I'm
slowly piecing things back together after the shittiest few days I've
had in a long time... yesterday it was confirmed that because my
'heart conductivity' (or something?.. don't ask, I didn't understand)
is 0.05% above the necessary range, I can't go into the clinical
trial I wanted so I lose sixteen-hundred potential dollars there. But
the story about the blind girl is coming together somewhat, and I'm
learning some valuable lessons about telling stories on stage in the
process.
On Tuesday after I had probably a four in front of my parents at the Rochester, I had a chat to Jonathan Schuster (who CRUSHED it that night as the MC by the way) and he told me a great rule that he uses for storytelling. “Everything I say has to fulfil one of three purposes”, he said, “it has to either endear me to the audience, further the story, or be funny... and being funny is the most important one of the three.” He used his cum-eating story as an example, as during it he cites three (count 'em, THREE) times that testing whether drinking pineapple juice makes your jizz taste like pineapple was HER idea. He really forces that idea on the audience, and reiterates it, and spoon feeds it to them, stopping on it and emphasizing the fuck out of it every time.
Also they day before that, on Monday when I was at the Brunny only half an hour after that horrible death while my butt was still sore from the fucking, I had a chat with Beau Stegmann before his set and he told me what he was trying to do in his new bit about going to see a scary movie. He said that every punchline should – ideally, at least – feel like it could be the end of the bit, so that when you keep going the audience is pleasantly surprised, and all the energy that they built up on the last laugh that they thought was their last, is carried over, and so the story gains momentum. I remember him telling me that a tag/punchline (the bit didn't really have a punchline, but this cap I had at the end of it more of an afterthought and so sounded like a tag) that I had at the end of a long rant once was the best part about it because the audience thought I was done when I finished yelling, and so the afterthought was a surprise for them, and they laughed harder.
Armed with these two pieces of advice, I have rewritten the story about doing my set on Monday while being oblivious to the blind girl in the front row. I'm not going to introduce it as a story, I'm going to open by thanking the audience for sitting the right way as if it's an observation, or at the very most just a bit about it being good to face the front. Then I'll lead that into the story, which has individual jokes in it, and then when I walk off stage in the story, I'll do the punchline. I've also changed the punchline to a deaf girl, rather than a blind one, as someone who is blind could still hear the things I'm saying, and so even if they aren't aggressive or bad, I'm still an asshole, whereas a deaf girl couldn't hear the things, and so the joke becomes that I've just spent my whole set trying to get someone who can't hear me to turn around, and playing to the back of their head. I'm the loser, not her. Finally I'm going to use the line, “... but I thought 'I won't get angry, because I'm here to make people laugh'” as a recurring thought as I recount my set to endear myself to the audience and hopefully get them on side for the punchline which, even when it's a blind girl, still leaves me as a bit of a dick.
If I can make this story work, I think I'll be able to take these skills and use them to write a bunch of other stories that I've tried or wanted to tell on stage in the last eighteen months – peeing into a condom, getting yelled at by a homeless guy in front of a tourist group, bartending at a strip club etc. Then also I can apply these lessons to my show, which definitely needs some touching up in the opening twenty minutes as I regale the audience with stories of why I'm a fuckhead and how I needed to change.
Comedy is hard, guys. Every time I think I'm onto something, and I feel like I have a solid chunk of material that I can take around to rooms and do well with, I try to write something that in my mind is going to be the easiest thing ever, and it completely stumps me, and casts me back to square one. I spent the entire week before last trying to make a bit about 'the worst thing that's ever happened to me' (eating garlic paste on toast) work, and it just didn't. I kept trying to crowbar new jokes and ideas into it and engineer callbacks and new contrived observations in, but I was just battering my head against a wall. Sigh. Yep. Comedy is hard.
Peace, Taco.
On Tuesday after I had probably a four in front of my parents at the Rochester, I had a chat to Jonathan Schuster (who CRUSHED it that night as the MC by the way) and he told me a great rule that he uses for storytelling. “Everything I say has to fulfil one of three purposes”, he said, “it has to either endear me to the audience, further the story, or be funny... and being funny is the most important one of the three.” He used his cum-eating story as an example, as during it he cites three (count 'em, THREE) times that testing whether drinking pineapple juice makes your jizz taste like pineapple was HER idea. He really forces that idea on the audience, and reiterates it, and spoon feeds it to them, stopping on it and emphasizing the fuck out of it every time.
Also they day before that, on Monday when I was at the Brunny only half an hour after that horrible death while my butt was still sore from the fucking, I had a chat with Beau Stegmann before his set and he told me what he was trying to do in his new bit about going to see a scary movie. He said that every punchline should – ideally, at least – feel like it could be the end of the bit, so that when you keep going the audience is pleasantly surprised, and all the energy that they built up on the last laugh that they thought was their last, is carried over, and so the story gains momentum. I remember him telling me that a tag/punchline (the bit didn't really have a punchline, but this cap I had at the end of it more of an afterthought and so sounded like a tag) that I had at the end of a long rant once was the best part about it because the audience thought I was done when I finished yelling, and so the afterthought was a surprise for them, and they laughed harder.
Armed with these two pieces of advice, I have rewritten the story about doing my set on Monday while being oblivious to the blind girl in the front row. I'm not going to introduce it as a story, I'm going to open by thanking the audience for sitting the right way as if it's an observation, or at the very most just a bit about it being good to face the front. Then I'll lead that into the story, which has individual jokes in it, and then when I walk off stage in the story, I'll do the punchline. I've also changed the punchline to a deaf girl, rather than a blind one, as someone who is blind could still hear the things I'm saying, and so even if they aren't aggressive or bad, I'm still an asshole, whereas a deaf girl couldn't hear the things, and so the joke becomes that I've just spent my whole set trying to get someone who can't hear me to turn around, and playing to the back of their head. I'm the loser, not her. Finally I'm going to use the line, “... but I thought 'I won't get angry, because I'm here to make people laugh'” as a recurring thought as I recount my set to endear myself to the audience and hopefully get them on side for the punchline which, even when it's a blind girl, still leaves me as a bit of a dick.
If I can make this story work, I think I'll be able to take these skills and use them to write a bunch of other stories that I've tried or wanted to tell on stage in the last eighteen months – peeing into a condom, getting yelled at by a homeless guy in front of a tourist group, bartending at a strip club etc. Then also I can apply these lessons to my show, which definitely needs some touching up in the opening twenty minutes as I regale the audience with stories of why I'm a fuckhead and how I needed to change.
Comedy is hard, guys. Every time I think I'm onto something, and I feel like I have a solid chunk of material that I can take around to rooms and do well with, I try to write something that in my mind is going to be the easiest thing ever, and it completely stumps me, and casts me back to square one. I spent the entire week before last trying to make a bit about 'the worst thing that's ever happened to me' (eating garlic paste on toast) work, and it just didn't. I kept trying to crowbar new jokes and ideas into it and engineer callbacks and new contrived observations in, but I was just battering my head against a wall. Sigh. Yep. Comedy is hard.
Peace, Taco.
No comments:
Post a Comment