Thoughts on Standup
I sometimes go watch live standup. Here's a few thoughts:
If you go to an open mic for music, you'll usually see 1) amateur musicians 2) playing professional musicians' songs.
And this makes sense: playing for an audience is harder, and writing your own songs is hard, and if you're going to do hard things (I'd say) it's often better to practice one hard bit at a time instead of multiple hard things simultaneously.
If you go to an open mic for standup comedy, you will often see someone disintegrate on stage, but you will never see anybody telling anyone else's jokes. Using someone else's material is so taboo in standup that I'm scared to even write about it in case I get banned from all comedy clubs.
And I totally understand this in terms of undisclosed joke-telling (much like it would be terrible form to play someone else's song and pretend you wrote it!).
But surely the idea of "covers" could exist in standup? "Tonight I'm going to perform this bit by Tommy Cooper" or whatever, and then you do it.
Surely this would allow amateur comedians to practice delivery and stage presence and just not freaking out in front of an audience while using material that is provably funny to begin with?
Speaking of stolen bits, I stole the following thought: standup is the most empirical humanities discipline, and it shows. Standups get on stage again and again and get real, concrete feedback about every little part of their act. It's true Deliberate Practice – regular feedback on SMALL PARTS which can be worked on individually – in a way that I don't think exists for writers or painters or musicians.
When I was younger I dreamed of setting up a writing program that had this property, but I was too lazy and ineffectual so I never did. I'm convinced that we could improve writing by at least 2x and possibly 10x if writers trained as deliberately and effectively as standups (or, for that matter, athletes).
I think if I had been put in such a program as a teenager I would've been insanely gratified. But I'm not strong willed enough to put myself through such a program as an adult.
This guy wrote a standup comedy syllabus to teach you how to comedy. I'm not going to do it because it's long and I'm lazy, but I think it's fundamentally what good pedagogy probably looks like: lots of practice, specific questions and analysis (both for your own work and other people's), then more practice and do it again.