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Posting all my material

“Only post a small preview of your material online” seems to be the accepted truth about stand-up comedians website’s and how they should do their marketing and promotion. The thinking is, if all of your material is online, nobody is going to want to see your show. I disagree with this for a few reasons:

  • Videotaped performance is not a substitute to the live thing, it’s a compliment. Taped performances can also be turned into a souveneir for fans to take the performance home
  • For every person who might not see you live because they see your video (and I’m sure there’s a few, but they probably wouldn’t have come out anyway), you may get two new people to see you who wouldn’t have otherwise
  • It forces you to keep writing new material
  • If the purpose of your site is to get a person to come to one of your shows, then you don’t want to post the whole show online. If your purpose is to develop a relationship with fans, and maybe even lead a tribe, then you want to show your fans how you’re growing and improving, and leave room for their suggestions. (Just one example, the broadway musical Cats was so successful because there were people who’d seen the show ten, twenty and even sixty times. This in turn generates an additional buzz and awareness among people.)
  • Some of your fans may live far away or be unable to make shows live, the more they can see of you, the more likely they’ll want to come by when you’re live and in their area
  • Information (even humorous information) wants to be free

My philosophy, until proven otherwise, is to upload as much of my material and sets as possible.

Before anyone calls me a hypocrite, let me do it myself: I don’t post all my sets onto my homepage, I have 2-3 good videos there and post the rest of the videos to this blog, where I think the true fans will go. If someone is taking a 2 minute look at me before deciding to come out and see me, they don’t need to see the videos of me trying out new material and bombing.

Comments, especially those calling me crazy, are welcome 🙂

Treat it like a job

After Sunday’s show, a few of us grabbed some drinks and started discussing how each of us goes about writing.

One comment which I can sympathize with was that writing is a “little guy talking to me”. This is what Steven Pressfield would call your “inner muse”. Basically, when you’re sitting (or standing) and writing (or coming up with material aloud), you feel as if it’s someone other than “you” that’s giving you the ideas.

Another interesting thing I learned about writing techniques was most comics there do the standard suggested technique of writing premises down, then coming up with punchlines, then cutting down on words and finding the funniest part. While one comic comes up with punchlines first, then writes the premises. I think I’ll try this method soon to see if it works for me.

The last thing that struck me about the conversation was how a few of the comics put in 2-3 hours a day writing. One said, “If you want to make it, you gotta treat this like a second job.”

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More Stand-Up Comedy Tips:

Using New Material

I decided to do a set of all new material I wrote yesterday. Two things I learned about doing new jokes:

1) Try to embed new material in the middle of an older set which you know gets laughs, you can never be sure how new material will do, and if it’s all new, flat out bombing isn’t out of the question

2) Make sure to say your new material out loud a couple of times, even if it’s to yourself to ensure you have a flow, you don’t want the stage to be the first time anyone has heard it aloud

*The comments after my set are from other comics, this is a “writer’s room / feedback” type of mic

One liner day

I received a lot of really positive feedback after this set. It seems that shorter jokes are working better for me. The downside of this is shorter jokes mean I have to remember a longer list of jokes for my set. I suppose as long as it’s getting laughs….

The facetime and the laid vs laid off jokes need to be reworked. I’m thinking of trying, “I don’t understand some of the intracices of the English language. Why is it when you’re a jerk at work, you get laid. When you jerkoff at work, you get laid off?” I’m still not sure how to tighten the facetime joke. I think saying “40 minutes” instead of “40” could’ve helped. Suggestions welcome…

Too Dirty?

“Great job, but you gotta clean it up. Cmon. I can’t have you talking about coming in girls on stage.” Some places will let you know what kind of material you have to avoid before hand, others will end your set early if you say something you weren’t even aware was dirty. 

As you may have guessed that’s what happened last night. I found out while taking a leak in the bathroom that this particular place doesn’t like you to do many jokes about female anatomy or if you’re gonna do them, you gotta go as metaphorical as possible.

Question: Will changing “coming in a girl without a condom… the first night I meet her” to “Not using protection for a one night stand” or “Going raw when you first meet someone” take the laugh out of this bit? Or is even that still too dirty?

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