Easy Guide to Comedy

When pursuing stand up comedy, maintaining discipline is a constant struggle when developing your material.  I have read a lot of literature on how to develop my own comedy and have always just wanted a simple guideline of advice to do so.  After 7 years this is probably the best and simplest advice I have for developing one’s material. Keep in mind that comedy is a very personal journey so please feel free to adjust this guideline to what works best for you.

Step 1:  Wake up everyday at a reasonable time to be no more than 8 minutes late to work…usually.

Step 2:  Go home and find out what day it is and go to appropriate open mic(s).

Step 3:  Do the mic and try and internally minimize developing sets as much as possible in order to protect your inflated sense of ego.

Step 4: Go home.

Step 5. Repeat steps 1-4 for 5 years.

Step 6: Get divorced.

Step 7: Repeat steps 1-4 for 2 years.

Step 8: Stop taking your psychiatric medication for a few months while repeating steps 1-4

Step 9: Explain to your current employer you need to leave work early to get a haircut.

Step 10: Go home and before you leave for your haircut, take out a $100,000.00 life insurance policy and put it in your ex wife’s name.  JUST IN CASE…. her family has mafia ties and if they have a hit on you they would probably make it look like a suicide so if there’s a money trail and a motive maybe you can blow their  whole cover. 

Then start frantically collecting all your scientifically unarguably correct writings on your theory of the last digit of Pi and try to ignore the fact 2 weeks ago you got kicked out of the Fermi Lab’s free public tour for arguing with a real Theoretical Physicist that numbers are geometric and you can  prove this with just a bathroom mirror and an open frame of mind… BUT he didn’t have an open frame mind so how the fuck are you supposed to prove the last digit of Pi is 3 only if you’re traveling forward in time while moving simultaneously back words in time at a faster rate; and if he can’t understand simple concept like that then how am I, I mean you, supposed to believe he’s actually a real physicist not a FUCKING FRAUD.

Step 11: Drive to go get a haircut

Step 12:  Make a quick stop at the police department just to stop in and be like “hey, this is really not a big deal BUT the mafia is probably after me also did you know that plumbers are actually drug mules…. your welcome.”

Step 13:  Leave the police station in an ambulance because you have to go into witness protection.

Step 14:  Find out you’re not going into witness protection but actually getting forcefully committed, a fucking again, and then get released 7 days later.

Step 15:  Go get a haircut.

Step 16:  Repeat steps 1-4 but make a  note to follow up with the pharmacy to get prescriptions refilled.

This is how after 7 years I found to be the most effective way to develop my craft, but as I said some of these steps may not work for you.  And that’s completely fine. I hope this helps anyone interested in comedy looking for a simple clear step by step guide on how to develop your material.