How quickly did that guy need to bang?
Topics on the day incude $4 magic tricks can earn you a spot on Letterman, can your dream job ruin your passion, Brian’s triumphant return to his home town, how to make something completely rehearsed sound natural, and why stealing jokes is a bad idea in the technical age. My life is a bit of a failure pile.
Comedian of the week – Patton Oswalt: My Weakness Is Strong (DVD with CD)
Email: brianmcomedy@gmail.com
http://blog.rooftopcomedy.com/2010/05/14/the-iowa-comedy-festival-joel-fry-interview/
Here’s an interview I gave with RooftopComedy.com; good times!
LOVED this week’s podcast.
Great show this weeek. I liked the concept around being conversational and how to get there. Oddly for me, this is how I am inching closer toward that ability… I do my 5 minutes in varying styles– same material, but a different voice or pace. And I do it in an exaggerated way. The point is run through the material and almost prove to myself that there’s 1000 ways to deliver that same line(s). It’s really an improv exercise in that regard. What happens is that I ‘break out’ of the mentality of delivering it a certain way and I usually discover SOMETHING during the ‘exercise’ that helps me with the relaxed delivery I am looking for.
That’s probably a wordy explanation but the idea is to break yourself out of the mental box and one way to do that is to run through your material in odd ways– take your favorite comedian’s style (Mitch Hedberg, for example) and say all your jokes as if Hedberg was saying them. Now do the same thing in another comedian’s style. You’ll discover something that will help you make your material and your delivery unique.
Hope this is helpful.
Chris
P.S. My post in PLease Excuse His Language about Dunham was a joke of course– nobody bit down on that, huh?
I smelled what you were stepping in about Dunham.
Chris, that is really helpful. I’m definitely gonna try that
That’s a great tip Laytes. When I used to video tape my sets I was shocked to see how I would often make the same face or gesture at the same point in my jokes, everytime. Sometimes it worked, but usually it was just some kind of weird, robotic subconscious thing. Forcing yourself to change things up is a good way to keep yourself from switching to auto-poilt. Of course I don’t record my sets anymore. Not that I’m too good for it, just too fat to look at myself comfortably.