Hacking Standup

Comedians hate this one simple trick to getting funny fast.

Is there a magic pill that makes you funny fast? Comics often claim you must grind it out for decades to see results. It reminds me of my time in medical school where the misery of academic incarceration bonded the students together. Time certainly makes you better. But there is a definitive way to speed your progress. Produce your own comedy shows. Creating shows overcomes the deficiency in stage time that inhibits comedic growth. It also sharpens the entrepreneurial skills essential to all artists.

The Limiting Reagent: Stage Time

Standup has a bottleneck problem. There is a limited amount of stage time and hordes of comedians vying for it. The only way to improve your routine is to get in front of audiences and bounce your jokes on them. The crowd provides immediate feedback. They do this with obvious signals like laughter and applause, but also subtle ones like facial expressions and body language. These signals will shape your jokes and allow you to explore new offshoots. You will find who you are on stage through repeated exposure to these signals.

But each audience is a single data point. The success of your act depends on a multitude of factors: joke wording, the socioeconomic background of the crowd, joke placement, timing, body language, energy and a dozen other variables. Andrew Schulz describes standup as a game of basketball where the hoop changes every night.  As you repeat jokes to different audiences, you chisel them down and find what works consistently. For all of this editing, a copious amount of stage time is required. It is both the limiting ingredient and the canvas on which we paint.

In the beginning, you’ll get stage time wherever you can. You will wait hours at open mics to get three minutes behind the microphone. In loud bars and empty ones you will spew your clever lines into the abyss. This is the equivalent of painting a portrait on a garbage bag. Still, it is useful early on. There is a bit of magic to the open mic world. Filled with equal parts hope and hopelessness. But you must quickly graduate or it will suck you in. Open mics instill bad habits. You are surrounded by amateur comedians. Making them laugh will distort your sense of humor and you will forget how to make a real audience laugh. You must get on shows in front of normal people with normal sensibilities. 

You’ll find yourself in the predicament of wanting more stage time but having to maneuver through the politics of getting booked. There is an opaque structure to getting on shows. At this early stage, you have little to offer except your nascent routine. You are in a long line with dozens of other hungry comedians for the few spots at the local club or at a popular indy show. Many careers in comedy die in this holding pattern. But why wait around? Why not create your own show? 

Overcoming the bottleneck

There are dozens of venues in even a medium-sized town. If you are serious about becoming an artist then you have also signed up to become an entrepreneur. Venture out to every bar, cafe, theater and art gallery in your town and pitch them your project. You will learn to sell your value. Venues have their own agendas. They have a bottom line and varying appetites for risk. This cold selling will be intimidating; it is also a source of instrumental growth. You are a salesman for your vision. Get others to buy into your dream then deliver on your promise. With enough tenacity you’ll inevitably find opportunities.

Once you have secured a venue to produce a show, you will find yourself with momentum. You’ve pivoted from someone who is asking for stage time from a limited pool of opportunities, to expanding the pool and providing stage time to your peers. It is extraordinary leverage. There are still obstacles ahead of you. There is an ocean of details that separate a good show that gets recurring customers and a nod from the venue and mediocre one-off. But the advantages are great. You will create the space for you to consistently practice your routine and build a fanbase. You will learn how to form relationships with comics, venue owners, and ticket holders.

The indirect benefits are also vast. Producing a show will allow you to make a living. There is far more money in producing comedy shows than performing. Show production takes significantly more work. Marketing a show and building recurring customers will expose you to financial risk. Anyone who’s produced a show knows the sinking pit you feel in your stomach when you have just five tickets sold before showtime.

You will learn what makes a show successful and how to position comedians to balance the energies of different routines. You are no longer in charge of just your set, you are responsible for weeks and months of preparation. You must climb up the business vertical and touch on things that sully the idea of pure art: marketing, branding, booking, and profit. You’ll find that art has never existed in a vacuum. Art is a balancing act of producing something that is both uniquely yours and palatable to an audience. 

The more shows you create, the better you will get both at production and at standup. You will become a contributor to your local scene and create relationships that will open doors for you. As all of this happens you will keep getting up in front of crowds, crafting jokes and finding your funny

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