The ABC’s of Stand Up, Part 1

Whoever said “everybody’s a comedian” didn’t know shit. No, it’s “everybody’s a smart ass prick who thinks they’re funny.” Being a comedian involves way more than being the zany guy at work. The zany guy, the class clown, and the drunk yuppie in the audience who feels the comedian is getting more attention from his girlfriend than he is, you can all go to hell. You’re not comedians; you haven’t read this guide yet.

Audience
There are 3 variables to any stand up performance: what you write off-stage (the prep stuff); how you perform it (the in-the-moment stuff); and the audience. It may sound like an entire third of a set is completely uncontrollable, but you might as well say professional poker players aren’t skilled; they’re simply the luckiest bastards in the world. There’s always a way to control a crowd, but it involves “reading” the audience. This is “hard” and when you suck at it, it leads to “mental breakdowns”. Even if these humorless, uninspired nobodies hate you, remember what George Carlin said about the audience: “I am here for me, you are here for me. No one is here for you.” Yeah. Fuck ‘em.

Bookers
A booker is like something J. R. R. Tolkien would write about. They are these disgruntled, elusive trolls that will give you riches if you can first catch them, then pass their many trials of fire, then they will finally pay you. If they fucking feel like it. If you’re a nobody like me, trying to get in with a booker can be a lot like chasing the invisible man. Or trying to get back together with an ex girlfriend. They want nothing to do with you. But once you’re in, man, get ready for the floodgates to open. It’s nothing but milk and honey from here on out! Long swims through a beer river in a magical forest of BJ’s every night times a million! Just kidding. They’ll (probably not) call you back in 6 months because they can’t over-expose the scene with you or whatever half-assed excuse they give.

Corny Shit (Hack Material)
You’ll hear a lot of this stuff. This one time I was at a show and a marine was there with all of his marine buddies. They just came back from Iraq and I guess he was The Funny One and wanted to try his hand at stand up before going back and making more killer jokes about the smell of dead insurgents. Anyway, he did that joke about fucking fat chicks and how it’s like riding a moped. Notice how I don’t even need to finish the joke. He said it like it was an original joke that he wrote and then proceeded to get drunk with his asshole friends and pollute the room with shitty music and the word Fag. The point is, if you manage to write a joke that is at least 75% original then you’ve won half the battle. P.S.: puns, “whites do this while blacks do that”, “what’s the deal with?”, etc all are dying a slow, agonizing death. They need to die faster.

Dying
Yeah, I know it sucks. I know what it’s like to work on a set for hours, thinking you’ve crafted the most brilliant rape-joke of all time just to go up on stage and stand in front of a firing squad of pissed off statues. Every single comic has died a thousand deaths on stage. But that’s fine. Just don’t make a habit out of it. The worst is when you do well and think you’re bullet proof. That’s when you get lazy and start blaming the audience for not thinking crib death is funny (it’s not). Dying can be a good thing if you’re smart enough to be introspective and learn from the experience. So, yeah. Don’t be retarded about it. Be like a glorious zombie phoenix named Lazarus.

Edgy
I was kinda alluding to this a second ago, edgy folk usually suck. You know, white boys saying Nigger, talking about rape, baby deaths, nigger babies raping each other to death. With AIDS. Shocking =/= funny. If it were then we’d all be standing around looking at pictures taken by the death squads in the Congo laughing our fucking asses off. Only smart people are able to write jokes. Do you have any idea how hard it is to write clean stuff? If you are one of those guys who can write clean stuff and it’s actually funny, then you need to quit comedy and go work in the Obama administration or as some advice-giving guru on top of a mountain or something because you are one of the smartest people on the planet.

Fuck
I love this word. Many other people don’t. Tread lightly.

Groupies
This one’s easy. You don’t get groupies. Musicians get laid all the time because they can take their loneliness and inner turmoil and turn it into a beautiful, melancholy ballad that makes girls want to reach out and touch their heart. Comics turn theirs into fart jokes. It’s also worth mentioning that the vast majority of female audience members are there with their boyfriends, so unless he hit her before the show and one of your jokes makes him cry you’re not getting shit.

Hecklers
I have a real love/hate relationship with these dicks. First off…they’re dicks. They are drunk morons who think they can be funnier than the guy whose job it is to make fun of drunk morons. Sometimes it’s warranted; most of the time it’s not. All I know is if you’re up there and some stupid heckler starts giving you shit, and he gets a laugh, and you, just, absolutely slam him into the ground, there’s nothing better. It’s Revenge of the Nerds as ordained by God.