Have you ever wondered what the secret to success in comedy is?
Ever feel like it’s just this massively intimidating idea, like this enormous blob of ectoplasmic goop that has no shape or form?
Building a career in comedy can be so daunting.
School is so much easier! In school they tell you what to do. You know when to take your SAT’s. You’re told how many units you need to graduate, what you’re GPA needs to be.
In college, you’re told that in order to become a teacher, you have to take certain classes, get so many units, take an internship at a company and if you graduate with the right GPA and honors, you have an opportunity to have a job waiting for you when you finally graduate.
It’s a process and it’s similar for a lot of careers. It usually goes something like: High School-College-Internship-Job-Career. That’s organized and easy to conceive; maybe there’s some variation or advanced degrees for specialties like law, medicine or engineering, but it’s still a process that’s pretty well defined.
When you start out doing comedy, there is no obvious process and nobody tells you what to do. You have to find your own way as you go. You can talk to others, but there’s still no real map.
Or is there?
Comedians always ask me, “what’s the secret to success?”
My favorite response? “It’s not a secret.”
There are successful comedians and artists out there all the time telling you what they did in their careers.
I tell all my students exactly what I did to hit my financial and artistic goals.
The success guru Tony Robbins said, “If you want to be successful, find someone who has achieved the results you want and copy what they do and you’ll achieve the same results.”
By that he means copy their methods not their products. In other words, find out how they got successful and do the same thing.
That’s pretty much it in a nutshell. I can’t tell you how to succeed. I can only tell you what I did to reach my level of success in this business. I’m still learning and still achieving and some years are better than others.
I don’t just try to figure it all out on my own. I look to others, study their careers. I read biographies of other successful artists and listen or read their interviews. Sometimes they can reveal some pretty awesome things that they did to succeed. I jot them down and see if it might work for me too.
One of the keys to success in this business is to realize that show-business is two words and whether you’re a writer, performer or both, if you start thinking of this as building your business you’ll find that it’s a little less daunting. After all, building a business has a simple formula.
The basic formula to building a business is:
- Find an Idea
- Have a Plan of Action
- Secure Funding to Implement that Plan
- Sell That Idea to Customers on a Recurring Basis.
Most Comedians have step 1, the idea, (perform stand-up), but they want to jump immediately to step 4 without digging in to step 2 or 3.
In fact most comedians don’t even want to think about step 3, because it means they have to spend money, but let’s leave that aside for now. Let’s focus on steps 1 and 2.
Step 1: The Idea. Comedians have the idea; it’s their comedy or the idea that they want to do stand-up. But what’s really missing with most comedians is the plan of action.
The problem is that it’s missing both creatively and economically.
One of the things I suggest is to read and listen to what other comedians did in their career to get where they are.
Here’s a fabulous article from Splitsider about Bill Burr on his success.
Bill Burr is one of my favorites. His blend of honesty, passion and emotion in his material is what has propelled him to the status he enjoys today and what will continue to keep him on top.
What’s important to understand is that Bill wrote jokes for the first few years of his career. “I knew I had to know how to write jokes,” he says.
It might not have been his plan of action but looking back at his paper trail, a smart comedian might get some ideas from that plan. He then said, “I still wrote out jokes for the first ten or eleven years of my career. I was always kind of writing onstage. About six years in, I was riffing and doing that type of thing…”
If you read closely, can you see that Bill is kind of giving you his plan of action? His method? His secrets to success?
Remember what Tony Robbins said, “find someone who has achieved the results you want and copy what they do…”
So go here and check out this interview with Bill Burr on Splitsider by Phil Stamato.
You might discover that suddenly that enormous blob of ectoplasmic goop might just start to take shape.
