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How Doing Stand-Up Comedy Can Help Your Writing
On structure, style, and writing with a purpose
I recently read an essay about how watching stand-up comics can improve one’s writing.
The author emphasizes style and wordplay — puns, non-sequiturs, double entendre — as the tools most transferable from comedy to prose. These are good points.
But what about joke writing? There is a process to this as well, and it’s more complex than you’d imagine. Joke writing hones many of the skills in demand by novelists and nonfictionists.
In other words, if you want to be a good writer, try being a good comic.
January 28, 2015. A hundred pairs of eyes were on me as I stood on stage at Goodnights Comedy Club, blinking into the miniature sun of a spotlight. Me, a 42-year-old librarian and English professor. Father of two. Owner of seven cats and a corn snake. Plus my wife had crabs — hermit crabs, in an aquarium.
Jerry Seinfeld. Ellen DeGeneres. Robin Williams. Lewis Black. Jay Leno. Chris Rock. These are people who had stood where I was standing.
How did this happen?
I have loved stand-up comedy since I was a teenager staying up late on weekends to watch A&E’s An Evening at the Improv. I often imagined myself up there, cool as iced tea, my eyes sweeping the crowd, my hands on the mic or spreading wide to welcome laughter.
In my youth, I might have made it happen. But now? Not with a wife and crabs to support.
Then I learned about Goodnights Comedy Academy, a course for beginning comics meeting one night a week for four weeks and culminating in a “graduation” performance in front of a real audience. I paid $300 and got a slot in the next class. There were three other students: a twentyish IT guy named Justin; a thirtysomething waitress named Brandy; and a mid-fifties folk singer named Jonathan.
And there was the instructor, Charlie Viracola. He was also in his fifties, maybe 5’6”, and wore the uniform of urban smartasses: long sweater, cargo pants, and a beanie. He lived in Los Angeles but grew up in Raleigh and had a history with Goodnights: he was the club’s first act when it opened in 1983.
