The Recipe
The formula I use for stand-up comedy is as follows:
30% writing
30% performing
30% learning
10% X-factor
Writing
Stand-up comedy is writing. Everything from punchlines, to stories, to character can be written down. I wrote stand-up comedy long before performing it March of last year. But after getting over the hurdle of performing for the first time, writing is the real grind. It is a lot easier to show up to open mics, put my name down, and get up when my name is called, then it is to sit down and write on my own. Having the host call me to the stage basically precludes any kind of backing out; whereas I have a dozen excuses on any given day not to write:
I’m too tired,
No good ideas,
I’m too busy,
I wrote a lot yesterday,
I will write a lot tomorrow,
Writer’s Block™️
But they are all the same thing: I want to skip the work. I just want the big reward: performance. I don’t get laughs from writing in a notebook. But I get something just as valuable to the craft… material! Pages and pages and books of material. About 80% of material never makes it on stage. Of the 20% that gets performed, 80% is immediately trashed. So maybe one out of every 25 jokes that I write will make it into my act for any extended period of time (and only about 20% of those will last for long). So it takes a lot of writing, and editing, to create a joke… and that’s just the first step.
Performing
The next step of creating comedy is “going up.” Usually at open-mics, this step involves the 5 minute sets around town I might do on any given night but also the act of going out. Going to the open mic I meet people, talk to comics, and see other sets. This category is equally important to writing. At first I thought comedy was just having good jokes. I would say about 40% of stand-up is the words that are said. The rest is stage presence:
Body Language
Confidence
Voice/Intonation
Timing/Pauses
Ad-libs
Eye Contact
I underrated this aspect of a performing art somehow in my calculations. While my writing has certainly tightened up and improved my first 10 months of stand-up, my capacity on stage has gone from 0 to 1: from nothing to something. It is also the area I need to work on the most. It’s also the hardest to improve on because to do so takes a stage, an audience, and the capacity to watch recordings of myself.
There’s very little I can do on my own to increase my own confidence on stage or use appropriate voice modulation through a microphone while telling a joke unless I have an open mic to try it out on. Open-mic sets are short and sometimes far. This is the reason growth in comedy happens so slow: it’s one five minutes spot at a time, hours or days apart. To get an hour on stage can take weeks. 10,000 hours?
Thanks to the tremendously welcoming Miami comedy scene I have been getting some longer spots on mics and even a couple of booked shows this year. To date (25 days), this year I have performed on stage for 246 minutes. Almost a whole ten minutes per day! How good at the unicycle someone could get doing ten minutes a day?…
It does add up though! 246 minutes is more than I expected counting up the spots in my notebook. That’s over four hours and it’s still January!
Learning
I’ve read two comedy books:
I’ve watched three comedy “master classes”:
Read a blog, watched a web series, listened to a podcast’s archive, and become a student of the history of comedy. I’ve watched a dozen comedy specials and countless comedy clips. I haven’t limited myself to comedians than I find funny or ones that are successful. I have absorbed as much comedy-content as I can (and created a little bit of my own).
Learning comedy is finding needles in haystacks. But a gem from a book on wit I was purusing in the library or a bit of advice from a seasoned pro on a Joe Rogan appearance feels like a golden needle when the tip sticks. Comedy education also always comes with the caveat that to really internalize a bit of information, I have to experience it for myself. See Writing and Performing.
X Factor
The X factor is something I can’t fully describe. I can’t define it but I can give some examples of it:
Living life
Making the Publix clerk laugh
Reading a novel
Travelling
Talking to strangers
Learning to dance
Working out
Cooking food
Buying a new shirt
Meditating
Keeping track of my sets
Going on a walk
Practicing Spanish
Taking a long shower
Being in love
Comedy is an art and art comes from life. Life can be fun, hard, rewarding, tiring, or confusing. Comedy is all those things as well. Life doesn’t have a plan or a recipe, it just needs to be lived. Comedy just needs to be done. But it’s nice to have a “formula.”
Enjoy “Boxing” in its latest iteration. This was the story I was so proud of working on last month. I haven’t performed this joke since this set on Dec 27th. It turns out I like the jokes a lot more than the story… Funny how life works that way…