once said, “Some people see a glass as half-full; some see a glass as half-empty. I, on the other hand, see a glass as twice as big as it ought to be.” Spoken like a true comedian.
That’s one of the great things about being a comedian: the ability to see everyday things from a different perspective and make something uniquely funny out of it. At this point in our careers, the glass wasn’t just half-empty, it was broken, and the wine had stained the existing stains on the 20-year-old carpet. Life was a bit of a mess. But a mess can sometimes lead to great things.
Getting Into Comedy 101
It’s very easy to get started in performing comedy. Want to tell some jokes? Simple. Just hop up on stage during an open-mic night somewhere, make sure to invite every friend you have, and rest assured you’ll be an enormous hit – the first time you perform.
The next ten performances, after you’ve worked your way through all your friends, will be painful. The silence you hear will be your constant reminder that the road to success in comedy is a long one.
All of us started as stand-up comedians, and on many a night we would take to the stage without one person in the audience. On these nights, a well-known comedy club owner in Dallas would tell us to hop right on that stage and perform. In show business, as in life, the show must go on, and on those nights when no one was there to see us perform we plodded on. This is the industry equivalent of research and development.
This brings to mind a very famous story about the legendary artist Pablo Picasso. One day, Picasso was sitting with a friend and the friend asked Picasso if he would draw him a picture on a cocktail napkin. The friend even offered to pay Picasso for the picture. Picasso, being the artist that he was, quickly scribbled a beautiful picture on the cocktail napkin in less than a minute. When he was finished, he handed the picture to his friend and said, “That will be one million dollars.” The friend was exasperated. “One million dollars! It took you less than a minute to draw that.” Picasso smiled and then said, “Yes, but it took me thirty years to learn how to draw it that fast.” Becoming an artist or an expert at a craft takes a lot of time and dedication, and often rewards in the form of payment take a long time to materialize.
In our case, when we are asked how we were able to be paid so well for doing something we love to do we always respond, “We aren’t being paid for only this show we are being paid for all the shows where we didn’t get paid that made us this good.” Becoming an artisan at anything takes time and most times the financial rewards don’t come until years later when mastery has occurred.
Now let’s say you want to improvise? Simple. Just get a group of people together, take a group headshot, print some flyers, and schedule a time when the local coffee shop will allow you to ply your trade. In both instances of stand-up comedy and improvisation, it helps if your audiences are a little drunk. It greases the wheels for your lack of experience.
The point is that to get into comedy there’s literally no criteria. People at work think you’re funny? Good enough. Are you a hoot at your family reunion? Done. Can you make the waitress laugh at the local Applebee’s? Here is the mic, have at it.
A person doesn’t need good grades, references, or any proven track record to get started. Anybody can do it, so everybody “thinks” they can do comedy well. But that doesn’t mean a person shouldn’t try. One has to believe they’re capable of anything and not let choices in life be dictated by fear.
Look at the case of the aforementioned George Carlin. There were two distinct Carlin personalities that arose throughout his career. In the 1960s, Carlin was doing much more mainstream comedy, such as the “Hippy Dippy Weatherman.” His comedy was by all accounts safe for television audiences, and he made a very good career of performing in that manner.
As Carlin grew as a performer and became more authentic, a new voice arose that changed a generation. Carlin became a hysterical voice of dissent. The amazing thing about all of this is that it didn’t happen until Carlin was almost 40. This is evidence that we can and should continue to grow throughout our lives. We may have several different career shifts, and this is what makes life so exciting: the prospect of pursuing new avenues that are brought to us when we least expect it.
When our improvisational comedy group, Four Day Weekend, conducts a workshop and we ask a group of adults to raise their hands if they can paint, about a third of the hands go up. Notice that we don’t ask, “Who here paints very well?” The interesting thing is, if we ask a group of children the same question, all of the hands go up.
That’s because life hasn’t beaten out of children the possibility of being, doing, and accomplishing great things. Children have a belief that anything is possible, and in fact they will collaborate with other children to make anything possible. As adults, we lose our faith that anything is possible, and our willingness to collaborate with others diminishes.
Only as an adult do we question our ability to be good at something. We’re afraid of being told no or looking stupid. Our greatest fear is that we will look silly or dumb in front of our peers, and this paralyzes us from taking chances in our lives. Our fear prevents our creativity because we would rather sit on the sidelines and have the perceived acceptance of our peers than to take a chance at greatness on the off-chance that someone may judge us. We like to call this the prevent defense of creativity. Take no chances, get no grief. Avoid humility or rejection.
At what expense, you might ask? Creativity and progress. Imagine if Steve Jobs had been too frightened to take the chance to change the way we communicate using mobile devices. Congressmen would have to send pantless pictures of themselves via snail mail. It would take ten times the amount of time for their careers to implode!
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