Week #19 Stand up Comedy

Last week in class a question popped up, "can standup comedy be considered a type theatre?" it was a question that we could not formally develop because it would take us more than the whole class to do so. Fortunately yesterday I had my first stand up comedy workshop and I learned a whole lot of things about the matter that will get us closer to answering that question.

Lets start by naming the parts of a Stand up act:

• The Comedian
• The Text
• The Audience

These are the 3 essential things you need to have in order to have for stand up comedy to be stand up comedy. This was the first thing Walter Chullo (who is leading the workshop) told us about stand up comedy; he then proceeded to tell us about the history of stand up comedy, which is not very relevant to the question, but it would be helpful to say that stand up comedy may have derived from theatre traditions like Commedia Dell'arte. The next thing we did was an analysis of comedy:

1) What do we laugh at? What makes us laugh?

• Mundane Situations
• Mundane Characters of life
• Stereotypes 
• Disgraces/mistakes
• defects/gestures
• the physical/Physical aspects
• Jokes
• Nicknames
• The unexpected
• Words
• Tabu
• Old words/play on words
• double meaning
• misunderstanding

2) What don't we laugh at? What doesn't make us laugh?

• Sensible topics

3)Elements of comedy

The elements of comedy is in a way the structure of a bit.

• A Truth(a true starting point)
• That identifies/mundane(an absolute truth)
• Loss of status(with a higher status the funnier the loss of it)

Exercise #1: Say a truth that identifies and looses status

For example we could say something like: We have all been in the same situation, we have all been in the bathroom an realized that there is no toilet paper, and we have had to walk out an look for it with our pants down. 

Here we have a truth (we all go to the bathroom) that identifies (we have all been in that situation) and loses status (having to walk out)

We then went on to learning how to choose our theme:

1. Personal Context
2. Physical characteristics
3. psychological characteristics
4. Fears
5. Hates
6. Social Context
7. A place
8. historical moment
9. the new and/or nostalgic
10. any other theme

Homework #1:

Develop three themes for each point mentioned above. 

I will have to do this for the next class and for example something I could do could be talk about my size(Physical characteristics) or talk about public restrooms (A place)

After knowing how to choose a theme we then went on how to structure a monologue, the techniques on how to write. 

1) Setup Punch

1.1 - setup, the previous part, build the situation, the absolute truth that identifies, not necessarily makes you laugh. the setup has to be written in the same way as you speak

1.2 - The Punch; the funny part, surprising, short, efective, unexpected, may be obvious, has to be funny

1.3 - Comedy's magic number is three

1.4 - Punch over the Punch - a technique where you continue to do punchlines over your original punchline.

2) Comparisons: 

Comparisons have to be proportional

• "while you ... I ...." or "before it was like... now it is like..."

3) Representations

• scenes/dialogues
• present characters
• create atmosphere 
• presents yourself as you are
• mime

4) Classification

• classificate any situations that causes laughter or develops content: for example, things that happen when you use the combi "there is always a woman that thinks she knows more than the driver...(use the representations) there is always a man that comes in and says ...."

5)Lists

• Making lists going from the most obvious to the most funny: for example, things not to do on a first date "ask her to pay, make unfunny jokes, tell her about the dead hooker in the trunk of your car"

6) Contrast attitude

• take the theme one way and surprise with the punch

7) Audiovisuals

• a video, picture or song

8)Props

9)The Callback

• something that worked before and is used again

10)The absurd

• start with something real and DEGENERATE it into something absurd

Homework #2:

Choose 3 of the themes in HW #1 and develop 1 using the previous "tools"

Tips to write standup comedy:

1. write in the first person
2. write how you speak
3. structure of the monologue

• present yourself
• present the theme
• develop the theme
• leave

1. use punctuation
2. write in a group

That is all we learned the first day and as far as I know it is not as close to theatre as i thought it was and even though it has some elements of theatre there is no direct connection to it. I think that as the course goes on I will find more connections to theatre.