Introduction

Conducting objective performance evaluations of your stand-up comedy performances has the potential to literally shave months or years off the time it takes to develop a high level, big laugh stand-up comedy act.

In order to set performance benchmarks and to evaluate your stand-up comedy performances for improvement, you will need some tools, specifically:

• A smartphone
• Comedy Evaluator Pro
• A YouTube account (optional)

In this lesson, I’m going to provide you with information on each of these tools and why they are important in your development and progress as a comedian.

Your Smartphone

Most everyone has a smartphone today. Here are the apps you will be using on your phone for performance improvement — these apps are either already available on your phone or are available from the app store associated with your phone (and they should be available for free):

• Audio recorder
• Video recorder
• Calculator

Armed with these simple apps, you have the ability to easily make recordings of your stand-up comedy performances and to conduct objective performance reviews for improvement. The detailed information on how to do this is provided in this report:

[beautiful_link_preview url=”https://www.comedyevaluatorpro.com/203/smartphone-secrets-for-comedians/” target=”_blank”]

The important thing to know from that report is that you don’t need Comedy Evaluator Pro to know exactly what performance level you are at or which minutes of your stand-up comedy routine need the most improvement.

Let’s talk about audio and video recordings that you will need in order to conduct performance improvement reviews of your stand-up comedy act.

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Using Recordings For Performance Evaluations

If you reviewed the report in the last section, it should be obvious that making an audio recording of your stand-up comedy performance is far easier than making a video, primarily because you can make an audio recording yourself, without the need for a second person involved to record a video.

Whether you make an audio or video recording of your stand-up comedy act, keep this in mind:

You do not need a “best quality” recording for performance review activities.

• For audio recordings, you need to be able to hear you talking and the audience responding.
• For video, the same is true with one additional aspect — you also need to have ample video quality for a visual review of your stand-up comedy for any potential changes or improvements.

You should make a recording of every single stand-up comedy performance you do, especially in the beginning of your stand-up comedy adventures because:

1. When you are on stage delivering your material, you are NOT in evaluation mode — you are in performing mode.

Subsequently, it is next to impossible to discern exactly how well you did or did not do for any given performance until after the show.

2. With a video recording you can review and evaluate one of the most important laughter generation aspects of your act — namely your delivery (more specifically your body language and facial expressions).

3. Most important of all, having audio or video recordings of your stand-up comedy performances will allow you to determine just how powerful your stand-up comedy material and delivery is, specifically you will be able to:

• Determine how many seconds of laughter you are generating each performing minute
• Determine how many punchlines generate laughter each minute (effective punchline frequency)
• Determine how powerful your punchlines are (laughter duration)

It should go without saying that unless you have this sort of information, it can be difficult to engage in performance improvement activities.

Now, let’s talk a little bit about making the recordings you need.

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Audio Recordings

Because it is so easy to make an audio recording of your stand-up comedy performances using your smartphone, this will likely be your preferred method when it comes to conducting performance evaluations.

Below is a report that covers this in detail. In the next section, I will cover the advantages of making video recordings of your act (at least periodically):

[beautiful_link_preview url=”https://www.comedyevaluatorpro.com/1162/your-smartphone-an-awesome-tool-for-comedy-performance-evaluations/” target=”_blank”]

Video Recordings

Making  a video recording of your stand-up comedy act for performance review is optimal primarily because in addition to the audio aspect, you can also review the visual aspect of your performance.

Therefore you should periodically make video recordings of your performances because you can detect issues that are not readily apparent on audio recordings.

In this section I want to focus on what you should be looking for in a video when it comes to performance evaluations.

Once you have a video that you can review, the very first thing you should do is watch the video from beginning to end without the sound, focusing on just the visual aspect of the performance.

Then you should review it again with the sound on. During both reviews you should be paying close attention to these particular aspects of your performance:

• Was your body language and delivery of your stand-up comedy material natural for you?
• Were you smiling excessively or laughing during your punchlines (this can potentially decrease your audience laughter response if this is unnatural for you)?
• Were you looking at the entire audience during your act or were you focused on just one section of the audience?

The evaluation of these performance aspects is in addition to the objective performance evaluation described in the first part of this lesson.

Now I want to briefly touch upon using YouTube as it relates to performance reviews.

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Using YouTube

Below is a link to an article on my blog that contains extensive information about online videos that every comedian should be aware of.

But what I want to do is cover some of the information in that article as it relates to performance evaluations.

Establishing a YouTube account may seem unnecessary activity, especially when you are just beginning to perform your stand-up comedy material, but hear me out.

Many people are unaware that you have 3 visibility options when you upload a video of your stand-up to your YouTube account:

• Public. This means that anyone can see your video and it is included in the YouTube search results.
• Unlisted. This means that only people who have the link to your video can view it. Unlisted videos are not included in YouTube search results.
• Private. Only you and specific people you select can view the video (based on email address).

I would highly recommend that if you upload your videos to YouTube that you use the Unlisted option and here’s why:

1. Headliner level stand-up comedy material is honed over multiple performances.

Subsequently, you may not want folks to see your initial stand-up comedy videos until your performances reach a certain performance benchmark.

2. This will get the videos off your smartphone as videos can take up much of your storage space.

3. Having your videos gives you a visual record of your performances and the improvements that you make.

Note: There is a YouTube video interface built right into the Comedy Evaluator Pro evaluation screen, making it very easy to evaluate your stand-up comedy performances in a single review.

I should also mention that you can change the visibility options for any YouTube video whenever you want, as well as deleting any video that you upload to your YouTube account.

Here’s a related article that you might want to take a close look at about  online stand-up videos…

[beautiful_link_preview url=”https://www.realfirststeps.com/3939/kill-stage-killer-video-proof-rocked-house/” target=”_blank”]

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Wrap Up

If you do not record your performances, right from the beginning:

• You have no personal record of your performances
• You have no way of establishing performance benchmarks
• You have no way of engaging in intelligent performance improvement activities that can dramatically shorten the length of time it will take you to deliver headliner level stand-up comedy material

And since your smartphone can provide you with all the tools you need to to conduct objective performance evaluations, I can only strongly recommend that you use it to your maximum advantage.

So let’s move onto performance benchmarking…

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