How To Rehearse Stand Up Comedy
While stand up comedy can look easy, it seldom is. The process of how to write a joke and then rehearsing stand up comedy is something that you need to work on if you really want to become a well-rehearsed stand up comedian who is able to have audiences eating out of the palm of his hand with his humor! There is nothing worse than literally bombing in front of a lot of people because that will deteriorate your confidence for future performances!
One of the things that some stand up comedian wannabes do a lot—which is, however, wrong—is rehearsing their act in front of a mirror. A lot of the comedy pros such as Andy Williams simply refuse to go along with this because of the harmful effects toward audience reaction that this approach can produce! Let me explain further.
You see, if a wannabe stand up comedian is looking at himself in the mirror and then rehearing his act, he will have a tendency to fake both his body language as well as his facial expressions to help his act along. This strategy of selling his act to an audience will be detected by said audience, who will laugh a lot less because their subconscious keys in to the fact that they are being defrauded, in a way.
So if you want to have a successful stand up comedy career instead of just being a wannabe, then forget the mirror!
For a comedian, the key to remembering both his running order as well as his material really depends on nothing more than basic, good organization. If you have ever seen the great comedians on the stage—such as Andrew Dice Clay, for one, or “Dice” to his fans—you may have admired and even been awestruck by how easy they make it look! Well, that all has to do mostly with the technique they use to remember their material and running order. Here is how it works.
First of all, you want to order your stand up comedy routine into bits, and then from those bits, you want to pick the ones you think are the funniest for your timeslot. Next, you want to make sure that you break almost every bit of your material down by all-important pauses. For instance, if you already have a paragraph of material written, then insert the pauses in the appropriate places for when you will be talking. You should come up with something similar to this:
Setup Line (Pause)
Another Setup Line (Another Pause)
Yet Another Setup Line (Yet Another Pause)
Finally, the punch line (Pause for laughter)
The goal of how to rehearse stand up comedy all comes down to how well you master the pauses! After all, the objective to any good stand up comedy routine is to make the audience laugh, but you have to give them time to actually do it. Newbie comedians frequently screw up in this regard, which can adversely disrupt the flow of their routine, so keep this all-important point in mind as you learn how to rehearse stand up comedy.