When asked what keeps pulling them back to the stage after all these years, Chappelle & Rock had the same answer: Mastery.
But mastery isn’t unique to comedians. It’s actually the most common goal among all highly-creative professionals. Studies into the psychology of highly creative people have found that mastery is mentioned over 20% more often than any other goal. Regardless of their field, highly creative people cite mastery of their industry as the most important driving force in their lives. It’s what motivates them to keep pushing.
Why is mastery such an important goal for comedians & other creative people?
Mastery doesn’t depend on your circumstances. The pursuit of mastery never depends on where you currently are. It’s all about where you want to go. Whether you’re a veteran comedian or just getting started, the goal of mastery is an enticing, powerful motivator.
For the new or aspiring comedian, mastery is an inspiring goal of what you can become in the future. We look to the amazing comedians of the past and feel inspired to one day reach the same level. Our first (and earliest) goal of master is to simply become competent on stage. We want to master the most basic elements of comedy. We do this through the simple process of learning what skills we need and then practicing them over and over.
For comedians that have been working for a while, mastery is more about mastering individual aspects of comedy. We don’t just want to know how to write a funny analogy, we want to master it. We want to practice it like any other skill until the jokes we write are so tight that they feel almost magical to the audience. We want to get to the point where the audience goes from thinking “That’s funny” to “Wow. That’s genius!” Like everything in life, it’s a skill that can be mastered. Early on in our career, our goal is to master these individual skills and learn how to put them together into an amazing performance.
What about for the Dave Chappelle’s and Chris Rock’s out there? Why is mastery still pushing them forward? At the highest levels, mastery is no longer about performing competently on stage. It’s already clear THAT you can get laughs. The question becomes HOW do you want to get them. World-class comedians are still evolving, even though they’ve settled on their comedic style.
My all-time favorite comedian, Richard Jeni, displayed this beautifully. In the late 1980’s he absolutely killed it on stage at the Just For Laughs Festival. It was full of the kind of applause breaks that most comedians only dream of. A few years later, he produced his award-winning show “Platypus Man.” In the show, he did the same bit, yet he made significant changes to it. The performance was already good, yet he somehow made it even better over the years.
Mastery is the only goal that can drive you to improve something that the rest of the world already thinks is good enough. The outside world told him to stop because it was good enough, but inside he felt there was more he could do. His desire for mastery took something amazing and made it phenomenal. The pursuit of mastery is the only goal that can achieve these kinds of results.
At some point in your career, the outside world will deem you a master of the stage. The audience will think that there’s nothing better than what you’ve already given them. You will be the only one who will know that more is possible. Mastery keeps you from getting complacent.
The Take-A-Way
If you’re a new comedian, mastery might seem like a far-off goal that is overwhelming to think about. This isn’t how you should think about it. The whole point of mastery is that it shows us what’s possible in the future. Mastery begins exactly where you are. It’s not about mastering everything all at once, it’s about mastering whatever is in front of you. You cannot master higher-level ideas before you master lower-level ones. You master the skills that make you a competent comedian, like various joke structures, before you master the ones that make you incredible, like building audience rapport and developing a fan base. And when you have mastered those, you master the skills that make you legendary. While it seems like an overwhelming goal at first, all that it requires is that you take whatever is in front of you and practice it relentlessly until you’ve mastered it.
This is fully within your control. No one can stop you from learning what makes funny analogies and then hammering out 50 a day until you’re analogies are clearly superior. No one can stop you from then relentlessly practicing every other type of joke to get the same results. And no one can stop you from then moving on to mastering higher-level ideas after that. The mastery of stand-up comedy is the mastery of each individual aspect of comedy, which only comes through focused practice. This is so much more rewarding than simply sitting down to write comedy without any clear goals.
If you want support on your journey, we’d love to have you in the Faster & Funnier Writing Course, where we break down each type of joke, show you exactly how it creates humor, and then give you concrete steps on how to write them. The course is already structured with this idea of mastery in mind. It breaks comedy writing down into actionable goals that you can practice and improve so that you’re always focused on the next goal. It’s also built to scale with you, with exercises specific to brand new comedians and those for experienced writers who want to practice higher-level ideas, like authenticity and comedic storytelling.
I also invite you to check out the Kaizen Creativity Podcast, where every Monday, Wednesday, & Friday we discuss ways to become more creative and successful. I do short episodes that give you a quick takeaway that you can use in your comedy writing. You can see all the episodes at JaredVolle.com/podcast. Below, you can check out the episode that inspired this blog post.
To your success,
Jared Volle