Great Comedy Advice for Beginners and Experts

A new regular column!

As a standup comedian with almost thirty years of professional experience, multiple TV credits, a concert film, and a recent special, you’d be surprised at the number of people who ask me for advice about the business. Unless you thought that number would be zero, in which case you’d be right on.

Like many comedians before me, I know that advice isn’t something you give to the people who want it. It’s something that you spring on that young comic who just had a great career break and needs their confidence torpedoed. Or that attractive young comedian after you’ve had a few bottles of Confidence by Anheuser Busch.

Or, if you’ve committed to a Substack schedule and have absolutely nothing to write about, because your life revolves around standup and you have zero other interests or hobbies or friends in any other business. So here is some great standup advice for comedians of all experience levels, whether you’re just beginning or you’ve been doing it for a while and haven’t had the success that the Universe owes you.

(Advice is) something that you spring on that young comic who just had a great career break and needs their confidence torpedoed.

Send Them Home Angry: Mastering Crowd Work

Crowd work isn’t just a lazy way to build up your TikTok presence; it can also help kill twenty minutes when you only have ten minutes of material.
Many road headliners supplement their twenty minutes of killer comedy about hating their wives by implying that audience members hate their wives, too.

But the real crowd work geniuses know it goes deeper than asking really original questions like “Where are you from?” and “What do you do for a living?” You have to take the average chump who came to see you perform after a hard week of working a real job and make them regret that mean high school students made your adolescence miserable.

The following are good launch points:

• Ask a man in a relationship, “How long have you two been together?”
  If he pauses even a nanosecond because you’re embarrassing him in front of a roomful of strangers, that’s when you pounce: “He doesn’t know!”
  There’s nothing funnier than watching a relationship fall apart in real time.

• “What’s your credit score?”
  Do not let up until you get a number.

• If there’s a group of women together, ask, “Which one of you is the whore?”
  If they’re friends, they’ll humiliate the one they all secretly hate by pointing her out.

Make them (the audience) regret that mean high school students made your adolescence miserable.

Steal From the Best: How to Write Jokes

The trick to generating new material is digging into your own life.
Since your life revolves around sleeping all day, putting on the cleanest clothes from the laundry pile next to your bed, and shuffling out to do an open mic or show, there’s not much to draw from.

So here’s an expert level tip: Watch standup specials all day. Take note of the comedians that make you the angriest – they’re the ones who are the most successful. Then steal only their setups and write new punchlines around them.

Nobody can call you out for only having half-original material, because that’s called “parallel thinking.” Remember: Finding an original premise is the hardest part of writing a joke, so don’t bother.

Public domain premises to get you started:

• My wife and children stand between me and happiness

• Despite what I just said for the past ten minutes, I can’t be prejudiced against gay people/trans people/Jews because I know one.

• White people, am I right?

• I am an alien from another planet and so every step of the process of ordering at a restaurant is amazing to me.

• Anything Brian Regan said on one of his albums. Seriously, that guy has a lot of material and even if he ever found out he wouldn’t mind if you borrowed a joke or five.

Screaming into a Live Mic: How to Have an Electric Stage Presence

Back in the old days, comedians spent years, sometimes decades working on a stage persona, learning physicality, taking acting lessons, all in the pursuit of becoming better performers onstage.
You don’t have that kind of time. Marijuana isn’t going to smoke itself all day!

That’s why you need to take that all-important shortcut:

• Scream into the mic. Comedy is about beating the audience into submission by completely overwhelming their senses.

• Forget that the microphone you’re speaking into is connected to a sound system that ends in speakers.

• The louder you are, the more likely you are to trigger a primordial fear response and get them to laugh out of a panic instinct. Any laugh counts!

Some comics cheat by resting the mic on their chin for their entire set. This is good, because if you weren’t lazy you’d be learning how to be a better comic instead of taking a shortcut by reading this article.

Stand by for more tips

I’ll be continuing a regular comedy column until I’ve compiled enough material to pitch a lazy book. Look for upcoming practical advice every comedian needs to know, like how to borrow money from the people in your life.

Liam McEneaney is a comedian who taped his first TV appearance two months before September 11^th and has been rewriting the same three jokes since. His most recent credits include headlining an open mic at a dispensary and also sitting in the audience of a bunch of TV shows that he lists as his credits when he does the road.

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