Not to spoil your rant, but Carlin won the Best Album Grammy last year for “It’s Bad For Ya”. Flight of the Concords won the year before that.

I always get pissed when Books on Tape win for best comedy album.

Brian – I’m probably on my own, but I’d love to hear more of your take on why Bob Hope is the most overrated comedian ever.

I’m not a big fan of Hope or anything, but am intrigued at your statement.I was always led to believe he was an important figure in stand-up due to being the first guy to tell jokes onstage as an ordinary-looking guy in a suit rather than some Vaudeville schmuck in a loud costume and a silly hat.

I know he never wrote any of his own jokes and how he also relied on cue cards too damn much. But the Crosby/Hope road movies were funny and kinda influential.

Was he really that bad?

Just an update on the comedy competition…I lost and the guy who has a tv credit won. I agree with you Brian they give competition to who they want. Two chicken burritos after I got over loss.

I am working on project with a buddy of mine to have live comedy shows webcasted to showcase local talent. We are having a show on 19th at my friends studio. Once I get link I will post so anybody who is interested in seeing Miami Stand up scene can see what we have.

Comedy Contests – I think the best “worst show” stories come from comedy competitions. I lost one once to a guy names “Dirty Sanchez.” He was a white guy who dressed like a mexican stereotype and sang dirty limericks in an accent while strumming a guitar. Awesome. Also, they peppered the contest with hired comics, but didn’t tell anyone they were not in the competition, so everyone was confused as to why those comics weren’t called onstage at the end. Oh yeah, and there was a retarded guy in the competition who got as much laughs as I did (though I didn’t ask, “why are you laughing?” after every joke). That made me feel real good about my life choices.

I say do contests just for the good story.

Booking Agents – I feel your pain Dan. The day after I listened to your interview though, I had a booker email me cause he heard I killed in one of his rooms and wanted to know when I could come back. That felt great, cause normally I have to pester him for time.

I can’t remember when the question about doing another comics material came up, but there’s a great clip of Steven Wright and Chris Rock performing each other’s jokes… It’s hillarious, and from what I can tell on youtube, completely unavailable…

— Dennis goin’ to bed

Wow, what a dick I am, forgot to comment on the show. Thanks for the mention Brian.

(my rant on the blog-style comment threads not being forums: you can’t edit your comments)

Comedy covers seems like a fun thing to do or perhaps see live in *small* doses, but if someone were to create a full cover or even a parody like Weird Al does to music, that, in my opinion, seems a little obnoxious. It just doesn’t feel right. A comic to me is more like an actor, and what self-respecting actor tries to be like another actor? If you did, you wouldn’t be considered an actor so much as an impressionist and you wouldn’t be seen as an individual, a star.

Kinda sucks to hear about competitions being rigged. I know the club I want to do my first open mike at has a yearly competition and I was thinking of entering when it rolls around. I sure hope it’s not like that.

Dalton – The answers you get will vary widely depending on comedian, comedy style, and status, but I can throw down some general ideas. Also, this post is going to be really long cause I’m snowed in, bored, and drinking. So it’s either write this, or play Final Fantasy.

“Do comics work on their acts and then keep sort of a “bag of jokes” around that they can pull out during a show, or do they have a set act or many acts planned out?”

First of all, I personally plan out my sets as much as I can. I might go off on a tangent while onstage if that’s what feels right, but for the most part I know what I’m going to say.

Now, as far as what material I do, I have two “bags of jokes” lets say. In one bag I have jokes that I’ve written but aren’t finished (whether I’ve told them before or not) and in another bag I have jokes that are “done”. If I’m at an open mic, or an insignificant show, I’ll use that time to do mostly jokes from the unfinished bag, maybe peppered with some finished jokes depending on how well the former are working. If I’m doing an important show, it will be all finished jokes.

It’s also smart to make your set flow as best you can (and Im not just talking about segways). Simply making a long list of jokes isn’t as effective as doing two or three ten minute “sets” in a single show. The structure of these sets would be something like “second best joke, joke, third best joke, joke, best joke”. Three of these put together means there are a few climaxes in your 30 min set before your hilarious finale. I think I’ve over analyzed this a bit, but you get the idea.

I don’t have set groups of jokes, but rather build the groups as I see fit before each show. However, a main concern new comedians have is remembering their material. If you create set blocks of material in this fashion it will help you remember what you want to say. I have a few more tips on this subject, but I’ll save them for brevities sake.

Like I said though, set construction largely depends on the comic. I’ve seen guys do hilarious twenty minute sets in which they told two jokes and improved the rest. Granted, most people don’t have this style, but it’s out there.

“Does a comic start with a small set of jokes and then build upon that for their entire careers and maybe end up not including any of the original material at all?”

Because in the beginning doing stand-up is much more about finding out what jokes AREN’T funny, as opposed to what jokes ARE funny, you’re not going to see a lot of material last beyond the first year of a comics career.

Comics starting out will have five minutes of material or so and will painstakingly try to build on it and refine it until they have something they can actually start polishing. This process alone took about a year for me.

By the time you are couple years into comedy, you will most likely be doing very little of what you started with, but some jokes do last. I think I have two jokes I still use that I started telling in my first 6 months of doing stand up. I have a friend who just recorded an hour long comedy cd who’s title refers to a joke he wrote during his first year as a comic, and he still tells it as a closer sometimes. I know that Demitri Martin’s escalator joke (I tripped on an escalator and fell down the stairs for an hour and a half.) was one of the jokes he told during his first open mic set in NYC.

“It seems to me a “bag of jokes” is what the lesser known comics do, and the huge headliners and people you see on HBO, Comedy Central, etc., use a set act and just do that same set for a while until it runs out of momentum.”

This is not necessarily the case. Generally, most “TV” comics work their material the same way lesser comedians do, just in different forums. If you see them on TV or in a Theater they are doing jokes they’ve been working on for the past year or so in preparation for such an event. In between these shows they will often do sets in comedy clubs trying out newer material. I know that Patton Oswald came to Richmond recently and did an hour of prepared material, then at the end said, “Hey, I know you guys have been here for a while, but I have a bunch of new stuff I’d like to try out, so you’re welcome to stay if you want.” Then he did an additional hour of new material. Alternatively, known comics will work the road for a year trying out tons of material, the boil that down to a special. When I saw Louis CK live at the DC Improv he did an hour, only half of which made it to his cable special Shameless.

Comedians who are known to the masses face a few big problems that unknown comedians don’t. First of all, because there are so many small video recorders available, people will record known comedians telling new jokes in a club and post them online before the joke is finished. This makes it hard to deliver a strong finished product. Second, known comedians can’t really have a “bag of jokes,” because any joke they have finished and put in the “bag” is most likely already available to the public via cable special or the internet. This means that these comedians will often hear their punchlines shouted at them during a performance. I’ve seen this happen personally and I felt so bad for the comedian. Unlike a normal heckler, there’s no way to recover from this. You can’t deal with the person and then get back to the joke. The joke is dead in the water.

Something inexperienced fans of comedy (those that have never actually done it) need to understand:

There’s one thing that is important to understand about comedy that you really don’t get unless you do it for a number of years. Like I said before, learning comedy is not about figuring out which jokes are funny. It’s about finding your voice on stage. In a way, jokes are physical things, but your personality and the way you tell the jokes are ethereal and transcend the actual punchlines. The later is much harder to get a handle on than the former.

This is why I refuse to tell my jokes when people ask me in a bar what I say onstage. It’s doesn’t really matter what joke tell them as an example. I’m not onstage or in the moment, so the joke becomes this physical thing that I’m simply handing them. They take it and look at it, say “Oh, yeah. I guess this is pretty cool,” and hand it back to me. But at a show the same joke takes on another form altogether. It comes out of the speakers, mists over the crowd rapping around their heads and everyone loves it. This is why sometimes its hard discussing how comedians learn to write jokes. A lot of that process is rooted in figuring out how to make jokes float and wrap around the listeners head.

Most inexperienced comedy fans know about starting out, and they know about making it big, but they don’t consider the middle part in which comedians find their voice. For a comedian who’s been doing stand-up for a number of years, the learning process is centered on how you feel about what you’re doing onstage rather than which jokes are “funny.” I can tell you that having one person from the audience sincerely tell you they thought you were really funny after you did 10 min of new material you wrote two hours before the show feels exponentially better than destroying a room with A material you’ve been doing for years.

When I started out I found myself writing jokes down that I knew I couldn’t tell. This was not because they were offensive, or not good enough. It was because I was aware that I wasn’t developed enough as a comedian to pull off the jokes onstage. I ended up sitting on a lot of these jokes until I was in the right place as a comedian to get my point across and make it funny. Later on I went through a phase of getting onstage without having anything prepared and seeing what it was I said. This helped me grow as a comedian and had nothing to do with finding out “which jokes worked and which didn’t.” I bombed HARD during this phase, but in the end it helped me learn how to make a joke float with my personality. I have since gone back and rewritten some of those jokes from back in the day that I didn’t know how to tell, resulting in a few now being the strongest in my arsenal. This scenario for me is an example of how presence and experience onstage can effect how a joke is written and performed. Therefore, I don’t believe stand-up comedy is ever as simple as having a “bag of jokes” that works.

Ok, now I’m done.
Like I said, this was a long post because I’m snowed in, bored, and now I’m drunk.
On to Final Fantasy we go!!

Great post Bill!!

Contests – I think the way to make it fair is to give everybody in the audience two votes… that way they vote for their friend and the best comic.

Just my $.02

—- D