Click on the title: “Me doing stand-up comedy.”
Let me know what you think.
That’s a laugh track, right? The laughter doesn’t match your delivery. Also, there are lots of weirdly long pauses. And, I think you forgot jokes or humor.
Keep trying, but this wasn’t very good.
(Hey, you asked!)
I wouldn’t be as harsh as that, but I do think it needs more polish, which will come with practice.
Lose the laugh track, work on the delivery (pauses should be dramatic and punctuate the joke, not just random and overly long), and study humor theory to understand what makes a joke ‘funny’. Honestly, this isn’t the worst stand-up I’ve ever seen—I used to live across the hall from a third tier comedy club so I got to see a lot of bad acts—but it needs a lot of work in terms of both punching up the humor and making it relatable to the audience before it gets anywhere close to being funny. And you need an actual live audience; running a set for an anonymous Youtube audience isn’t going to give you the immediate feedback or pressure to improve; it’s a Rupert Pupkin move that is just going to reinforce things that don’t work even if you think they should be funny. You need to fail and fail and fail to figure out what works.
For instance, the bit about birds and bread has a nugget of insightful humor in it but nobody cares about birds; you will discover the humor by relating it back to how people are like birds in some farcical or sardonic way. If a comic were just relating a story about a horse running loose in a hospital, it wouldn’t be especially funny, but by making it an allegory for something that people are actually invested in, it becomes relatable even though its kind of a dumb idea. Notice how Mulaney sells the joke without even making the reference explicit, which also makes the audience feel like they are somehow in on the joke.
Good luck to you.
Stranger
OMG that guy is terrible. Just awful.
Repeating a line doesn’t make it funny. Especially in a smarmy voice.
I liked it fine once I realized that it wasn’t video of you doing stand-up comedy, rather a video about you doing stand-up comedy. Nice to see doves and chickens make their first appearance in your material.
Do you like other things by John Mulaney? Generally speaking, I think he’s hilarious, although the linked video is kinda weak. I bet it was much funnier at the time he delivered it live, though - his audience probably had a shared sense of ineffable unease early in the Trump administration that the horse-in-the-hospital metaphor worked pretty well for.
As to the OP’s video, while it isn’t fantastic, it is not so terrible that I would discourage him from continuing to try. A lot of the component parts - voice, mannerisms, delivery - made me think, “yeah, I can see this guy becoming pretty funny, if he keeps practicing.”
Never heard of the guy. My style is more Rodney Dangerfield, you know, guys that tell actual jokes.
To me, this kind of routine is not comedy:
'Hey did you see in the news about (fill in the blank)? I mean, really, can you beleve it? (fill in the blank). Wow, I mean (fill in the blank), really? … etc., etc.
“I don’t get no respect!” — the zenith of stand up comedy circa 1967.
Stranger
If you didn’t do this in front of an audience, it’s not standup comedy, it’s just telling jokes for a camera.
The jokes are much too few in number, and not generally very strong. The analogy of birds liking bread to people liking money wasn’t really a joke at all, the bit about a chicken eating chicken was also not really a joke (and lacks the familiarity of situation needed for a setup - how do you run into a chicken leaving a McDonald’s? Why didn’t you say pigeon? It’s a bird.)
I agree the timing’s off too, but, again, you will rapidly learn timing by performing for an audience.
If you want to do standup, you need to go do standup. Go try it! Get on stage on an amateur night. You will not be good. I wasn’t good. No one is. Get up there anyway, and right away you will impress people, because - trust me, this will happen - ,many people, upon learning you did that, will be blown away you tried it and will say words to the effect of “I could never do that.” If I may offer advice;
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You must get stage time to get better.
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Meet other amateur comics and workshop jokes with them. If you can take a course in standup comedy, do so. If you can’t, just meet other comics and ask them questions. Learn the terminology.
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At first your priority must be writing a LOT of jokes and telling as many as you can in your short sets. New comics never tell enough jokes. More jokes is better, for many reasons:
- People will not remember that you told 20 unfunny jokes if you told 6 funny ones
- The more jokes you tell, the less uncomfortable silence there is and the less nervous you get
- The more jokes you tell, the more you can figure out which stay, which go, and which must be worked on
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Do not be affected in your movements. You seem affected (e.g. doing body language in an emphasized manner.) It’s certainly possible to have poor body language but do not worry about that right now; when you start out, you need to just learn microphone use, remaining within the room offered on stage, and dealing with the lights, which can be unnervingly (even painfully) bright when you’re not used to them in one place, and then atrociously aimed in another. You don’t need extreme body language; comedy clubs and bars are small spaces and the audience can see you.
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Please do not be discouraged. You were brave to post this. Standup is HARD, but when you walk off stage after getting your first real laughs, you will be so pumped I can’t even explain it.
I find Mulaney’s work funny as fuck. His bit on “What’s New Pussycat” at the diner just tickles me so. But I don’t like “jokes” as much as I like funny stories/observations. But his delivery does get on people’s nerves, and, I hate to say this, he was funnier pre-rehab.
As to the OP… I’m not sure these observations really work for me in terms of at least my sense of humor. Or … is this more meta than that, framed by how I think @don_t_ask is taking it?
Um … you are missing something worth finding out about. The guy is awesome, whether in sketch comedy like Cha Cha Slide
or individual standup like his search for Xanax.
OK, I tried those. May I be excused now?
Sure. I’m glad you looked.
OP, the most simple thing you need to know is that nothing you have now produced in 2 “standup” videos is funny, and not even in a “it’s funny because it’s not funny” meta humor kinda way.
So my advice is to stop. Completely, And never try this “standup” thing again.
Well, he’s making an awful lot of money at it. You might want to just recalibrate.
Donald?
I think you have the basics of rhythm and pacing down, which is great. A few criticisms which I hope are helpful:
- You need to tell the jokes over and over until you tell them smoothly. There is too much time in each joke.
2, It comes across as theatrical rather than conversational. If you want theatrical, then you need jokes that are a little more surreal, or maybe shocking, to match that energy. Day-to-day observational humor won’t work with a theatrical delivery. If, on the other hand, your end goal is gentle observational humor, then you need to simply say the whole routine over and over in front of a mirror until it becomes conversational. - Editing. Challenge yourself to tell the story in the least number of words possible. Write out the joke and then cross out every superfluous word you can. Then add back in only what is absolutely necessary to understand it.
- More jokes. LOTS more jokes. At this stage of the game you should be just spitting out long lists of jokes in order to see what works. Find an open mike or a comedy club and just get up there.
- Make your audience feel intelligent. You do that by not filling details that they can get from context. That “I figured it out” feeling builds through the course of a set and is what really slays them. Lead the horses to water, then let them choose to drink.
Good luck! I hope you keep at it and enjoy the journey.
I think it goes beyond just not funny:
I heard a rumor that Ron DeSantis is considering a lawsuit against the o.p. for joke theft.
Stranger
Is it truly joke theft if no actual joke was stolen?
“I tells ya, I don’t get no respect!”
Stranger