I saw Carrot Top about 10 years ago in Vegas. You know what? He was funny. He does use props but not nearly as much as you would think. He used them as kind of a bridge between sets of jokes. For the majority of the time he was just being a comic who has been telling jokes for decades. Was it one of the best shows I’ve ever seen? Not even close but it was an enjoyable evening.
Carrot Top makes prop comedy work. Prop comedy does not make Carrot Top work. Carrot Top’s career is explicable because he’s a good enough comedian to get laughs even using props.
For comparison, consider the career of British comedian Tim Vine, whose act is basically just an endless stream of terrible puns. But he’s successful because he’s got the delivery and timing down to a science.
Both of these examples demonstrate that it’s the comedian that makes the material, not the other way around. A mediocre comedian can bomb with great material; a great comedian can make even mediocre material funny.
Material doesn’t have to be new or particularly funny in and of itself; stand up comedy is, again, mostly in the delivery. See, for instance, John Mulaney telling a story about going with his mother as a child to see then presidential candidate Bill Clinton and continually interrupting himself to talk about The Fugitive because the ballroom was the setting for the penultimate scene of the movie. Mulaney is literally just recounting the dialogue from the film interspaced with his ‘real’ story about meeting Clinton; the humor all comes from how he delivers the dialogue and keeps interrupting himself. If you or I tried to do that set, we’d bomb because we don’t have the finely tuned delivery or the intimately crafted persona of Mulaney, and we’d just sound like we were telling an anecdote badly.
There is an ‘underground’ competition among comedians to tell a really vulgar, not-particularly-funny joke about a family of acrobats colloquially known as “The Aristocrats”. Since everybody knows the setup and punchline, all of the humor in the joke comes from how the comedian tells the joke and especially how shocking and ridiculous the description of the act is, and because it is a competition among comedians (who are highly critical of one another) it really proves out the skill of how to tell a joke rather than just relying on any inherent humor in the material.
Stranger
Look online for comedians that do in general the kind of routine that you want to do, then look at the route they took to get where they are.
60s/70s comics?
I think you’re hyperfixated on the end goal.
Forget about a 45-minute set. Take a class where you develop a tight 10 and ‘graduate’ with a performance at a standup open mic.
See how the audience likes it. See how you like it. Go from there.
Where’s my Dramamine patch?
Are there any books in particular you would recommend?
Another fictional series about stand-up comedy was I’m Dying Up Here, about an early 1970s L.A. comedy club. loosely based on The Comedy Store.
I’d call that a “bit” instead of a joke. A stand-up can have bits and maybe a few individual jokes thrown in.
Other than friends & family all audiences are basically disinterested in you as an individual at the start of your show. If however they are uninterested then you’ve got a problem.
In terms of how the words are customarily used, a bit is a part of a set that has a single premise, which usually contains more than one joke. Norm MacDonald’s sequence of jokes about how he’s scared of Germany is a bit, which contains several jokes. Jokes are setups and punchlines; additional punchlines to a single setup are tags.
One of the reasons a new comic should try to use tags is getting more laughs per minute. A critical goal for the new standup is the maximization of punchlines per minute. You can accomplish this by either having more jokes, or by reducing the time spent introducing new premises, which is where the new standup wastes a lot of time.
If I could throw in one additional piece of advice for Caribbean, or anyone else, remember when watching the great pros on Netflix that they can spend more time setting up premises than you can, because the audience trusts them to deliver a quality payoff. People who paid $150 to see Bill Burr will let him spend a little extra time on setup now and then because they know a 50-megaton joke is coming. They do NOT trust Joe Slapnad at the Rooster T. Feathers Amateur Tuesday the same way.
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Sacha Baron Cohen, 'zat you?
True. However… I bet most of us have been at some family gathering where, during a lull in the conversation, a voice pipes up “You know, the other day I was…”
A quiet collective sigh goes through the room. Another of Uncle Fred’s interminable anecdotes.
Eventually it runs its course and there is a smattering of polite laughter. But then some kind but misguided soul says “Good one, Fred. You know, you should be on the stage as a comedian”.
Perhaps the OP should ask themself honestly: am I Uncle Fred?
On reflection, I think there is a quite strong possibility that the OP is actually having a joke at our expense.
Yanking our collective chain and seeing how long it takes for someone to catch on?
Yeah, I’d say this whole thread became a meta-joke awhile ago, if not from the very start. Still, it’s been interesting discussing the nature of humor in general.
I’ll have to disagree with you. Comics talk about how when they get to a certain level things change. At a certain level of noteriety the audience changes from coming out to see comedy to coming out to see you. They paid to specifically see you because they are a fan or know your work. They are an interested audience. That goodwill only lasts 5-10 minutes if you don’t bring the jokes.
That’s very much like bands and music. And it’s the hardest first barrier to break through: to develop a ‘following’.
Most bands never get beyond the friends, family and odd drop-in audience. Because, to be brutally honest, they are not that good. I’ve been in a couple…
Sure. Personally I find most ‘set-piece’ jokes don’t make me laugh at all. For example, I will see the Edinburgh Festival top-ten list each year and think, if that’s the best, the average must be pretty dismal.
Clever use of language sometimes… but laugh out loud? No.
It seems to be as difficult to come up with an actual funny joke as it is to write a memorable song melody.
Times I and friends have actually been rolling on the floor laughing seem to come like lightning out of left-field. And of course there is the context of you had to be there…
A good comic can even make an “interminable anecdote” work.
Stranger