Ok, stand-up comedy 101.2 is where we are going to get ready for the stage, so if you have not been on a stage as of yet it is the type of thing that makes your insides turn to liquid so I suggest a light dinner and then eat after. Those juices you are going to feel flowing, are not creative ones, they are the squirts!
Spot lights, cigarette smoke, a drunk trying to look up your skirt, or pick a fight by heckling you to death, those are all good times right there. I know for sure you are ready for all of that! I have to get into handling the heckler on another page, so check to see if it is up yet.
You are going to hear from some of the geniuses of comedy schools that will tell you never work free but if you don’t you will never be on or keep on top of your game. If you just happen to have 2 nights a month that you perform for $$$, and you don’t do some open mic’s to feel out some new material and tweak them there instead of in front of a paying audience then you are in for a crappy surprise. That crappy surprise this time is not the squirts; it is you being canceled from your two times a month at the paying gig.
Let’s go ahead and back up for just a moment. Before we get on the stage and need a sheet of paper, with our material on it, to be able to perform, ask yourself this, “Do I have 5-7 minutes of material that I can deliver in my sleep, already memorized in my head?” If the answer is no, then you are not ready for your first squirts session quite yet.
First, there are no formulas to follow when writing comedy material and I prefer that you do not use any. Don’t get me wrong, there are rules of thumb that anyone will give to you and they all might differ slightly but they are good starting points to follow.
One is to have about seven minutes of material completely memorized before you get on the stage to do a five-minute gig. If you stumble on a joke, you can still get the five minutes done and done well. If you have a ten-minute gig, have 14 minutes ready and so on.
Two…every time you hit the stage, you need to have a voice recorder at the very least so that you remember where you did not get laughs and where you did. If possible, you need to also video tape yourself so that you can see if you were doing beginners flaws such as looking at the floor, or pacing without acknowledging the audience.
These are very, very important and crucial tools to have when you do self-analyses the next day. Don’t ever think that you suck if it goes bad, just tweak what you did, maybe make it shorter, eliminate some and add to others that kept everyone making noise. You are going to have bad days but the more you get on that stage and the more you record and the harder you practice…the faster you will be a professional stand-up comedian.
