Comedy by the Numbers
This was a follow up to the previous question. Generally speaking this has to do with the issue of struggling with writing. The comment I’m responding directly to is “What’s frustrating is that I feel halarious conversationally, but it’s so hard converting it into a routine.”
That’s always the challenge. Like I said, it’s a numbers game. Lets say your jokes average 30 seconds for a joke. If you write ten jokes a day and try them out and only one works on stage, at the end of a year you’ve still got 182.5 minutes of working material.
Now ok it’s not going to work out quite as regularly as that, but my point is just that most people can’t deal with their material if it isn’t awesome, so they don’t write because they’d rather only write something when they think it’s brilliant. And that’s a recipe for failure. Most writers don’t write. If you do the work you’ll be rewarded. You’ll get better just by doing it.
I’m not saying it’s easy, it’s fucking hard. And it takes time to figure out how to take what’s funny about you in person and put it onstage. If everyone who was funny in person was funny on stage then there would be even less money in comedy than there already is. But again it’s not impossible, it’s just hard and it takes time and lots of failure along the way, but you’ve just got to keep in mind you’re conducting experiments, and 99% of experiments teach you how not to do something, but that 1% has made a number of people very successful.
At the end of the day you just need to see if it’s a process that you enjoy. You can’t get into anything just for the end-goal because that may elude you, and then your life would be meaningless. But if you love the process then you’ll have had a pretty good time whether it works out or not.
