Comedy is Serious Business

I’ve heard that performing stand-up comedy is like getting up in front of a group of people and masturbating. This sums up the mentality behind stand-up comedy to a tee. There is an overwhelming feeling of vulnerability when it comes to standing onstage and getting a room of complete strangers to laugh at jokes based on your own personal, life experiences. Also, it only lasts a few minutes (Hiyoooo!).


It may not seem like it, but performing stand-up is hard. There is an art to crafting a genuinely funny joke that the whole audience can relate to. From there, it’s a matter of trial and error. Finding out of a joke works or not. Finding out what part of a joke works or not. Finding a way to make the parts that don’t work, work. Then there is, of course, the “stand-up” part, which entails getting on stage—alone—and making people laugh for anywhere from five minutes to an hour. Not to mention it takes years to get discovered and even longer to get to the level of Louis C.K. or Ricky Gervais. However, it seems as though only a handful of comedians nowadays actually take the time to write good material and the jokes get even worse with up and coming comedians.


Now, I must say I am part of these up and coming comedians (I’ve been doing stand-up sporadically for about two years now) and I’m by all means not the best comic ever, but I can tell the good comedians from the bad ones. When I first started taking courses, my instructor always stressed how important it was to keep your material as clean as possible and to try and stay away from toilet humor. This made sense; with clean material, you have more of a chance to be booked for a television gig without having half of your set bleeped out and, since most people are ordering food while you perform, you don’t want to talk about poop the whole time. It also made you a better writer, having to draw from personal experiences for your jokes rather than resorting to blue humor.


Imagine my surprise when I started doing open mics and new talent shows at comedy clubs and 90% of the jokes told by the other comedians were about drugs, vulgar sex stories, and copious use of the word “fuck” (warning, this blog post may contain the word “fuck”). The other 10% consisted of “you had to be there” stories that had the performer’s friends in the audience howling with laughter, leaving the rest of the crowd confused and me enraged. How is it that the jokes I spent months fine tuning and killed in all my classes get moderate audience response while the mere mention of marijuana would send the audience into uproarious applause?


I must shamefully admit, however, that whenever a female comedian takes the stage, it elicits an involuntary eye roll. Almost all the female comedians I’ve seen do one of two things: tell female oriented jokes that alienate all the (straight) male members of the audience or tell overly explicit stories seemingly to prove something. What exactly it is that they’re trying to prove is still beyond me. Anyone, regardless of gender, is capable of telling a great joke that people can relate to so I don’t understand why female comedians feel like they have to try so much harder to do so. Ellen DeGeneres is hilarious without resorting to these two methods of telling jokes so the “glass ceiling” that most female comedians seem to be experiencing is self imposed.


I know you must be thinking, “Oh, well maybe you just aren’t as funny as you think.” I’ve had a couple of people approach me to perform regularly at their club and a script that I cowrote is a finalist in the New York Television Festival Script Writing Contest held by Fox (boom), so I feel pretty vindicated. I’m not trying to turn anyone off from becoming a stand-up comedian, nor am I going to quit but these are the things one must deal with when attempting stand-up as a career. Now, if I were a successful comedian with a steady income, this post would have a more optimistic ending.


*Here’s a link of me performing stand-up. It’s from when I first started and you can tell I’m nervous but I got great audience response that night. Shazaam!