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What Makes a Good Stand Up Comedy Premise?

An effective standup comedy premise should contain two elements: a topic + a condition, but in order to truly hook the audience you need two more essential dynamics to be present in your set up or the joke risks receiving a diminished laugh or worse, nothing at all...
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Boring Premise to Great Routine

There are no bad premises in comedy, only premises we don't feel connected to. But there's always a way to take a premise and give it some context so that it comes alive and can create excitement.
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How to Write a Joke like Chris Rock

That's right. In this post, I'm going to show you how to write a joke like Chris Rock... Well, I'm going to show you one specific way that Chris Rock writes
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Performing the Same Jokes Doesn’t Make it Boring

When you're starting out, I cannot emphasize the importance of building that core act. You should do it constantly, revise, refine and polish. Add act-outs, tags and toppers. Until it crushes. Worrying about your friends hearing the same jokes is counter-productive to you really developing and polishing your act. Not to mention that it can have a cascading negative impact on your development.
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How is Writing Comedy the Fastest Way to Complete and Utter Failure?

I was listening to some comedy the other day and I came across this video (podcast interview on YouTube). There was a guy in the interview who was talking about comedy.

This guy was from Kentucky and he had a bit of that Southern accent that made me think, "Damn! I didn't know they had the internet in the hollar.

He said, "Writing comedy is the fastest way to complete failure." As you might imagine, that got my attention!

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The Best Way to Write a Comedy Act if You’re an Absolute Newbie

There are three primary techniques I use when creating a comedy routine. The first way is to always write down things that are funny. Usually when I'm with a group of friends and something occurs that makes me and them laugh, I will write it down to possibly use later.

The other technique is to sit down and write jokes. I prefer this technique because I don't have to wait for the coincidence of the moment with friends or a funny situation to just happen to 'occur' to me. I can just sit down and generate material.

I do this by utilizing about 23 different approaches, but for the sake of this blog post, I will just write about two approaches. Here they are...

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Jon Stewart to Step Down From The Daily Show

Oh Snap! If things weren't explosive already when it comes to Late Night T.V. and variety T.V. If you remember, the middle of last year I wrote about the changes in the Late Night T.V. scene are unprecedented in T.V. history with changes in The Tonight Show and Late Night on N.B.C. Now things are heating up even more with the news of Jon Stewart announcing that he is stepping down from The Daily Show! What? Say it ain't so! Jon Stewart has been the most trusted name in news and comedy for the last twenty years, while also developing and introducing some of the most talented people in comedy, like Stephen Colbert, who's now replacing David Letterman and of course John Oliver, who now has a show on HBO. And now the landscape in Late Night is changing drastically. This spells opportunity.