Introduction

One of the critical factors that will directly impact how fast you are able to progress as a comedian is whether or not you are conducting intelligent performance improvement evaluations on audio and video recordings of your stand-up comedy act.

Let me be more specific:

1. Getting the stage time needed to hone your stand-up comedy act and performing skills can be difficult to get, especially at the beginning of your stand-up comedy adventures.

Common sense would dictate that you should try to squeeze every bit of value possible out of every stand-up comedy set you perform.

Otherwise, you will end up being stuck in same “hit or miss” process most other comedians use to develop and hone their acts, adding a tremendous amount of time to the process of being able to deliver headliner level stand-up comedy material.

2. Knowing exactly which parts of your stand-up comedy act need attention can dramatically reduce the time it takes to adjust, improve or remove the sections of your act that aren’t generating the laughter levels that you want.

3. Since most comedians are unable or unwilling to engage in performance improvement activities, you automatically have a significant advantage over other comedians as far as potential rapid progress goes.

And the best part of all is this:

Using Comedy Evaluator Pro, performance improvement is a much easier and faster process than using smartphone apps. But the process is the same.

So let’s get started. The very first secret I need to share with you is about how audience dynamics can affect your performance results.

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Audience Dynamics

When you first start performing as a comedian, as a general rule you are not performing in front of large audiences — you usually perform for smaller audiences.

There are a number of audience dynamics that have a direct impact on the performance results that you can get no matter how effective your stand-up comedy material is at generating laughs.

Below is a report that covers audience dynamics in detail. But here’s the important thing I need you to know before you head over there:

Ideally, you want to develop stand-up comedy material that works well consistently with virtually every audience. There are audience dynamics, however , that can throw you off and create doubt about your material if you aren’t aware of them:

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Now, lets talk about some specifics when it comes to making adjustments to your stand-up comedy material:

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Making Adjustments To Your Transcribed Stand-up Comedy Material

You should have your stand-up comedy “script” or map — what you transcribed as your stand-up comedy material — structured in single line format in your word processor.

You should have this already in Single Line Format as described in this course, making it very easy to line up what you have recorded with what you have in written form.

You should also have an audio or video recording of your stand-up comedy set.

The first thing you need to do is to “edit” the stand-up comedy material in your set to reflect EXACTLY what you said during your recorded stand-up comedy set because:

• You may have omitted lines.
• You may have added lines.
• You may have said lines differently than in your stand-up comedy material as it was initially structured in your word processor.

The second thing you will want to do is to identify and mark the end of each minute of your recorded set in the written format as it actually occurred during your performance.

Once you have done this…

You can now accurately line up exactly what you did on stage with a minute-by-minute performance evaluation using your smartphone apps or Comedy Evaluator Pro.

Let me show you an example of exactly what I am talking about…

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Example Of Identifying Each Minute Of Your Act

Let’s assume that you have already made edits to your stand-up comedy material in your word processor or on paper to reflect exactly what you said on stage upon initial review of your audio or video video recording.

Now, you want to identify each minute of your stand-up comedy material as it actually happened on stage.

You’ve seen this YouTube video of comedian Brian Regan before:

Here’s how the first two minutes of this performance would look in a word processor with each minute identified:

S: We needed a refrigerator for our new place and
S: I’ve never bought a refrigerator in my whole life.
S: I went into the appliance store
S: There’s 900 of them lined up.
S: There’s a salesman there.
S: What’s this guy supposed to say about refrigerators?
S: Well you have this refrigerator right here.
P: This keeps all your food cold for 600.
S: You’ve got this refrigerator.
P: This keeps all your food cold for 800.
T: Check this out – 1400 – Keeps all your food cold.
S: So this guy’s working me on this one.
S: I’ve never seen a guy work so hard.
S: This one is a very nice refrigerator.
P: It has a meats drawer.
S: And uh, what you do with that
P: You would put meats

End of minute 1

T: Whatever varieties that you would choose
T: These would be your meats
S: So there’s no requirement on the types of meats you could pick…
P: Bacon…
T: Marbled meats…
T: There’s an endless selection, endless.
S: And this one also has a crisper
P: For crispy things
T: Potato chips

End of minute 2

This is what you will do with your stand-up comedy material so that you can account for every punchline and the subsequent audience laughter (of lack of audience laughter) in each minute of the audio or video you are evaluating.

Now let’s talk about evaluating your stand-up comedy audio or video recording for performance improvement…

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Conducting An Objective Performance Evaluation

Using your smartphone apps or Comedy Evaluator Pro, here’s what you want to pay close attention to in a minute-by-minute evaluation of an audio or video recording of any particular stand-up performance:

1. Total seconds of laughter in any specific performing minute.

Any minute of your performance that did not reach 18 seconds of laughter should be scrutinized for review and rework.

2. Laughs per minute.

This will tell you how many of your punchlines produced measurable laughter.

3. Laughter duration for each laugh.

Note: This can be difficult and time consuming to obtain using smartphone apps alone.

As you perform a CEP evaluation, each laugh you generate is recorded in seconds.

This provides you a solid indicator of just how powerful any particular punchline was that you delivered was during your performance.

4. Overall performance level.

Once you have your performance evaluation, you can now line up those results with what you have on your word processor to pinpoint exactly where you need to make improvements in your stand-up comedy material or delivery.

If any minute in your act generates less than 18 seconds of laughter per minute, there are only 5 primary reasons why this happened:

• Too many set-up lines
• The audience could not relate to, visualize, or appreciate the information provided in the set-up information
• Too few punchlines
• Punchlines didn’t work or didn’t work well (they weren’t funny)
• You ran over laughs (started talking before the audience was through laughing)

Let’s cover each of these…

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The 5 Primary Areas Of Focus For Performance Improvement

Before I cover each of the areas in your stand-up comedy material to evaluate for performance improvement, keep this in mind:

Never forget — the vast majority of your laughter generation power comes from a genuine expression of your stand-up comedy material, not the literal words as they appear in your written material.

So, let’s cover the 5 primary areas that you need to focus on when it comes to performance improvement:

1. Too many set-up lines before a punchline is delivered.

Simple fact: The more talking you do before any punchline, the less punchlines you will be able to deliver in any particular minute of your stand-up comedy act.

2. The audience can’t relate to, visualize, or appreciate the information provided in the set-up information.

If your audience doesn’t understand or relate to what you are saying, this will render your punchlines ineffective because audiences won’t be able to “get” the punchlines.

3. Too few punchlines. This is usually related to #1 above.

4. Punchlines didn’t work or didn’t work well.

Here are the reasons your punchlines didn’t work or didn’t work well:

• Punchlines simply were not funny and didn’t express an effective sense of humor reaction to the set-up information
• Audiences didn’t get the set-up information rendering a punchline ineffective
• Keyword structure in your punchlines gave away the element of surprise too early
• Punchlines were not delivered in a genuine way, causing the audience to suspect they were merely being “joked”
• Punchlines were “written” instead of reflecting genuine sense of humor reactions to information being shared with an audience.

5. Running over laughs.

If you start talking before an audience has finished laughing, you can greatly reduce your laughter generation.

Audiences simply cannot hear what you have to say when they are laughing and will cut their laughter short to listen to you.

Armed with a performance evaluation and the information I have just provided…

It is very easy to pinpoint exactly where your stand-up comedy act needs improvement and what to look for and adjust when it comes to implementing performance improvement activities on your stand-up comedy material and your delivery of that material.

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Wrap Up

You don’t need to spend one penny to conduct objective performance evaluations on your stand-up comedy to know exactly what level you are performing at and what specific areas of you act you need to focus on for performance improvement.

When you begin evaluating your stand-up comedy performances, keep this in mind:

As I have mentioned before, headline level stand-up comedy material is honed and refined over multiple performances.

So don’t be dismayed if you don’t “crush” audiences when you first start performing.

But also know this:

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