Testing Your Comedy Material Before You Get To The Stage
Training Module Six: Intro And Lesson Links | Members Area
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Introduction
You may not realize this, but you have the ability to test your stand-up comedy material for effectiveness and laughter impact — before you ever deliver your material to on stage to an audience.
How? You can easily test your comedy material in casual conversations provided you adhere to the guidelines provided in this lesson.
Before you make any attempt to test your stand-up comedy material with friends, family members, co-workers and acquaintances…
You MUST make sure you have taken your comedy material through the professional rehearsal process and can deliver and express your material naturally and with little effort.
Otherwise, you will fumble, stumble and grope your way through a testing attempt, rendering it virtually worthless for evaluation purposes.
Not only that…
Your body language will not be in alignment and the person or persons you are talking with will suspect something is amiss in what you are saying or talking about — either on a conscious or subconscious level.
Again, they will immediately focus on what is amiss, as opposed to paying attention to what you are saying.
Part 2
Testing Your Stand-up Comedy Material In Casual Conversations
Here’s what you need to know about testing your comedy material in casual conversations:
1. Never identify in any conversation that you are working on or testing stand-up comedy material because if you do:
The person or persons you are communicating with will automatically be “on guard”, focusing on trying to figure out what the “joke” is instead of listening to what you are saying and genuinely responding to what you are saying.
In other words, the element of surprise will be greatly reduced and you don’t have much of a chance to generate genuine laughter.
2. Don’t try to “force” your comedy material into a conversation. You need to have a little bit of patience in order to inject your comedy material naturally into a conversation at just the right moment.
3. You may need to alter some of your lines in any stand-up comedy material you want to test because…
There can be some slight differences in dialogue and monologue verbiage.
However, the mechanics for generating laughter will remain unchanged.
4. You will need to keep track of who has heard the comedy material you have tested because…
Once a person or persons have heard your comedy material, the element of surprise is gone and you won’t usually generate a genuine laugh (unless the person wasn’t really listening to you the first time you attempted to test material).
5. Always have something to write with when you are testing your comedy material in conversation because…
The person or persons you are talking to have a sense of humor too.
They can and will react to your comedy material with their own ideas, views, observations, opinions and reactions (punchlines) that you have not even considered.
In a nutshell, you can gather some fantastic additional or replacement comedy material for a bit or a chunk just from paying attention to how others react to the topic or subject of discussion you have initiated!
6. Try to test any particular bit or chunk with 3-5 different people before you pass judgment on your comedy material as far as its laughter generation capabilities go.
7. Remember that when you are in a conversation with an individual or a small group of people, the audience dynamics are different.
In other words, you are not going to usually get a 3-5 second belly laugh from your comedy material in a conversation as you would if there were 20-100+ people seated closely together in a comedy venue.
However — small to medium GENUINE laughs generated in casual conversations can equate to HUGE laughs with a larger audience dynamic.
This is how you can know your comedy material is good to go — before you ever hit the stage.
Part 3
Not Getting Laughs? Here’s Why…
If your material is NOT getting laughs when you test it in casual conversations, then there are only a few reasons why:
- The material is simply not funny.
- You stumbled through the material because you weren’t really thoroughly prepared to work it into a conversation.
- Your body language is out of alignment.
- You are trying to “force” your material to be funny in an unnatural way.
- The person or persons you are having a conversation with know you are working on comedy material.
Wrap Up
Wrap Up
When was actively performing in stand-up comedy, about 30%-40% of my comedy material was either gathered from or developed as a direct result of engaging in simple causal conversations with others and knowing how to stealthily work my comedy material into the discussion when the opportunity to do so became available.
I was also able to test a great deal of my stand-up comedy material in everyday conversations that I had and was able to determine just how powerful it would be when I delivered and expressed that material for an audience.
You can do the same. You just need to be smart (and patient) when it comes to testing your comedy material and…
Always be on the look out during conversations that generate laughter from the participants — whether you are the cause of that laughter or not.
You have tools and techniques in this course to take those conversations and make them into your own big laugh stand-up comedy material. 🙂