George Carlin said he knew with 98 percent accuracy that a joke was going to get a laugh before he got on stage.
Ninety-eight percent! I want to be like that.
However, to get to a level of mastery with your comedy, you first have to understand why people laugh and how comedy works.
And here's where I share with you the biggest secret in comedy...
I love the holidays, but every year we hear stories about how stressful the holidays can be.
Suicide rates go up, family arguments occur, anxiety and depression increases, crime increases and so do heart attacks.
That's not fake news, those are facts and I know it sounds drastic, but as a comedian I say, "Comedy Gold, right?!"
One way to be sure you're keeping your sense of humor is to remember to keep
Joe Dungan, one of my hardest working students and one of my master teachers just won The Clean Comedy Challenge 2017 at the Ice House in Pasadena, CA!
Joe competed against a litany of other comedians. And he must've done great because at the end of the performances one of the other comedians said to him, "Get ready to collect your prize money," implying that it was clear who won the Clean Comedy Challenge.
So how did Joe do it?
It's amazing to watch someone who's developing their skill at writing. They could crack a great joke right in front of you. And the moment you ask them to write it down, they fall back on their learning of writing in school, trying to use correct punctuation, grammar, etc., and they over write the joke.
That can kill the joke.
This is what you can do to fix it...
This could be the most important 9-minute comedy lesson of your life.
In the next 9 minutes you're going to learn a lot! I mean a ton! I'm calling this article my 9-minute Comedy Mastermind Session.
When it comes to comedy writing and theory, my argument always focuses on structure.
"Structure is king!" I'll usually say.
Getting to the point and getting the laugh with a strong point of view while saying something that actually means something is crucial but structure is where the laugh occurs, not just...
Got an email from a student today. It said...
"The lesson I learned tonight is that university students are PC to the point that it is unnatural. These are the people posting PC crap all over Facebook! At first I was confused about my inability to connect with the crowd. I felt it from my first joke (about marriage/children).
So how do we make this work?"