Over the years, maybe 50 people – from friends to CS agents on the phone – have told me I should be doing standup comedy. The idea is super tempting. I have a great niche in mind and would prefer starting with a bang not a whimper, which means hitting my first small audiences with strong material. While I’m funny and have a strong stage presence and comfort level, I doubt I can write 30 to 60 minutes of killer observational comedy. (I know the first few appearances would be 5 to 10-minute gigs, but I want to look ahead and see if I could go the distance.)
Where would I find freelancer joke/comedy writers to add muscle to my act? I know the talk show greats have always used joke writers, but do you think the top talent on the comedy circuit have joke writers or are they doing all that writing themselves? I’ve got to believe the major players have writers who are constantly refreshing their supply.
I think the vast majority, if not all standups just starting out, are writing 100% of their own material. One, they are usually pretty broke unless they happen to be independently wealthy, and two, they’re trying to establish their own unique comedy voice, which would be difficult if you’re trying to explain the voice or vibe you’re looking to establish to a joke writer. It is hard to do. I’ve listened to a few podcasts over the years where they talk comedy “inside baseball” and comics often are expressing admiration for a fellow comic who’s able to come up with a fresh hour of material once a year.
Once you hit the big time, I guess it depends. I think many modern standups, say John Mulaney, will always write their own material. But, say, if an Eddie Murphy or Jerry Seinfeld does a standup show? Who knows. And of course, as you mention, get yourself a talk show and you will totally need writers, because no one can crank out fresh material day after day on their own.
I agree that you’ve got to write your own material. Unless the hired writer is very familiar with your schtick, they’re going to give you generic jokes, and probably mostly reused ones. If that’s what you want, you can find books and websites with jokes.
And by the way, I have a co-worker who is annoying in some respects and has trouble learning work stuff. (Why are you asking about that? We went over it last time this came up.) But to his credit, he’s out there, trying to meet people and improve himself, including by taking an extension course in stand-up. The finale of the course required the members of the class to each do a stand-up routine of, I think, five or ten minutes. So if you’re thinking you can become a stand-up, you might want to take such a course. Also, look for an open mic night at a local comedy club. You will get an idea of just how hard or easy this will be for you.
(BTW, the co-worker who seems to have trouble retaining information is also taking lessons to become a private pilot. That terrifies me.)
Wow, you’re a braver man than me, Gunga Din. I don’t have stage fright as a musician, but the idea of being on a stage without even a guitar as a prop would terrify me.
But… have you ever tried it? The sad fact is that most standup ‘jokes’ just aren’t that funny, in my experience.
I was a stand-up comedian as a profession for a period of about six years. Joke writing is hard. And filling 5-10 minutes is a lot harder than people think. When you’re first starting out, 10 minutes is an eternity. Especially if the crowd isn’t really digging your set.
I was fortunate enough to be able to travel some in the Midwest, and pay my bills mostly through that job.
But it’s also a very lonely business. You spend a lot of time in a town where you don’t know anyone. When you get done with your set, everyone else has to go home and go to bed. You spend many nights staring at the hotel room walls and saying goodbye to telephones.
It can be fun. If you’re good at it and lucky enough, it can be incredibly rewarding. But it takes a certain kind of mindset to be able to do it and not drive yourself crazier than you already are.
Most successful comics today build their sets off their personality. The jokes come out of the persona they create and present to the public. They work at writing all the time. Every day. Hours every day. Then they go back to small venues and try them out loud to see what works and what doesn’t.
To be fair, talk show hosts do use staffs of writers, because the above process can’t produce 10-20 minutes of topical humor every day. And older comics like Henny Youngman and Joan RIvers developed personalities that could be fed by one-liners that other writers sold to them.
You can’t do that to start out. You can’t even afford to do that to start out. How many jokes do you think it would take to fill a five-minute spot? Probably 20-25. In the very old olden days when Woody Allen started jokes were $5 a pop. Today they’d be much more. You’d be going to open mics where you don’t get paid at all. How much money can you sink into this?
Humor doesn’t have to be observational. It does need to be personal, in that it needs to have a connection to you. You’re talking to total strangers. When you do that in real life you make connections by your personality. For comedy you amp up that personality in humorous ways. But you’re still trying to make friends, win them over, get them on your side, make them feel good. Then they’ll laugh. If they just want jokes, they can Google better ones all day long.
Thank you for the wisdom. The more I think about it, the more confident I am in my ability to make audiences (especially Boomers/Gen Xers) laugh – and that isn’t just my malt liquor talking. Especially given some of the sight gags I’d weave into my act. If I really worked at it and studied the masters, I know I could develop 30 to 45 minutes of good, solid material, especially if I go the way of experiential storytelling humor.
Regarding hiring a joke writer, that wouldn’t be my preference either. Still, I think it would be easy, not hard, to write for my demographic and storytelling genre and certainly wouldn’t require some kind of symbiotic Vulcan mind meld between writer and comic, not that I’ve seen a lot of Vulcans slaying crowds at the Improv. It’s just writing and talking about funny, universal stuff, delivered in an over the top way that strikes funny bones.
The only way to know is to give it a try. Who knows? I could become a legend on the nursing home circuit.
A good 30 to 45 minute set? Unless you plan to do a hell of a lot of driving (on your own dime), you are going to need to refresh that act quite often, and joke writers that specialize in long humorous anecdotes are very rare and quite expensive. Remember, it is more important that the writers are familiar with your style than with your proposed target audience…and having a somewhat unique personal style is the heart of successful stand-up. Do you think you can give them something that they can’t get by saying “Alexa-find me some stand-up comedy”? Have you performed for any group that wasn’t friends and/or family?
I’m beginning to think you might well become a comedian, because this paragraph of storytelling is quite funny. More print humor than stand-up, but the wall of transition is only a thousand feet high.
I very strongly advise you write your own jokes, for several reasons:
It is generally an extremely bad idea to take jokes from other sources unless you have ABSOLUTE certainty they are originally from that source. If you tell a joke some other standup wrote and that just got repeated to you, you will look like a joke-stealer, which in comedy is worse than being a cannibal. If a friend gives you a joke, thank them and never use it on stage.
You will be generally more comfortable telling jokes you wrote yourself. They will be vastly better delivered and more sincere. In truth lies comedy.
What I would suggest is that you do the following:
FIRST: Accept that you won’t be very good at it to start. Please understand; you’ll be mediocre. You aren’t a good standup comedian. You may be funny with your friends; that is not the same thing. (Being funny in ordinary life is not a good predictor at all of standup skill. The best predictor is public speaking ability, and even that is only mildly predictive.) If you really think you have 30 minutes of material, I would bet you really have maybe 5 minutes. Virtually all starting comedians have way too much filler, not enough jokes.
SECOND: If at all possible, take a course in comedy writing. Comedy writing is a skill set with known techniques that work. It can be taught, just as music or painting can be taught. If nothing like that is available near you, read books on comedy writing.
THIRD: Start with 5-minute open mics. Get a five minute set. Go to bars and open mics and other stuff like that. You will do just okay sometimes, bomb other times. That’s fine. It’s part of the process.
FOURTH: Develop relationships with other standups. We love to talk shop and workshop our bits. Other comedians will help you.
All I will say is that you’ve picked a noble but very difficult profession, and I wish you the best of luck because the world needs more funny people!
And I strongly concur with those who say you should write your own material. For all the reasons stated, plus the fact that really good comedy writers are probably permanently occupied with long-term commitments and the freelancers aren’t likely to be the cream of the crop. But mostly because stuff that you’ve written yourself is not only going to come across as a lot more genuine, but it’s really intrinsic to being authentic. Getting others to create material for you basically makes you a reciter, not a comedian. Talk show hosts exempted because they simply need so much material, but I have the strong impression that the good ones have a very collaborative relationship with their permanent staff writers.
Disclaimer: I am (almost) the farthest thing imaginable from a stand-up comic myself. There’s at least one worst profession for me, though. I did a “career proficiency test” for fun once, and the very worst cringing rock-bottom career for me would be “fun director on a cruise ship”! (Or maybe it was “entertainment director” or some such thing; in any case, I could imagine myself saying – repeatedly – “are we having fun yet?”)
In addition to those salient points, comedy is only as strong as the delivery regardless of the material. A great comic can elevate seemingly dry, prosaic, or crass material to great humor in the way they deliver it, but only if they really get what makes the material work or bomb with their style of delivery. Taking a set of generic, canned material out on stage is pretty much guaranteed to bomb hard because you won’t be working through the process of finding the right notes to make it funny, nor is the material built around whatever persona you are projecting.
Also, if you are going to do stand up, and especially if you are doing open mike, you are going to have to both read and respond to the audience as well as deal with hecklers. If you can’t engage with the audience, and especially if you can’t give back to hecklers as good as you get, you are just going to dud out again and again. In addition to the suggestion above to take a class in comedy writing, you should also join an improv group and work hard as hard at it as you do on stand up.
I’m not a stand up comedian but I’d done some freelance comedy writing as well as studied screenwriting and film production. I can’t tell you of the number of people I’ve talked to in writing groups who believe just because they’ve gotten a few stories published that they could easily write a screenplay or sketch comedy. Setting aside the technical aspects of filming or how to punch up a sketch to match the talent of a particular player, these formats are just very difficult skills to master because unlike prose the beats are critically important (yes, even—or perhaps especially—genre sitcoms) and knowing how to make them work requires years of experience. And yet, writing and delivering stand up comedy is another level of difficulty still, because it is just you in front of a crowd without anyone to play off of but an audience which is as likely as not to be disinclined to so much as snicker at the ‘joke’ that makes your friends and coworkers double over in laughter.
Unlike late night talk show hosts, you won’t have a sidekick to come in before and warm up the audience, or big flashing signs telling the audience when to applaud or laugh to make the most of generally mediocre material. If you just walk in with a bunch of material someone else wrote for you (or cribbed from other sources and sold to you as original material) you won’t learn anything about what makes comedy work, and you are unlikely to get anything from the audience except boos and heckles.
On this note, I will add that I once lived in a medium-sized town that for a few years ran a supper club that was a spinoff of the Second City theater then thriving in Toronto and Chicago (and possibly at that time also New York). For those who may not know, there’s a strong connection between Second City and Saturday Night Live, and many alumni of the former have moved on to the latter – and sometimes onward to movie careers. But the reason I mention this is that, even as relatively minor as this small-town spinoff was, they not only did great skits, but also really, really impressive improv. They’d ask the audience for skit ideas, and then invent the most amazing stuff on the spot.
I mention this because I think it ties into the idea of the importance of doing your own writing. You need to be totally immersed in your material, totally authentic, and able to improvise as you go. Somebody else’s material just isn’t going to cut it.
BTW, I don’t really know anything first-hand about this, but Second City runs classes:
I have a friend who taught workshops at the Chicago Second City for a few years. She then moved on to Seattle and did a lot of the same things. She’s now settled in Georgia, and teaching acting and improv down there.
I did stand-up professionally, and she and I were in improv groups together, but I am in awe of her drive and ability.
I think you’ll need more than a few 5-10 minute but before you’re ready to do just 15 minutes. That’s just what it’s like. You need to become comfortable in front of an audience that isn’t just your family and friends. You need to refine your bit, word by word, emphasis by emphasis, facial expression by facial expression, just to get 5-10 minutes worth building on. Trust me Shecky, I know comedy, it’s harder than you think. It’s easier to entertain any random group of people that has no expectations than an audience who is only there to have you make them forget about their problems. You’ll be in a first date with a room full of people.
There’s a robust filter on who eventually gets their license, if that helps to reassure you. Nothing’s perfect, but he’s going to have to demonstrate to multiple people he can safety do the job.
(Or maybe it was “entertainment director” or some such thing; in any case, I could imagine myself saying – repeatedly – “are we having fun yet?”)