The key to learning how to write stand-up comedy effectively is in revising your material. Did you know that Jerry Seinfeld rewrites his jokes at least 50 times before he settles on the final version? Learning how to write stand up comedy is all about learning the rules of comedy and learning how to continually rewrite your material to find the funniest combinations.
Learn How to Write Stand-Up Comedy – Revising Material
Only a small fraction of writing stand-up comedy is about writing brand-new material. The vast majority of your writing time will be spent honing material that you’ve already written.
The highest quality (and funniest) ideas aren’t going to come from your very first attempt at a joke or bit… they’ll come later on as you’re revising it. The most original ideas are generally the ideas that are the most difficult to think of and take the longest to surface. If you want to learn how to write stand-up comedy you need to learn expert revising skills.
To revise your material, you first have to test out your original idea. To answer the question “How do I make it better?” you first have to know what’s you’re actually dealing with. You have to get your material out on stage.
Once you perform a bit for the first time you want to then ask yourself a series of questions designed to get at the heart of your material’s strengths and weaknesses. These questions are covered in depth in the Faster & Funnier Online Stand-Up Comedy Course. By continually asking these questions, you’ll learn how to write stand-up comedy that’ll crush on stage. You’ll be able to identify every component of your performance, whether those components are benefiting your career or taking away from it, and how to rewrite your comedy material to increase those strengths and decrease or eliminate the weaknesses.
Learn How to Write Stand-Up Comedy – Testing Out Your Material
When you test out your material, you’re really attempting to identify the various components of your material. A component is any individual writing or performance characteristic in your performance. You want to be able to identify these components so that you can learn how to write stand-up comedy better in your revisions. Each revision you’ll test out a new set of components and test how they work. You’ll then use this information to guide your stand-up comedy writing later on.
Jared Volle