Week 2, what to include in stand-up and feedback.

Solo Performance

Techniques to use in comedy/stand-up

Check the work through, especially experimental. What might be funny for you is not always funny for the audience, unless you back it up with the back story. Have sidelines and sub-plots. Stories have to be personal, but also transferable to an audience so that they can understand and appreciate the story too. Cut out the rambling blurb, set up the story but don’t waffle. Keep the audience’s attention. Don’t make it look like reading in a library. Project. Listen to and for the audience’s reaction and play off of it. Visual cue’s help the audience imagine it. Draw the audience in, have some sense of mystique, don’t give it all up at once, make them want it, make them wait, make them want to hear more, want to keep the joke going. Have a connection with the audience. Improvise with the audience and use their feedback, like when someone leaves or comes in late. Autobiographical is good. Has to work on lots of audience’s and lots of re-writes. Have presence on stage. Blur the lines between show and person, act and self/individual. Specific audience isn’t always a given. Have to be sensitive to the audience, but also bullish. Have to adapt to them but not pushed around by them. It’s ok to push boundaries but don’t go over the line. Want to make it look/seem spontaneous. Embody people, be a character. Element of surprise. Have something that the audience can identify with. Say the full name, specificity. Show compassion and that you care. Turn specificity into universality.

‘Local girlfriend always wants to do stuff’ is better than ‘Nation’s girlfriends call for more quality time.’ The targets are different, but the local makes it personal whereas the national makes it impersonal.

Incongruity = two things that do not match, the unexpected brings out a laugh.

Superiority = laughing at people, not with them.

Relief = based on Freud. Conscious investment in serious, laughter through safety, the serious gets laughed off and the tension disappears. The performer gives a conscious/unconscious sign that it is ok to laugh at it.

Feedback for my picture story-

Felt personal, good pace, use of natural reaction and playing off the audience. A visual description helped to make the audience feel par t of the journey. Don’t sit back and relax in the chair.

Feedback for my thank you’s-

No more stool for me! Take more time at the beginning. Have a casual chat at the start, take time between getting on and starting the actual gig. Constantly sarcastic and cynical. Visual descriptions helped again. Pause between jokes. My thinking is quicker than others, I know the joke and the punch line, the audience might have to work a bit harder. Wait for the pause, space and joke. Expand on ‘private jokes’. Share them and express them more. Enjoy it. Branch things out, brainstorm, ideas into a collective. Don’t necessarily go word for word through the script joke for joke, use collective groups of jokes that relate to each other.