Why You Should Ask an Academic
An article published last July in the Chronicle of Higher Education reappeared in my FB news feed the other day, and it says basically what I’ve been on a...
Category: Doing Stand-up
I don’t just watch, read about, and critique stand-up, I also perform. Stand-up is hard. I do stand-up because it’s hard. The road from open mics to headlining a show – even locally – is convoluted and full of terrors. This category will address the how-tos.
Getting on Stage
Perhaps the hardest part of stand-up for many people is actually getting on stage. Seinfeld’s joke about fear of public speaking versus death is legendar...
Why You Should Think Jokes Through
Comedy teacher, comic and writer Jerry Corley gives three reasons to develop your writing. They are: Writing Makes it Easier to Build Structure into your Materi...
How to Write a Joke
Everything starts with the jokes. Until you’ve got material that consistently gets laughs, you’ve got nothing – and you need at least five mi...
Why Do the Work?
I hear critiques of comics, most recently of Louis CK, that “he seemed to be rambling,” through his first abortion joke. They don’t seem to r...
A Note on Spontaneity
I should preface my process by saying that writing is often unexamined. People think that jokes “just happen,” spontaneously. And they do – ...