Stand-up Comedy Course
So the weird thing is I have actually written and delivered a course on stand-up comedy for drag queens and I use stand up for when I am doing drag. So why am I doing a course on it? Well, this really was my opportunity to check for gaps in my knowledge. I figure if someone is well received on Udemy for delivering a course then it must have some good content and I can use that to add any little extras to my stand-up course.
Once again... this is a notes dump. This will not contain all the content and it's easier to listen to than to read. Also my notes will be full of my own experience and flavour and perhaps missing some important parts that didn't seem relevant to me at the time. So if you want to know about comedy get onto Udemy. Order this course.
https://www.udemy.com/course/stand-up-comedy-mastery-writing/
So in the course they try to tell he person to be themselves. I think I said this before. I have a whole section on getting permission (from the audience) to be funny. A huge part of that is being authentic. But that's not the limit of it. There's a whole part about alpha - beta relations. Often a joke teller is assuming the role of alpha in the relationship and the audience is assuming the role of beta so there is a consent that is required. Often in the UK when a person is forced into a beta role they will be to polite to actually say anything, but they are uncomfortable and the longer the performance goes on the worse it is going to be received.
Different levels of energy
There's different levels of energy in comedians. Compare Robin Williams to Jack Dee.
The key thing is to structure your material around your personality. If you are low energy like Jack Dee who often has low energy his comedy meets that by being grumpy.
Content
Be different. Stick out from other performers / comedians. Also if an audience is used to one type of joke or another switch into a very different format.
The course focuses on being the most authentic version of yourself... I'm a little bit nervous of this because the average person just isn't THAT funny. So if we be ourselves then we're not going to be that funny. I think we all have things we can work on to help us with our stage presence, charisma. (I personally quite like Charisma on command, a YouTube channel that looks at things people do and the effect their actions have on other people. It's worth a listen. ) But the more we apply things like this... the further we get from our natural selves and I genuinely argue that's good for comedy at times.
I guess we move the frame of authenticity a bit because when you learn something that works it becomes a part of you. You tell a certain joke and people laugh... dopamine hit. Do it again with another group of people, they laugh and dopamine hit. You end up retraining your brain and your personality authentically changes you become more prone to tell jokes like that. Have you ever heard of phantom phone vibration? It's the same thing. So I guess you can maintain authenticity while still doing something different. But remember that an audience paid for a performance. So they are in a way permitting that to happen.
Most young boys will perform throughout their adolescence looking for where their performance gets accepted. This is how they establish a social hierarchy and alpha male. Testing to see what they can do. Testing to see if their flirting is accepted by the female. It's like watching discovery channel. We can perform with people, but be clear about, what we are doing. Switch it on and off again. "I was approaching her like this... Hey baby." She was all "tee hee." You can have the audience recognise that it is an act and accept it as that.
How long does it take to write material
Sometimes you just need to sit down and plough though it. This does work for me, but it can be frustrating. I make a few jokes you just need to find a few lines to string them together.
Supposedly the average comedian will write around 5 minutes of comedy per month. Do you want to know more? Buy this course:
https://www.udemy.com/course/stand-up-comedy-mastery-writing/
I'm not paid to advertise.... I just hope that if a large chunk of the course is written here on this page they won't sue me if I keep linking to their course... remember reading it is boring.... when you pay for this then you got it read to you. It's as effortless as a baba having story-time. Far less work involved. Nearly all of this material is available somewhere on the internet, probably in more depth too, but this is a chance to have it read to you in a timely format with as little effort as watching some TV.
The course talks about trying material out, with an audience. The audience is going to give you the key thing you need. Feedback. Sometimes a joke is too inappropriate for an audience to let you get away with it. This again is related to my previous comment of permission to be funny. Sometimes you will need to edit it to put the punch line on the end. Sometimes it works well, but you might still want to try somethings to improve it. Don't worry about trying to write material in less time try to get material perfected in less cycles, but never stop improving it.
Improving
Often a comedian goes through stages. They begin with real inconsistency and over time this becomes a more consistent personality. Eventually you can begin to just refine it.
When you have 3-5 minutes of consistent material then ideally you want to make it fit more and more with your personality. I spoke about this at length within the getting permission section of my talk. Having a character, refining the character writing the jokes around that character. I guess I was in a hurry to the end point. The speaking in this course homes in on what point that I didn't think of, which was that when your jokes match your character they're more likely to remember your character. I like to think of Tanyalee Davies. When you see her, you can't help but notice that she's a little person. Anyone that pretends they can't see it, is just so scared of being considered prejudiced that they actually end up acting more prejudiced than other people because they can't bare to acknowledge it. Since she then performs a full routine where at least 25% of the jokes are immediately related to her stature. They relate it to something very visibly undivorceable from people's first experience of her. The end result. They don't just remember the joke they also remember her!
Don't be afraid to bomb. It's like soldiers. There's often a point in the battle where you have to accept your losses. "We are going to die... but we will at least take out as many of those enemy soldiers as possible before we do!" The same works for comedy. Except, less killing; more slaying. You are going to bomb. It's going to happen. Sometimes it will be the way a night will go. Now you're on this path, that's done. It's happened. The wheels have been set in motion. The best thing for you to do is to just go "I'm dying on stage again tonight... what can I learn from this?" You can even tell the audience that. It makes you authentic.
How much material do I need?
Okay so this section of the course is very different from what I am going to be doing. Because I am using drag as the medium of entertainment rather than stand-up alone, the amount of prepared material is very different. The course talks about having something potentially as short as a 2 minutes slot in a show. This is very possible for stand-up, but doesn't work for drag. Often drag queens when they're first starting out will prepare a a lip-sync as their first performance, which could be anything from 3-4 minutes long. If they're good with a microphone they might talk a bit before the song and a bit after the song to work with the audience making a piece as long as 7-10 minutes, this might be after a few lip-syncs. Often Drag competitions in the UK, for example Drag Idol, you will have a 10 minute slot to fill and you need to be careful because you can be penalised for going over.
In the course he talks about open mics. You sometimes get them as drag events, but rarely. They are a great chance to get your drag out there and better known. What's more common is where a Drag Queen who has a good social media following groups together a load of queens who all fill a 5-10 min slot and share a bit of the income. This is the equivalent of what the course calls a Showcase show where you still have a very short spot, but you've been invited and picked to join in or an opening act. You are unlikely to get more than 15 mins in a drag show where you are not the host so you need to book your own shows for that.
If people book you for birthdays / hen-dos, this is your chance to try longer material. You're good to go for 30 mins to an hour, but remember most people did not come for you. They came for the birthday boy/girl. So you should focus on variety and make it all about the special guy/girl. If you show up just doing an hour set, then you might have some unhappy customers who didn't care to see you. If you mix together 3-5 mins segments of stand-up with songs and games then you end up having a better show. If people don't like the stand-up it will be over in 3 mins and back to a song, if they're not a fan of the games then they get a chance to cheer on the birthday boy or the bride or whatever. It works really well to have a good mix of stand up, music and other things. I actually really like delivering my set on a tour bus going around London because the buildings that you see provide talking points. "See that chuch? It was originally built around 1050. That's even older than Angela Lansbury. Now since we are outside Parliament I've got a song for Boris, hit play my darling!"
Just a side note. If you're reading this to see what's in the Udemy course ... don't bother. I'm not going to successfully include everything in the Udemy course. I'm just dumping notes of my take from it, so they have somewhere to go; I'm not bothering to make this readable or communicative. You're going to find it hard work to read through. Why bother to read when for a low low price you can learn it through videos??? As should be clear from the paragraph above, my focus isn't even just stand-up. So just go to Udemy.com or follow the link below.
https://www.udemy.com/course/stand-up-comedy-mastery-writing/
What I took from Joan Rivers' Enter Talking?
So aside from doing the course I also read a lot from authors and one book from Joan Rivers which was an early biography leading up to her breakthrough. I learned about her "hook", a short phrase to grab attention. Which for her was "can we talk?". I thought about some of my own potential expression "just between us...", "ssssh don't tell her but...", "let's be honest", "I don't want to be mean but...", "we're friends now, I can be honest with you...". As I watch comedians I'm going to look out for hook lines from now one see what things I notice. I like the expression which are very open because you can repeat them over and over again.
Typical hooks
- In the middle of a story... "suddenly"
- "Let me honest with you..."
- "You want to know how I made the biggest mistake of my life"
- "how many of you have"
- "I'll tell you one thing."
- "I've been married X years and ..."
- "I said to my friend, you know what?"
Joan has to distinguish between high comedy and low comedy and sniff out what's working with an audience. If somethings not working with an audience she quickly changes subject or reacts to the audience not liking it. "Oh look we lost the gays now .... Insult Elizabeth Taylor and we lose the gays."
For the most part, I took from her that I just need to get out there and keep working until I make a breakthrough. That's easier said than done when you're a drag queen who takes 2 hours to get make-up on. But it's worth giving it a try.
Graeme