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 review of what happened during the last class.
My classmates and I arrived at comedy class eager to get in our last session of work with D. F. Sweedler before we took the stage on the following Saturday in front of a live audience. The room pulsed with nervous energy as everyone shuffled through their notes.
“I think I’ve got it,” one of my classmates said to me as we took our seats. “I changed around a few things but I feel pretty good about it.” I smiled at him while inside I secretly wished I could feel as confident as he did about my own work. He was feeling comfortable while I was feeling a quiet desperation, beads of sweat already forming on my brow.
Nothing I had done in class had made me feel like I had good material. That’s not to say that I didn’t think I had improved my material. I absolutely had improved a great deal, but I had no reason to believe that I would be receiving any laughs come Saturday night.
One by one we read through our notes. I had spent the last week in a whirl of preemptive nausea. Every time I so much as thought about the fact that this class was our last before the performance, it sent a shudder down my spine. Even though D. F. had told us not to write any new material, I couldn’t help myself. Everything I saw that week suddenly looked like a good premise for a joke. It was like the Garden of Comedic Eden. Where had this inspiration been for the last eight weeks? Suddenly, I wanted more time for process, but I was forced to to reckon with the reality that it was time for product.
When I got up in class, I went through my rewritten jokes and added a joke to the end about the fact that in every sci-fi movie or book there’s always a place called “The Academy.” I had laughed with my friends about it earlier that week and I thought I had worked on it enough to slip by, plus I enjoyed the fact that it played more into my personality. I wanted more jokes like that since I had begun to find them comforting. However as soon as I finished, D. F. gave me a surly look.
“Did I not say to refrain from writing new material?”
I looked away sheepishly.
“Ditch The Academy and let’s go over what you have.”
We worked through my jokes quickly and as we tuned up each one, I began to see D. F. like a skilled mechanic. His greatest strength is that he can take any joke and assess it methodically, almost immediately suggesting an intelligent remedy.
Use a callback.
Change the ending into a “reveal.”
Make this into a punch line by exaggerating the circumstances.
I had appreciated this skill for the duration of the class, but in our last moments of instruction, it stuck out to me even more because of the rapid speed at which we were moving through everyone’s material.
When we reached the end of he class, we all looked to him with a communal sense of wide-eyed terror. I suddenly wished D. F. would impart some secret comforting wisdom, but all he said was “Arrive at 5. Be memorized and ready to go.” Then he smiled with a sense of mischievous excitement and we all departed to prepare for the big night.
Anne 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)
