how i learned to do comedy the way i do comedy

someone asked! i answered! all may read!

dear friends, fans, family, fellow folks,

thank you for being here!
i am grateful to you and for you!
usually i use this space to share short jokes, poems, and other quick funs.
sometimes, i use it to share slightly longer pieces i’ve written, sometimes in response to questions other folks have asked me, like this question from an aspiring comedian fan.

THEIR QUESTION:

your style is so unique and real. how did you develop that? or is it natural?

MY ANSWER:

thank you for asking!
what a kind question.
the short answer is “both.”
the long answer is “keep reading and i’ll write a lot more.”

how did i develop it? over years and years of trial and error. and sometimes trial and got-it-okay. i started out writing mostly just one-liners. i would try them and they would either "work" or they wouldn't. i would keep the ones that worked more regularly than others, and kept writing more and more and repeating the process.

one major shift in my process happened around 2006 (i started around 2002). i saw rory scovel for the first time, and loved how he would riff and be in the moment. he would tell jokes in different orders from night to night ¹, and sometimes where a joke used to end one night, it would continue the next. he continued to inhabit the worlds of those jokes, creating and discovering new ideas in them, and building off of those ideas in ways that i hadn't seen really done in standup. i had mostly seen people performing prepared, honed, crafted, well-written Jokes. this was the first masterful improvising i saw, and it really stuck with me. it was like i only knew about symphony orchestras and someone was like “you’ve never heard jazz before?”