My experiments with Stand-Up #1

ankit goel
Aug 22, 2017 · 2 min read

I have always found stand up comics to be incredibly cool. Just the fact that these people have mastered the skill of making people laugh would have been sufficient for me to think makes them incredibly cool to me. Except the top comics out there are doing a lot more than cracking jokes. Some of these people are outright philosophers/moral detectives/social commentators who are brave enough to make fun of the status quo when they don’t agree with it and challenge our definition of what is/should be considered normal.

I have spent the last few months writing jokes, researching specials and throwing myself on stage whenever possible. Sometimes the jokes work and people laugh and I feel powerful and it’s the best time of my life. Other times I tell the joke and everyone blankly stares at me and crickets creak while I regret ever being born. The journey has been both fun and painful and led to lots of identity crises and anxiety attacks.

I am starting to get the hang of this, but that’s just my opinion, and I am among the least trustworthy people I know. From what I have gathered, there are algorithms that one can use to write a joke. There are rules you can follow to make people laugh. There is a method to this madness.

Learning this skill involves looking at patterns in everything that does work, analyzing why it works, and create similar stuff along the same lines that will hopefully work.
I have decided to collect and compile everything I learn, and then teach it to the internet. Like they say, you don’t know something unless you can explain it to someone else. This way I would be able to fill the gaps in my knowledge, have a collection of tools and observations I can come back to whenever I want to make my material work. Also, maybe this content can help someone out there who is out to try his or her hand at stand-up. I don’t mind making a handful of pupils along the way.

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