Stand Up Comedy - Your First Time on Stage

You think you're a funny guy or girl and you've gathered enough courage to perform on New Talent Night at a local comedy club. How should you prepare to face a room full of strangers and make them laugh?

First, you need your arsenal of funny material. Take time during the day to sit down and write a joke with a simple joke structure. The simplest and most basic form of joke writing is "set up and punchline". "Setting up a joke" is providing basic information about an experience or topic. It establishes a place, a feeling and a presence. The punchline element produces the surprise and the unexpected ending. A genuine surprise elicits laughter from an audience which proves your joke is effective.

Memorize your jokes and rehearse them either mentally or verbally. Create a visual picture in your head of the subject matter and your first jokes will be more easily committed to memory. Continue rehearsing your jokes daily until they can be recited out loud and with confidence. Achieving a relaxed conversational tone will demonstrate command of the stage and put an audience at ease.

How to Write a Joke for Stand Up Comedy

Writing jokes is a business in the world of stand up comedy. The jokes a comedian writes will be most effective if they match his or her character. Developing a comedic personality on stage takes years but in the meantime it is necessary to get a start on that route to funny. Following a simple joke formula is the first step to writing for the comedy stage.

The formula "set up - punchline" is the most reliable comedic equation. It is a wonder that many comedians get so far off base when writing their first jokes. Usually this waywardness occurs because a new comedian usually imitates someone he or she has seen on stage at a concert or on television. What results from imitation is usually a very long and rambling set up and a punchline which is just as long and just as wordy.

An effective exercise for an aspiring comedian who is writing jokes for the first time is to write down all of these rambling words, thoughts and phrases and immediately begin the editing process. One of the hardest exercises is reducing these ideas to two sentences - one sentence for the set up and one sentence for the punchline. The most rewarding part of this type of tight editing is that if your resulting joke is funny, your laughs will come more quickly. A series of one-liner jokes will give you confidence. The laughter will affirm your instincts and give you the confidence to relax and start to write in a style that is comfortable to you.