Well, it kind of started when Flowers recommended The Comedy Bible in this very thread (thanks Flowers!). I’d already been collecting material in a text file on my computer, and then I started carrying a notebook in my jacket to jot down stuff when it came to me (that’s one of the first suggestions in the book). And honestly, that’s the biggest thing. I don’t think any of the material I created doing the actual excercises in the book made it into my set, it was all stuff I’d come up with talking with friends or talking to myself in the shower.
Four weeks ago my girlfriend and I went to amateur night for the first time, just to see what it was like, and then I ran through all my material in front of her and started polishing, reworking and cutting stuff. I printed that out and put it in my car, so I could run through it while driving and memorize it. By about two weeks ago I pretty much had a set, which when I timed it out was over 12 minutes (for a six minute slot), so then I really started cutting. Funny stuff got moved into the backlog for future sets, unfunny stuff got removed completely. Then I just kept running through the set a couple times a day until I could do the whole thing from memory, and in the course of “talking it out” as they say, I continued to polish it. By this point I didn’t bother printing out my material, I just had a recipe card in the car that had a pointform list of the jokes I wanted to do. I took this card up on stage with me but I didn’t need it.
Since I couldn’t be totally sure how the timing would be, I had about three extra minutes of material memorized. I had most of my long stuff up front and then a bunch of short bits that I could pad out until the red light came on, and then I’d go to my closer, which got the biggest laugh both from my girlfriend and when I came up with it originally. There was one short bit I really wanted to get in, so obviously I put that at the front of the padding queue. And that’s pretty much exactly what happened. In actual fact, it went almost exactly as long as I expected and I didn’t use any of the padding jokes.
I’ve posted an audio recording of my set on my blog.
Some of the things that were really helpful from the book:
• if you go three sentences without a joke, cut out the filler
• act out conversations. Don’t say “my dad told me that…”, pretend you’re your dad telling you
• if something isn’t working, cut it. I tried to write three or four different bits about the actual experience of online dating, and none of them made me laugh. I kept trying to rework them and even pulled some stuff from my blog rant on the subject, and it just wasn’t working, so eventually I just cut them completely and gave a two sentence intro to my next joke and started with that.
• don’t single out specific groups or people to make fun of, this is the quickest way to get the audience to turn on you.
• don’t tell stories. The premise should not be about you, even if the punchline is.
If you want to hear what happens when you break these rules, I have the rest of the show recorded. One guy went up there and told this long rambling story about how he had a brain aneurism that had a few funny bits in it but for the most part was painful to listen to, and eventually they had to start playing music to get him off the stage because he really had no ending that he was working toward. If he would just talk it out ahead of time and cut everything that isn’t a joke or a set-up to a joke, that stuff would be gold.
Another guy did pretty much the exact same set that got him booed and heckled (albeit by his sister) the last time he was up. He did a bit about how cat people suck, and another about how women on Plenty of Fish suck. He didn’t get booed this time but nobody was laughing.
