between the Mona Lisa and a stick figure on paper. The greatness in great singers lies in the undeniable fact that they have talent and know how to deliver that talent, regardless of how they learned to do it. The same can be said of great comedians.

Those who don’t have talent or don’t know how to deliver that talent are SOL from my experience.

Totally stupid conversation I just had about singers (I deliver singing telegrams and have taken years of voice lessons): “You can’t hear the greatness in singers because you’re trained and you just care about the money”—just passing that on, since we’re all in training here. It was a very short conversation BTW.

Is it typical to have an audience sit through act after act without hearing laughter, or even a chuckle? In the first paragraph of this article, Steve writes (of a different experience), “It overall consensus was that stand-up comedy is an “art” and laughter is not an important or even a noteworthy gauge for identifying a comedian’s skill on stage.” This statement would almost exactly reflect what I experienced in my YouTube video viewing last evening — except that there was little or no “art” to be found!

What I observed was groups of people (different clubs) taking turns going to the microphone and merely spilling random thoughts, with unclear, under-developed ideas, and almost no humour. I agree with Steve: “Laughter generation is the ‘ultimate result’ of successful execution of the “art” of stand-up, as well as a DIRECT reflection of an individual’s skill as an “artist”….”