expand your comfort zone (advice for a comedian friend who requested it, and also for anyone else who wants it!)
spend some time at the Plan And Deviate PAD!
dear friends, fans, family, folks,
thank you for being here!
i am very grateful for your choosing to be here!
as you may know, i generally use this space to share short jokes, poems, and other quick fun words units.
and SOMETIMES, i use it to share slightly longer pieces i’ve written, often in response to questions other folks have asked me, like this question a younger comedian friend asked me recently.
THE QUESTION:
“I have a question!
In the back of my notebook, I keep a list of things to try when on stage. Not jokes, but more performance choices. These are things I want to improve or attempts to force a spark of creativity.
For example, I may say, this time, I want to sit longer in any pauses, embrace silence.
How do you approach your development? What are some methods/drills/practices you have found useful? What is something I can add to my list to work on during a show?”
MY ANSWER:
as always, thank you for asking! good questions!
(often when i say "good question," it means that i don't immediately know the answer, which i do think is good for me, because it means i'm not just going to deliver something by rote, but rather i have to [i GET to] think about it and discover what the answer actually is, in this moment. so, thank you for that.)
i'll do my best to answer your question as literally and directly as possible, eventually, and also i'm going to start with a few vignettes that your questions are bringing up in me, which may or may not have anything to do with what you're asking specifically.
1) i enjoy freestyle rapping. i love seeing people doing it well, and i love doing it the way that i do it, when i do it. when i do it, i think about the two main things that i want to do which are A) rhyme & and B) make sense. at any given point, i want to be doing at LEAST one of these things. so, i might start by saying something true (making sense) and then rhyming something with what i said (rhyming), even if it DOESN'T make sense. and then the NEXT thing i say will endeavor to make sense of the rhyme that i just made, and so forth. sometimes the rhyming and making sense come together in a beautiful confluence. but at any given point, i'm happy to be doing at least ONE of those things.
and
in doing comedy, when working on new material, say, i strive to do a similar thing. instead of rhyming and making sense, i aim for these two things: A) being funny & B) saying what is important/meaningful/true/interesting to me. so i might start by saying something meaningful and true, even if it's not funny, and then aiming to discover something funny ABOUT what i've just said, and then continuing to leapfrog forward from fun to meaning to fun to meaning (which ultimately, i often find to be fun AND meaningful. the Fun And Meaningful FAM.)
Keep reading with a 7-day free trial
Subscribe to Arty Har-Hars to keep reading this post and get 7 days of free access to the full post archives.