Things I learnt doing stand-up comedy
michaelgv.uk
michaelgv.uk
Two major things I learned were
a) you have to get the audience hooked in the first 20-30 secs or it gets much harder. Best example Emo Philips opening with “You know it’s really hard when you have to kill a family member because they are the devil. <Pause for laughter>. Other that it’s been a great day”. Now that’s a hook :-)
b) the concept of “laughs per minute” - ie there is a certain rate at which the laughs become self sustaining. It’s 3-4 laughs per minute. If you can keep that up for 2 mins the audience is in a state of laughter that keeps getting more and more intense. If you do less than 2 laughs a minute the energy drops between each laugh and you have to work really hard to bring it back to level. Key is to maintain a rate that results in a high ambient level of hilarity bordering with at least a couple of people cackling loudly and losing it.
Nevertheless when you do a successful set you feel like Superman when you walk off the stage.
I remember watching this right after he died, and was blown away by how good he was. Not only does he get laughs right away, they're sustained. I went back and timed it, and his first 2 minutes on stage has 1 minute of audience laughter and applause. He nails all the things you mentioned, and has the whole audience roaring in under 3 minutes.
It doesn't scale to a funny second performance.
I don't blame people for using their physical idiosyncrasies or ethnicity to get their foot in the door. But you're right in that it only goes so far and you gotta evolve.
The first two minutes of the set are incredible.
This all reminds me of a paper I've read, and think about regularly. The author, or others, might be interested. I've posted notes and a link to the paper here:
https://josh.works/driven-by-compression-progress-novelty-hu...
The argument is something like "when our expectations are subverted, and new visible order snaps into view, we feel satisfied and interested". Curiosity and expectation seems to play a large role in humor and standup.
Thanks for this article, Michael! I've subscribed via RSS! I am thankful to have found your website.
Really like the quote and your website. I've had a good play around with your "find a random blogger from Hacker News" project.
I'm quite proud of it, and as I've told other people about it, I specifically mention a "laughs per minute" rate of, for the first few minutes, an impressive rate! (It wasn't just my humor, definitely a group experience) I think it went great, in large part because it was a quite improvisational, reactive experience.
It feels _so_ strange to plug oneself's talk, but here we are:
https://josh.works/boulder_ruby_group
"Move Slow and Improve Things: Performance Improvement in a Rails App"
To the degree that it was successful, it was ENTIRELY due to a highly supportive group of people eagerly invested in my success. What a powerful phenomena to have at your back.
update: It was sorta hastily prepared, and my gosh, rewatching some if now years later there's a lot I wish I'd done better in the organization and clarity of some how how I presented. It just totally had elements of a standup routine, as many entertaining talks do. This is independent of the value, correctness, necessary truthfulness of the content, of course.
[...]
I just used The Internet to answer this question - they're active, in person: https://www.meetup.com/boulder_ruby_group/?_cookie-check=0N7...
If you're still in town, check it out! I'm not in Denver at the moment, but hope to go again someday!
If the lady had said "Can you spare a few minutes to discuss supporting cancer research" there isn't any ambiguity in the sentence and then no joke.
Community used these to great effect. For example:
Britta: Yep, I’m getting serious. I got a backpack, got a new notebook. Oh, I got one of those see-through yellow pens so I can do that thing where you colour in the words.
Shirley: Highlight?
Britta: Probably the backpack.
I thought you got your degree online from Colombia?
Yes, but they want a real degree from America
- he told people he got his degree from Col*mbia (both place names are pronounced the same)
- people (naturally) assumed he meant Columbia
- the punchline reveals that it was actually Colombia
- the punchline also hints that he got his degree by buying a certificate online, rather than doing bona fide online learning
Interestingly, to me, Colombia and Columbia don't sound the same, but I'm not a native speaker and I tend to think of words in terms of their spelling rather than their pronunciation.
Britta thinks Shirley asks for the highlight of the things she got. Shirley thinks she’s telling Britta what that thing that you use to highlight text is called
Rather, I think this is just some ambiguity about what the "few minutes" are for.
If you had understood the joke in the first place, please unread all the above.
Sure, I've left my two young kids and a puppy in a locked and closed car and it's a very, very, very hot day and I have 3 important things to do...can you?
/FB cap doff, of course.
I've continued to pay attention to it since, and it really is amazing how much skill and preparation it takes to put together anything that even comes close to being a decent performance.
Great stand-up comedians have inevitably spent hours of time refining every sentence that comes out of their mouths, despite their delivery sounding entirely natural and unrehearsed.
T.J. Miller, of Silicon Valley fame, does it successfully in this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qxD6S-nEL_I
But yesterday, most comics bombed badly; out of 8, just one was actually good, and one passable; the others were terrible. But it's an incredibly difficult exercise, so much so that one has to wonder why you would put yourself through this.
It's certainly true that comedy is about writing and rehearsal and being analytical and having a fun look at the world; but it's also about quick wit, especially if one wants to interact with the audience.
They do this in Paris precisely because they bomb - if they were any good, they'd be making money in an actual English-speaking country...
/bitch-mode off
Was this in his early days, or his darker rant days?
Even in his darker period he was still a crafty orator, using rhyming, cadence and tonality so well.
He discusses this in many interviews over the years and many which were shown in is documentary. What's even crazier to think is that he was kind of a recluse and an introverted person, which is insane considering how much of a wildman he was for most of his career.
Of course sometimes you're still looking at empty rooms and empty tip jars or no ticket sales, but most of the time, I get to tell more jokes to a larger number of people and get more money at each show working in flyover country.
I /really/ like that opener: "My favourite London bus is the 24".
“Which burner is your favorite? Mine is back left.”
If there's anything in local history you find interesting that happened that year (or even better, in the previous two years), you could have played that against the stereotype of London buses always coming late and in groups.
Btw, I really want to congratulate you for having the courage to do a set. It takes a lot to perform comedy in front of an audience of strangers - with tech talks you at least have the slides as a crutch, but with standup, you have nothing to fall back on. You have a good grip on pacing, too. Please keep at it.
My big takeaway from that was that comedy, like many, many things is a skill that can be improved on with hard work. Undoubtedly there is some element of innate talent, but it is far less than I would have imagined before.
I’ve been asked at times if I had ever considered standup or doing some kind of comedy or joining in on things - but I am funny because I want to entertain people I like, not strangers. When I tell stories or bits to strangers to get a laugh - I don’t really get the same sense of pleasure out of it as I do with a group of friends.
I’ve considered being more intentional and getting very good at comedy but in some ways - I like the uncoordinated trial and error.
The ultimate victory in intra-sibling competition: Grinding comedy until you have a Netflix stand-up special and your naturally funny wise-cracking brother doesn't.
- The rule of thirds for visual imagery [1]
- Three-act structure for storytelling and plays [2]
- Three-part setup for stand up comedy [this article]
Rules for content often fall into a rule of threes, and I'd love to know why.
I'm over simplifying but that is really the basis of a lot of comedy. Stand up less so. Most improv runs on the rule of threes though. It's an easy way to make something not funny at least a little funny.
Try it in a meeting or presentation sometime. Start with some goofy line or joke. Mention it again in the middle. Close with it. You'll probably get laughs. Even if its not that funny and got crickets the first time.
What’s the simplest way to represent most stories? You draw a line. It goes from point A to point B, start to finish, where the characters begin and where they end. There’s a whole lot of “middle” there too. What a coincidence, act two tends to be the longer one! Again, “1, 2, 3”.
How about the simplest way to count to (say) start a race? “Go” is unpredictable; “Ready, Go” is barely better; “Ready, Set, Go” gives you a clear cadence. 1, 2, 3. Beginning, middle, end.
As for images: humans are symmetrical with two eyes, we naturally divide the picture into two sides so you wouldn’t be impressed by a “rule of halves”. A rule of thirds is no more than a grid, one where there are clear sides and a middle to the image. A rule of fifths would also work, as would a five-act structure (which is a thing).
Three is the smallest number to which you can reduce a lot of concepts by establishing a pattern.
Geometrically if you have two points you can draw a straight line between them. Now you can put a third point almost anywhere else to change the shape from a straight line to something more unique, complex and unexpected.
Some comedians like Norm McDonald (moth joke, youthful porpoise joke) use dozens of straight line thoughts with one random one at the end. Norm was a great storyteller with lots of personality so he was able to keep the audience’s interest for minutes before delivering the change in direction. And he had a preexisting reputation so the audience was probably willing to wait longer for the hook.
It’s probably easier for most comics to do the bare minimum though which would be 2 cohesive thoughts and 1 unexpected one.
Jimmy Carr says that the shortest joke he's ever written is two words: dwarf shortage.
If you only do single setup plus payoff the audience may instead try to make the two fit together. If you give them two points of reference, it allows them to prebuild an assumed pattern with less work from the story/music/whatever for you to either play within or subvert.
An example of using just two to build patterns in the audience (but doesn't give a chance to subvert expectations per se) is cutting between shots in movies. The audience inherently tries to deduce the meaning of going from one image to a second. David Mamet has a great book, 'On Directing Film', that is not very long and talks about the shot transition version of this in great detail. You can use the ideas there and expand it to three to get into the ideas I've talked about above.
I would like explicitly to appreciate your choice to give 3 examples.
An assertion about mathematics requires a definition, and I don't believe this one for the usual definition of 'pattern'. For example, if I wanted to exhibit a linear pattern, two data points would be sufficient.
(But we're not talking about mathematical constructs anyway, so it's not clear what the relevance of mathematics is.)
Yes, certainly. And 3 points can show you a pattern that looks quadratic but isn't, and so on. More to the point, 3 points can rule out a claim of linearity, but they also cannot demonstrate a claim of linearity (e.g., you can usually find 3 collinear points on the graph of a cubic). My point was not to make a mathematical claim myself, but rather to argue that the claim "the minimum number of elements necessary for a pattern is three" is so vague to, I think, be nearly meaningless—and, in particular, unfalsifiable; in my mind, it doesn't deserve the adverb "mathematically".
Standup is something I want to try one day. I have a lot of respect for comedians. My gut instinct is that the personality and delivery plays a more important role than the content.
When you land a punchline, you sweep the crowd for a few seconds. If you then start a new one before the laugh has finished, you are not just breaking the illusion of having told the joke to them - you are rudely interrupting them enjoying themselves.
Also: while laughing, the audience will miss the next feedline / lead. The joke you started during a laugh will not land well, no matter how good it might be.
I did a 6-week course early this year at the Angel Comedy. In the showcase, the joke of the show came in a young Danish-Chinese woman's set, and she played it perfectly. 25 seconds of laughter, in three rolling waves - and she had the guts to ride it through. All of us were congratulating her afterwards.
This is the best way to get a laugh:
"You show the fat lady approaching; then you show the banana peel; then you show the fat lady and the banana peel together; then she steps over the banana peel and disappears down a manhole."
—Charlie Chaplin
Laughter is the reaction to being surprised in a safe environment.
From:
One went pretty damn well. The other got polite laughter at best.
Came away with a lot of respect for comedians. For me just coming up with 2 minutes of material was a challenge.
Just one but it wasn't funny.
To take an example from Jimmy Carr.
A lady with a clipboard stopped me in the street the other day.
She said, "Can you spare a few minutes for Cancer Research?"
I said, "All right, but we're not going to get much done.”https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rule_of_three_(writing)#Comedy
The self congratulatory estimating himself as one of the worst performers but coming out as one of the top three was a little hamfisted, and if that was honestly the case... I cannot even imagine what the other comedians used for material... a list of ones favorite mosaic bathroom tile patterns perhaps?
Comedy feels like writing, if you need to take a course it's probably just not for you.
The humor is in the hyperbole about how weak the prey is. The setup of a joke sets people up as a familiar level of prey, and the punchline is about someone (or everyone) in the joke being far weaker than you could have predicted. The punchline in this joke is about Jimmy Carr being stupid in a way that you wouldn't imagine someone could actually be.
It would be much more plausibly viewed as a mechanism to avoid fighting rivals. As in: monkey A steals monkey B's banana, and monkey B bares his teeth to attack, but then, recognizing that monkey A is bigger and will kill him, monkey B evolves the behavior of laughing instead, as a way to dissipate the aggression and avoid a fight he will lose. Later, lower-status monkeys use humor as a way to gain status, because since laughter is equivalent to not-fighting, you can win or avoid a fight with a higher-status monkey by making him laugh.
That sounds a lot more believable, and it kinda-sorta comports with observation (e.g. it maps very neatly to medieval jesters getting away with making jokes about the King, or schoolyard bullying victims 'winning' if they can get the crowd laughing at the bully). But it's still a just-so story about evolutionary behavior, and by definition suspect as those are famously easy to gin up.
The expectation is that Jimmy Carr is of normal intelligence and awareness. The joke that he is making is that he is not.
I don't buy the monkey story because laughing isn't generally defensive. If somebody attacks you and you laugh, they will attack you harder. To defend yourself with laughter, you point at a third-party and laugh, so maybe they'll think the third party is weaker than you.
I'm pretty sure the joke is that you aren't going to get much done in "a moment" of Cancer Research.
Not that he's too stupid to do the research. He could be the world's foremost expert on Cancer Research and the joke is still funny.
Dissecting jokes is tedious and subjective but the sheer number of people disagreeing with you is telling. Jimmy Carr does a fair bit of self-deprecating humor but this one is pure "punchline subverts the expectation of the setup". It feels like you're working really hard to force this "woke=weak" thing in to a place where it doesn't remotely fit.
edit to add: and in cases where humor is aggressive or dismissive (e.g. jokes about gays, Polish people, blondes, etc) I think you'll find that "ingroup vs. outgroup" is a much better model than "predator vs. prey".
It sounds to me like you think in terms of prey and predator as a default metaphor: which informs me of how I should handle you as an agent - carefully.
If you reduce everything to animalistic tendencies - you start reacting that way: then people start treating you that way based on your actions... self fulfilling prophecy.
You might want to update you mental model of comedy - or provide a significantly more cogent argument for your view, as it was far from convincing - and frankly worrisome.
All in all it sounds like you are telling us how you respond to people you perceive as prey... which is... concerning that you view ANY human as prey...
Notice that most of the examples of humor in this discussion are not that type.
Reductively I'd say the prey is the audience in that case, for not being smart enough to see it coming. The best puns are heavily telegraphed yet somehow totally unpredictable. They're clever mirrorings of things everyone is already familiar with, but still didn't see coming.
Bad puns aside, there’s many theories in the scientific literature (from cognitive psychology, linguistics and AI) that describe the mechanisms of puns (and many other types of jokes, really), and they mostly talk about deviations from a script/subverting expectations and norms (Hanks’ theory of norms)/accessing a non-default interpretation that is different from the default one (Giora’s optimal innovation hypothesis).
For the interested reader, i suggest starting with Raskin https://www.degruyter.com/document/doi/10.1515/9783110198492...