Finding my "Voice"

I've gotten more serious about Comedy. No, there's no contradiction. Whoever said, "Dying is easy. Comedy is hard," was right. [There is, BTW, some controversy about who said it first.]

I can be very funny one-on-one or one-on-small-group in an interactive, ad lib exchange. Being glib and having a repertoire of material make for the appearance of wit. Perhaps it's not merely "the appearance" of it.

That, however, has nothing (or certainly very little) to do with being a stand-up comedian. There are the writing of material, arranging it into "sets" (short acts), and developing the stage performing skills to deliver what you write. Very different from being entertaining to somebody you've just met.

And so I'm going to spend an hour (and some hard-earned money) with a coach next month. The object of the exercise will be to identify my "voice." What is the stage persona that will work best for me? Will there be different personae for different audiences? At my age (61), the audience will have certain expectations of me. Should I be professorial?

Should I be a dirty old man? A major problem being that young people find old men talking about sex to be "creepy."

Should I build a fresh act every day based on current events? That's what late night TV show hosts do (or rather what their writers do). But I'd run into the problem that many audience members don't: 1. read newspapers, 2. watch network news, or 3. watch CNN, MSNBC or Fox News. Many actually get their news from late night comedy shows.

I could just spew out brilliant puns, but they aren't funny. Some people won't get them (and resent me for it). Others will get them and say, "He's very clever." Being clever is not the same as getting the audience to laugh.

I probably have written 20-30 minutes of autobiographical material, but I'm not sure an audience would want to hear it.

Hence my need for some guidance.

But wait, there's more.

I have a database of 200 jokes I'd written up until I took a year off to work through some major health issues. I went through them and culled out 50 I didn't think were very good. The 150 remaining gags may or may not be very good, but I can string a variety of them together into things that works.

I've been getting back on stage again now for 3 months and wrote [some number of] new gags. In the last 2 days I went through the notes I made before each performance and
pulled together a comprehensive list of them. I'll determine how many new bits there are whilst I key them into the database. I plan to bring everything when I meet my coach -- who might hate me for it :)

I might even do what I've done before: post them to this blog.