Woman Around Town’s Anne Richmond is attending an eight-week course on standup comedy at the Comic Strip and writing about her experience. This is her second installment.
The other students looked up at me expectantly as I flipped my legal pad to the page with my standup homework on it. I started to read it aloud to the class and our teacher, D. F. Sweedler.
I went through my premises about how complicated the dining experience was at Max Brenner, the focus on all things chocolate, and how strange it was that guys took girls on dates there and expected them to order a salad. As I read, I realized that things I had thought were funny received lackluster laughter or silence. It was not at all what I imagined it would be like. I even found that I wasn’t taking full breaths or focusing on the style of my delivery. I was simply trying to read through my ideas sentence by sentence and stumbling through the whole affair ungracefully. The sentences I had written were ungainly in my mouth and far too verbose. I finally hit the punch line and delivered it, looking about the room, I must admit, a little expectantly.
Everyone simply smiled complacently up at me as if to say, “Congratulations! You made it.” Glad to have simply “made it,” I took my seat.
It’s a curious thing that happens in a comedy class. Everyone wants each other to succeed, but we all become aware of the fact that the material is supposed to be funny. When you’re watching others perform, you’re waiting for them to deliver a punch line and for them to make you laugh. This makes it harder to be surprised by an off-kilter remark or a strange point of view and you actually end up finding things less funny than you normally would. You even become hyper-critical of the things you do find funny and roll them around in your head as you consider what makes them funny. How is the joke working on me and how was it constructed?
After each of us read our homework, D. F. talked us through what we had read. He would tell us what worked, what didn’t and why. It was remarkable the way he would toy with a joke in his head, eyes flitting about as he considered whether jokes were salvageable and what might improve them. “That could be funny.” He used this phrase as well as, “I don’t know… Maybe that just can’t be funny.” He was constantly making adjustments and trying to decide what paths were worth traveling for each of us.
When it came to my material, he asked me to focus only on things that fed my premise and to get to the point sooner. “The longer a joke goes on, the bigger the audience expects the payoff to be. It’s best if you get right to the point as soon as possible.” He also advised me to “Personalize the joke. Instead of saying ‘You know how people do this,’ say ‘One time I did this.’”
Stand up comedy is really about letting people into your own particular point of view. Your premise is your hypothesis on a certain subject or life observation and you use your jokes to prove the hypothesis. As D. F. carefully deconstructed our work, I imagined us all constructing wooden frames with our premises and then building houses brick by brick with each joke, every completed wall making our audience feel more at home inside.
The idea of personalization was the biggest thing I took away from our second class. I decided to spend the week stream lining my material and really putting myself into all of it, even if that meant bending the facts of a given scenario. Instead of speaking about seeing men taking women on dates to Max Brenner, I made the joke about a guy taking me on a date to Max Brenner and feeling like I was being tested to see whether I would order a desert or a salad and what my choice would say about me as a desirable woman.
As the week progressed, I kept an eye out for any strange experiences and kept my notepad nearby to record them. Strangely enough, nothing really out of the ordinary did happen. I say “strangely” because for some reason, odd things are always happening to me. Despite the fact that I didn’t have any new weird experiences to develop into a premise, I did develop a new joke about how after a breakup, a girl becomes a teary eyed behemoth who refuses to leave her apartment for a week and only lives on mismatched, unappetizing, scavenged left-over comfort foods.
I wasn’t sure how it would go over, but I read my material out loud and timed it. When Monday rolled around, I felt comfortable enough with my delivery that I could simply glance at my notes to see where I was. D. F. was very clear on the rule that we should not memorize our material because we would be changing most of it, but I felt much more comfortable with what I had written in terms of my ability to present it once I was more familiar with saying it out loud.
When I arrived at The Comic Strip, a bunch of my class mates were waiting outside. We chatted for a bit and I began to feel a sense of fellowship and support that we had missed out on the first week because we had not really had the chance to get to know each other beyond our short introductions on stage. It was really nice to get to know them a little bit better and hear about their experiences of working on their pieces from the previous week. By the time we all filed into class, the entire taste of the room felt changed. The atmosphere was a bit warmer and everyone was buzzing with conversation.
When D. F. called my name, I was gratified to feel a little less frazzled as I took the stage.
Miss Richmond is an actress, singer, and writer living in New York City. Armed with a BFA in Theater from New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts where she trained at the Playwrights Horizons Theater School and The Experimental Theater Wing, she continues to work in the theater and the burgeoning field of new media. She is a founding member of Box Full of Wasps Theater Collective and one of the creators of the upcoming webseries, O-Cast ©, a show which she also produces, costume designs, and performs in. (http://www.annerichmond.com, http://www.o-cast.com)
