I mean that context decides what we should be doing, but we make grandiose concrete statements without that context.

Casey Grambo uses the phrase “tools, not rules”; I think this is a good way to think about anything, but I think teachers tend to forget to point this out in exchange for making a quick rule. (Yes, I do think it’s worthwhile to put an asterisk on every rule and say this is a general suggestion and not a firm rule.1)

Like What Contradictions?

Well, for example, improv often priorities clarity. We are looking for clarity. We want to understand your idea and what you’re doing.

But don’t talk about what you’re doing with that imaginary object! Don’t talk about it. No one talks about what they’re doing as they do it in real life2.

One offers clarity for unexperienced improvisors - “I’m milking the cow,” you say, a phrase rarely heard in real life but immediately gives us a setting and what your object work is.

One offers a more grounded, more in-depth picture for more experienced improvisors - “Hot day,” you say, milking the cow on the farm with the belief that someone else will be patient enough to be clear in a natural way later, and adding some exhaustion as you occasionally wipe sweat off your brow.

Which is right?

Well, both are, I guess. But one offers clarity and one offers depth, and those things are often on opposite ends of a see-saw. Craig Cackowski says “if the scene is clear, add density; if the scene is dense, add clarity.” I’m using the word depth rather than density, but I think it’s the same idea.

Another ‘rule’ is don’t ask questions. We don’t want to pressure our scene partner to come up with all the answers!

Unless we’re trying to frame the game, then ask a question. Or add information within our question, in which case ask a question. Or unless you’re trying to signal to your partner to slow down because they’re inventing things wildly at a rapid pace, in which case a question can beg them to slow down, then ask a question. But don’t ask questions.

Improv is inherently a series of oppositions. Every rule has an exception. Every rule isn’t a rule. Every rule is a tool,

It is to the point where words don’t mean the same thing at the same theaters: a tag out at UCB is literally tagging, at Sea Tea it’s a clap. The Harold at UCB is tight and rigid in structure, 3 individual scenes with 3 heightened beats with strict placement on group games in between; The Harold at iO means “longform improv” and the structure you get from that should be based on what your thematic idea is, not heightened beats and rigidity.

The point of the show is to make the audience laugh. Unless the point of the show is to do good improv, because sometimes laughs undercut good improv. Unless the point of the show is the theme, in which case the point of the show is the theme. But it’s live comedy, so the point is laughter. Unless it’s live theater, in which case the point is theater.

Improv is not a competition. But please bring your friends to the Cage Match where only the Winner survives. Please audition to join a Team, and get a Coach, so you too can Win.

And so on, and so forth, in perpetuity, until one day your head explodes because nothing is anything and everything is nothing and IMPROV IS OPPOSITIONAL AND CONTRADICTORY TO ITSELF.

So What’s the Contextual Part?

Generally speaking, which mode of thinking is hyper-context dependent, often based on your form, your scene partner (and their experience/your comfort level with them), and to perhaps the largest extent, your taste.

UCB teaches that characters shouldn’t grow, learn, or change how they feel in a scene. Game-centric thinking: these characters repeat their behaviors ad nauseum until they cease to exist. A character wants to go first? That character always wants to go first, regardless of whether the activity is good or bad. That’s their thing, they want to go first!

Second City and iO teach theater to have a turn. What’s a turn? That’s where characters change how they feel and their behavior based on an emotional event in sequence. This is the theater part of improvised theater. A character wants to go first? That character always wants to go first, regardless of whether the activity is good or bad. Until they meet someone they want to go second for, and ooo, now the scene has depth to it and we automatically have three beats in the scene (beat 1, original feeling; beat 2, the turn; beat 3, the resolution).

Go ahead and try to pull of a turn in most UCB and UCB-style, game-centric scenes, and people are going to think you’re a terrible improvisor. (Ask me how I’d know? Trust me! I do it all the time, wakka wakka!)

Should you label your object work or should you offer more depth? Does it depend on your scene partner, your experience level, the clarity of your object work, what the object is? It’s all up to you. It’s all dependent on what you think is right in the context of your moment.

“We need to know why the scene is today. Today is the day that ___ happens.”
Unless it’s a slice of life scene, in which case we’re just happy to see these characters and they’re interesting characters and that’s enough.

Unless it’s a narrative, then you need a Why-Today to propel your narrative forward. Unless it’s an average day narrative or a glimpse into character’s depths or the philosophy and thematic meaning is the entire point, which there are many written examples of.

There’s a thousand examples of this. I’m sure there’s an improv rule you dislike or that rubs against you because that’s not the way you want to play and context lets you play another way.

So What’s The Right Thing to Do?

Probably the thing for growth is to play against your natural instinct and try the other way. Learn the thing of which you dislike. If you’re always labeling your objects - stop. If you’re always initiating - only respond for a while. If you’re always going for emotional depth and turns - focus on game. If you’re always doing game - try a deeper feeling.

Ultimately, I think the point I’m making is to receive every note, but behind every note is missing specificity and a glimpse into someone’s mind who isn’t your own. Is the real note “don’t label your object work” or is it “this one time object work was clear enough and you didn’t need to label it”? Was the real note “talk more like a human” or was it “this one time we all think you could’ve said that in a more human way but thanks for the clarity”? Was the note “only repeat your characters behavior” or is the note “this teacher/class/scene/group/form/etc. mandates that we are only getting a very shallow glimpse into the character and just stick to game stuff in this context”?

I don’t think any note should be disregarded and I don’t think any rule is unimportant.

I think every rule is actually a tool, and the real effort is in figuring out why that note came at this time and not buying this note applies every time.

Easier said than done, folks.

Parting Shots

— Substack has seemingly gotten rid of the round buttons I used to use here. Wtf substack. M dashes for weird lists in parting shots it is.

— Didn’t get even a callback for auditions this year. Feels weird to be stuck in a limbo, where if you take classes you’re playing with less experienced people and it’s not necessarily helping you improve the way you want to improve, but you’re not enough to get the chances you need to improve the way you want to improve. The Malcolm Gladwell Outliers thing: those in the right spot at the right time grow faster, the others get left behind. So it goes.

— As such, I think I’m going to do an intensive at some point. My new job starts on Monday, and I have three weeks vacation that is not forced to be the last week of July and first week of August like my last job, so I very well may pool them up and then do iO in Chicago or UCB in LA in the fall or something. I don’t know.

— UCB offers shows streaming, but I think most UCB style improv shows are high floor low ceiling and not that entertaining to me personally. But the Chicago theaters that produced the improvisors I love don’t offer streaming. How the hell’s a guy supposed to find what he loves in 2026?

Something I often think about is how the most widely known produced longform improv is Middleditch & Schwartz on Netflix, but since no one wants to work with Middleditch since as it turns out he’s sort of a huge piece of shit, it seems like there’s a total void of longform improv content outside of Dropout. One would think one of the other streamers would look at Dropout’s success and say “gee, we can get a piece of that with a miniscule financial investment.” But I’m not a Hollywood exec, what do I know?

This is true with all forms of comedy, and everyone’s form of autism is different so I cannot testify to anyone else’s experiences other than my own.

But after the open mic on May 3, I gotta get into it, if only for a one sentence vent at the end.

What is Autism?

Well jesus christ. It’s a form of being neurodivergent, itself a medically ambiguous term for basically saying “these brains don’t function the way society has deemed normal”.

They say “autism is a spectrum”, but people don’t think about what that actually means. Particularly when people say “we’re all a little on the spectrum”: turns out that’s not how spectrums work. One color on the spectrum doesn’t make you on the spectrum, it makes you one color. You have to be notching multiple things to be on the spectrum. That’s what makes it a spectrum. (To stick to the color spectrum as a metaphor: blue is on one spot on the color spectrum. You being blue doesn’t make you on the spectrum. You would have to have some blue and some green and some red to be on the spectrum. That’s what makes it a spectrum, god damn it.)

Anyway. So what are the things on the autism spectrum?

— A lack of social and/or communication skills.

For others this means a lack of eye contact or not talking at all. For me personally, this blossoms in having no emotional intuition (which it no longer seems that way, but that’s just adjusting from 37 years of learning from past failures). It also comes out as taking things literally. While I don’t struggle to the extreme many people with autism do — if you say “he wears his heart on his sleeve”, I understand the metaphor — I often say things literally and people do not take me literally, and people often say things figuratively and I take it literally. I used to say at my old job “words have meaning” to the point where people used it as a parody of me, but the idea was I used words to communicate what they mean, and it turns out neurotypical do not do this and just assume you’ll figure out what they meant and that’s not how my brain works because what’s the point of language if we’re going to betray the meaning of the language?

Anyway…

— Repetitive behaviors and building routines

For some people with autism, this comes off almost like OCD — pure compulsion and an inability to function without the routine. I do not have autism like that. For me it’s more, I see the world in systems, and when bad things happen I view it as POSIWID long before I knew what that meant: the Purpose Of the System Is What It Does. When I make a mistake or screw something up, I change my process to avoid or correct the mistake, as opposed to going “oh, that’s life.”

— Sensory processing differences.

For me and many people with autism, this is sensory overload. For many people with autism it can blossom in other ways. For some, it can be simple stuff: touching provides an unnatural calmness, or touching can feel borderline offensive and grotesque. It’s a spectrum! Right? For me, I pretty much always had this with sound but didn’t know it because I also had the extra disadvantage of being fucking deaf. O mighty god, have ye created such a cruel world.1

— Unique cognitive profile.

Well what the fuck does that mean? In a generic way, it means strengths in memory, art, or science, along with challenges in other areas. For me, math is easy because it always follows and obeys systemic rules. (If you can solve one multiplication problem, you can solve them all.) For me, music is easy because it’s math you can hear.

For me, science is hard because I don’t understand. For me, art is hard because I cannot think in clear visuals. I’m sure there are other people with autism where this is flipped. Somewhere there’s an autistic MIT student who can paint like a motherfucker but can’t do their own taxes. That’s not me.

Autism also often includes an ability to do what’s called “hyperfocusing”. I’ve always had this, and it was honestly the thing that made me start to believe I might have autism before going to the doctor and oh yeah we’re autistic darn it.

It’s also worth noting that ableism with autism is so prominent that Psychology Today once published an article asking if people with autism are capable of humor and laughter. (That article’s actually good and talks about how some people with autism, myself included, only laugh at what they find funny and not out of social politeness like many people do.)

Autism and Improv

My advantage for autism in improv is: memory.

Going back to the hyperfocus: a neurotypical person can hold seven different images in their head at any point in time.

I don’t have that ability. I can just remember everything like a tape recorder once I decide to focus on something. If we do an hour long monoscene, I will remember the opening of the scene 59 minutes in and it will not be a struggle to do so.

But this is also a disadvantage, as improv tends to reward something closer to ADHD.

Let’s say we name a character Roy. And then 10 minutes later, another player forgets the character’s name and calls the character Jim.

Well, I’ll feel deflated, because I know it’s Roy, and the world has collapsed for me. I cannot buy into the imagination anymore: we’re just stupid forgetful idiots on stage to me now.

But a good improvisor will do what Will Hines called 1984ing it. In the book 1984, for half the book they’re at war with one country, then they switch to at war with a different country, but Big Brother and the fascist government propaganda says “we’ve always been at war with the second country.” That’s how you’re supposed to respond in improv: his name is Jim, his name has always been Jim.

That will never be natural to me, and will always feel artificial to me, and it fucking sucks.

And just once I’d like someone to note the second player and be like “remember his name is Roy. Pay attention more. Slow down. Breathe deeper.”

But I’ve never seen the guy who forgets the name get that note.

But I’ve gotten the other note, a lot, when I try to reconcile that his name was actually Roy the whole time, that I’m playing too meta and need to let things go and roll with the punches, and it hurts and it sucks and I hate it.

The first few years of improv were also extra hard for me and I imagine extra hard for anyone with autism, as a neurotypical person just understands what’s a turn-off or what feels too dark or creepy or when something seems flirtacious or when anything seems like anything. But being autistic inherently means it’s a struggle. In that way, improv is beneficial for people with autism far more than you’d ever imagine. I honestly don’t think I’d be anywhere near as able to function socially I am if I hadn’t started improv. Thanks, improv.

But also, ouch, dude. When I talk about how I was absolutely the worst at improv when I started, rest assured a lot of that, as it turns out, is just being someone with autism.

Autism and sketch

I think in many ways the only form of comedy I’m truly built for is sketch because you have to be slightly open minded like improv but it rewards hyperfocus and rewriting and doing the same thing over-and-over-and-over, and that’s what I’m built for.

There’s an insanity to sketch; there’s certain rhythms all sketches have that a lot of improvisors never quite figure out.

If you can understand game, then this could be easier for you than not if you have autism, maybe.

But with sketch and all forms of comedy, you will laugh at different times than other people. UCB teaches that we laugh at “the unusual thing”. That’s probably true, but what’s unusual to someone with autism is not what’s unusual to a normal person. (I would argue what’s unusual to any two people is wildly different and that’s why the “unusual thing” is a crappy definition in my book, but we’ve covered that before.)

Autism and standup

Again, with hyperfocus, standup might be easier for someone with autism. The nature of rewriting and going up and not letting people impact you too much and tweaking how you communicate and what you communicate thousands of times just feels like what real life feels like for many people with autism.

But what isn’t easier is the amount of local fucking hacks that just use autism as a punchline.

I went to an open mic in Hamden tonight and there were 12 comedians.

5 of them punched down at people with autism.

If you were one of them, do me a favor, and go fuck yourself.

Parting Shots

— This post was pretty much just for me stewing in my anger after literally five standups made really awful autism jokes. I didn’t go up at an open mic because all I wanted to do was scream at people and tell them they’re assholes. Turns out silence is a more mature choice. Great. Super. Super great. Super super great.

— I don’t understand the appeal to doing it. If that’s your idea of what humor is, maybe stop doing comedy and go to therapy. It’s similar to the Toyo mic thing with Raja & Riley where people were racist and sexist. I just don’t understand other people.

If we’re being honest, when I have moments like that, I listen to a specific song and cry. That song is, weirdly, “Father of Mine” by Everclear. The reason is for this one specific lyric in it:

“I will never be safe, I will never be sane. I will always be weird inside, I will always be lame.”

I think people often think I hate myself based on how extreme I react in negartive moments.

I don’t hate myself: I love me. There’s just been too many times where a neurotypical person would have the intuition to know something, and I don’t, and then I’ve been called an idiot or a dumbass or a stupid moron to my face literally thousands of times that it’s just an automatic response anytime I make a mistake. And when these shitty hacky standups turn anything into punching down at autism, I just think to myself: I will never be safe, I will never be sane, I will always be weird inside, I will always be lame.

Fuck ‘em, I guess. Just sucks to be the sensitive guy people don’t think of as the sensitive guy.

— First round of auditions were this past weekend at Sea Tea. I was going to do audition tips before them, but I feel like I was just going to get into my head with it. So I didn’t. I’ll do them for the next post later this week.

— Kate got us to backstage to meet Gary Gulman on Saturday. He was so kind and so giving and absolutely delightful. (And he talked just like me to the point that Kate suspects he might be autistic, lol.) He asked about my Thomas Pynchon tattoo, and told me there was a Thomas Pynchon joke in the set. When he did it, he motioned right at me, because we were lucky enough to be front row center. Gary Gulman, if you ever see this: thank you for making me feel safe and sane. I’d hug you again if I could.

And yet I haven’t written at length about what is hack, and why that’s bad. So with that in mind…

What Does ‘Hack’ Mean?

Well, guys, Hack has a Wikipedia entry. But the simple part is this:

Wow. Look. Simple, and yet also totally nebulous and unspecific.

Hack comes from the British term hackneyed, which per Mirriam-Webster means “Lacking originality or freshness; overused to the point of being boring.”

Hack just means you’re doing shit that not only anyone else could do, but other people have done.

What Are Some Common Examples of Hack?

Well, a lovely downloadable .pdf if you can get is this, the Hack’s Handbook: AStarter Kit.

Its most common examples of hack are:

1. Celebrity Trashing

2. Jokes about TV Ads in standup

3. The Attitude/Steroid Premise (“___ is just ___ on steroids”, “___ is just ___ with attitude.”)

4. The Difference Is Premise (“Men are like ___, women are like ____”, “white people are like ___, black people are like ___”, etc.)

5. Dick Jokes and Genital Humor (that’s right, a set about your pussy is hack, too!)

6. Airline Humor (this is because airlines are where comedians spend their lives when they become national touring comics, so it’s the thing EVERYONE HAS ALREADY JOKED ABOUT)

7. Crapping on yourself in a controllable way (this arguably includes weight, because you could lose it or gain it, but it definitely means don’t joke about your choice of clothes, because YOU CHOSE TO WEAR THEM THAT DAY)

8. Overused regional references

I would add that many roast jokes or battles are based almost entirely around being hack. “Here’s a racist joke”? 95% chance of hack! “Here’s a sexist joke”? Here’s a 95% chance of hack!

I would add that many specific jokes may just be done from parallel thinking, and that many local comedians haven’t watched a ton of comedy and don’t even realize they’re stealing decade only John Mulaney and Louis CK jokes.

But the thing is… I do realize that! I see that! It kills me!

What About Hack Delivery?

Yep, that exists too!

You ever seen a standup who sounds like they’re doing Jerry Seinfeld but they’re not Jerry Seinfeld? Right, unless that’s a Seinfeld impression, that’s just being a hack.

You ever seen a standup whose whole set basically comes off as a parody of an Italian American stereotype? Right, that might get a lot of laughs in some places, but it’s so hack!

One of the more common ways of being a hack is just doing a Dave Attell impression. Mike Birbiglia has talked on his podcast about how he hears a lot of standups do a bad Attell for their first 2-3 years. Fun!

Does Hack exist in improv or sketch?

Oh yeah! There’s a lot of bad hack sketch comedy, some of it even making it to SNL. Does the premise seem like a sketch you’ve seen 3 times before and you can’t put your finger on it?

Yeah, that’s because it’s been done way more than three times before.

Why do people do Hack comedy?

Because people laugh!

Most people in the audience don’t take in enough comedy to know that it’s stolen or derivative. They don’t absorb things for their originality - christ, there’s more than 20 Marvel movies at this point in time. People don’t care about originality, they care about entertainment. Remember me saying a lot of roasts are just being a hack? Yeah, that doesn’t mean roasts aren’t funny.

Hack works, especially in standup!

But the thing is, hack works to an extent.

No one becomes a top act by being a hack, the same way no one becomes a nationally renowned writer by committing plagiarism.1

You can become a mid level touring comedian by doing only derivative and stolen jokes. You absolutely can.

But you could never get your own special, or be a writer on a TV show, by being a hack. If you feel like your premise verges on someone else’s, change it deeply or throw it away.

If you wanna be a hack, go start a memes page, cause that’s all your comedy is: a formula created by someone else with better versions of what you’re doing elsewhere before you started doing your thing.

If you wanna be a comedian, write deeply, write original, dig deeper, go harder, try again.

Parting Shots

• This whole week was wild. Sunday, Kate Riley and I were in New Jersey to train for a game show (lol). Monday, I was off work to see Late Night with Seth Meyers with Kate. Tuesday, I was off work to film a TV commercial with David Ortiz. Seriously. My neck is insanely sunburnt and I look like a redneck farmer. But that brings us to..

• Wednesday was my last day of work and I’m positive several people in my department are in the process of quitting. Hahaha! Fuck you guys! You should’ve just treated me better and kept me at the job! WAKKA WAKKA.

• OK my next job starts May 11 let’s not pretend I’m rich and don’t need an income. Probably back to two blog posts next week lolol.

• in the 9pm show at Sea Tea tonight! The Dinos, Basement Ghost, KnucklePuck. In my humble opinion The Dinos are the best short form team at Sea Tea and KnucklePuck is the best longform. And then I’m on Basement Ghost. You should go!

• on Saturday, going to see Gary Gulman, my favorite currently performing standup, and apparently we might meet him!??!

• Sea Tea auditions on Sunday. Going for the deep end or bust again. I would be very happy if I got on. I was going to post audition tips but I think I’d just be talking to myself, and who wants that?

I can just say my processes are iterative, where you start one way and you constantly reflect and work on it to try and improve it.

This is how I worked out my standup sets, with timelines, and the changes, and why. I’m open to suggestion & criticism and would love to hear someone else’s. (Email me!)

Subscribe now

Generation 1: Write Some Jokey Crap

August 2023 - December 2023

In August 2023, I took Rob Santos’ standup class. He did some exercises to get you talking in front of people, of which I then did and enjoyed…

And then threw all that out and went to hacky one-liner comedian stuff.

It suffered, it didn’t go well, and I tried.

The reason I hate hate standup is because I was a hack standup, and yet it didn’t take a year to get past that.

Generation 2: OK, Rewrite Some Jokey Crap

January 2024 - April 2024

I then thought, okay, fine. Everybody’s bad. Rewrite it. Try it again.

This was better - as improved bullshit is better than unimproved bullshit - but it was still, by and large, bullshit.

Live and learn! You can make improvements on something that is structurally bad, but it’s still going to be a bad structure. Check the foundation before you buy the house, folks.

Generation 3: Tell Stories From Real Life

April 2024 - April 2025.

Fine, I conceded. The easiest way to tap into being myself was to do the stuff I did that got laughs in real life. Mostly in real life I ask ridiculous questions or have ridiculous responses.

This does not seem to work in standup.

So what else is left? Telling stories from real life. Fire away, chief. Started with stories about my parents and stories about being deaf, as that’s the big cause of who I am re: parents and the big thing I was dealing with at the time re: being deaf.

Generation 4: Tell Stories From Real Life and Add So Jokey Crap, And Experimentation

April 2025-December 2025.

Then I took Kate Dresty’s Standup CT! class. She had faith I was going to attend open mics since I had already done so, and I promised her I’d do a new five minutes for the class.

I did. It was mostly parent and deaf oriented, as I said.

But in class, whereas a lot of people were deciding what stories to tell, I had decided what stories, and was trying to ram as many jokes in there as possible.

This was worthwhile, even if I wasn’t all that successful at it.

The thing I will mostly fondly remember from this time period is in the run through before the class share, everyone else ran their five minute sets.

I instead spent five minutes trying 25 variations of two different jokes to decide which version of the joke was best.

I’m not sure that experiment was helpful - the audience, even if classmates, by the 16th variation, is not exactly enthusiastic in their response mechanism - but I think some people from that class and some people who TA’d that class (Sergio) still look at me as “The Guy Who Was Going To Figure It Out.”

Composers do theme and variations all the time. I did single joke and variations. Did it work out for me? No. But I still like doing stuff like that. Weee.

I then had the class share, did pretty well, and people told me I did well, and I told them by saying I hated my set because it felt like the jokes I didn’t like crushed and the jokes I did like died.

It still feels like that. Oh well!

Gen 5: Premise-Based Standup With New Sets

December 2025-April 2026

Now I was asked to TA Kate Dresty’s Standup CT class. I similarly committed to doing a new five minute set. This time I changed my writing approach: rather than stories, or jokes, the correct aim was premises.

You say a premise, then do setup → punchline within that premise, as much as you can, as good as you can.

Oddly enough, this is literally what Rob Santos said to do in his class even though I ignored that advice entirely, and if you read many books on standup, they say something along those lines too. Oops!

In storytelling, the story can basically be your premise. But I wanted to move away from narrative storytelling.

Each set I did in this time at a mic was a whole new five minutes, with a couple jokes shared between them as I tried variations. I started using google sheets to track jokes I wrote, when performed, how they went, how audiences were, and what the variations were.

For the class share, I did a best-of of about 15 or 20 minutes of standup. I still didn’t reach the heights I wanted to reach, but when people said I did good I believed them because most of the jokes that worked were jokes I liked. So that was an improvement.

Gen 6: Write 1 New Set, Rewrite Over a Month, New Set Next Month

April 2026-present

After listening to You Made It Weird so, so much, in one episode Pete Holmes instructs you to write in Alt Rooms and edit in Comedy Clubs.

Well, okay then, that’s what I’m doing now.

I’ll write a new 5 minutes for my Closed Mic or an Alt Room with a friendly crowd, and then revise it over a month at open mics to polish it off.

And next month I’ll have another 5. This is my current process.

What Do You Do?

My question for you is, what’s your process? How has it changed? How has it changed your voice, your jokes, your delivery, your success, your confidence?

Too many people find one thing that works, produce at a C+ or B- level, and say “that’s my process and that’s what I’ll always do.”

Well, you know, if you do the same process, you can expect similar results. If you want to get better, you have to improve your process. (There’s a whole field in manufacturing dedicated to this, and somehow that’s what I ended up working in.)

I’m genuinely curious as to what your process is. I’d love if you commented or emailed, because I’m sure there’s something from your process that’s better that could help others. (Email me: danielbogosian@gmail.com ).

Parting Shots

• Closed mic went pretty well, though for some reason it was the first set I ever did that I didn’t record. (Damn.) I feel better at riffing than writing, which in one way is cool but in another way I SPEND SO MUCH TIME WRITING WHY AM I STILL NOT GREAT AT IT. Grr.

• Closed mic just reiterated I want to host an open mic.

• Sorry, still not doing two a week of these for a while. I’ve got to close out everything at my job which again I put in my notice with last week! Hahaha.

• If you can get a 15-30% pay raise for doing 1/4 the amount of work you were doing, you should. That’s what I did. I have the first week of May off. I’m gonna make it!

• BOYFRIENDS IMPROV CAGE MATCH FRIDAY APRIL 24 9:00PM

• Kate & I are traveling to a bootcamp for a game show on Sunday and then going to Seth Meyers on Monday. The past two attempts at Seth Meyers were snow days with closed trains. Here’s to hoping it doesn’t snow on Monday April 27 lol. Quaid army.

• I wanna see Over Your Dead Body this weekend. A dark comedy/thriller from the director of Macgruber starring Samara Weaving? Count me in.

The most common weakness in Game and UCB-style improv is people not doing what’s called “framing the game” or “signposting” very well. Well then, what is framing the game or signposting, and why are we as a collective group not so good at it?

The Three Most Common Ways to Frame the Game

Essentially, when a game happens, people want to skip the part where they’re clear to their scene partner that this is the weird, unusual, funny thing.

“Framing the game” or “signposting” is essentially when one person in a scene announces HEY, THIS IS THE GAME THAT’S HAPPENING HERE.

There are three super common ways to signpost, often used in combination:
1. Reacting hugely emotionally to what was said
2. Asking a question or repeating exactly what was just said but as a question
2. Saying “you always ___” or “that’s so of you to ___” or endowing a larger pattern of behavior from what was said.

For example:

Method Number One: Emotional Reaction

Player 1: “I’m going to teach this history lesson only using examples from my divorce.”

Player 2: “Good lord! Don’t do that!”

Method Number Two: Questions

Player 1: “I’m going to teach this history lesson using examples from my divorce.”

Player 2: “You’re going to teach this history lesson only using examples from your divorce?”

Method Number Three: Endowment

Player 1: “I’m going to teach this history lesson using examples from my divorce.”

Player 2: “You’re always making the lessons personal. That’s why you’re a good teacher.”

This is called “framing the game” because … you’re basically announcing to your partner that hey: that’s the game. It’s called signposting because the idea is we’re putting a sign for our scene partner that hey: this is the game. It’s pretty simple.

Subscribe now

And yet by and large, improv communities are often so bad at framing the game. I think the reasoning is four-fold.

Reason #1: We Just Learned To Not Ask Questions

Framing the game is learned early in 201, which means we’re fresh off “don’t ask questions.” And now the hack is… ask questions?

Yeah, I mean. It is. I know the conflict of that. But it’s hard to wrap your mind around it, and it’s hard to hold those two opposing pieces of knowledge in your head when you’re still relatively new. When we don’t know what to do in improv, we often fall back on who we are in real life, which brings us to…

Reason #2: We Don’t Use This Skill in Real Life At All

In real life, if someone’s being a bizarre weirdo, we don’t then go “WTF” to their faces. We’re mostly more polite than that.

And we rarely yes, and- it. If in real life, someone told me they were going to do their job and reference a recent divorce, that would be tragic. I’d likely respond with “is everything okay?”

But we’re on stage, trying to be funny, trying to bring joy into the world. Don’t make the scene about your divorce. Make it about how you’re a goofy weirdo.

In real life, we nod along and then talk about these psychopaths behind their backs. In real life, we are polite and say wow, yeah, wow. In real life, we have worry about people we care about.

In improv, we encourage the weird behavior. Hell yeah you’re gonna teach about World War II by referencing your divorce. Make sure you talk about how Ardennes was like your dog, splitting time between the owners, until finally the Americans broke through and your dog got stay with you and she’s never gonna pet that dog again. Make sure to do that. Sure thing. Because it’s not real life, it’s comedy.

But because it’s not real life…

Reason #3: The Improv We See Doesn’t Often Do That

Veteran players off find the rote aspect of clear framework boring. They’re eager, and they want to get to the good part, and moreover, once you’re adept at yes, and-ing anything, people stop worrying about “what’s the game” and just start thinking “I’ll yes, and- what happens.” And I love this methodology!

But it leads to a lack of clear framing the game. So people go to shows to learn how to good improv, and miss the step where they see good improv with a good foundational aspect and an obvious game framing.

The beauty of improv is that people are putting the plane together while it’s in the sky.

In real life, no one talks that way. In real life, please don’t put the plane together in the sky. Please put the plane together on land and then take off. Please. Think of the children.

Without a clear example, it’s a hard behavior to learn, and prone to going off the rails. That’s often the fun of improv, but even in intermediate or veteran play, it often goes awry because there’s no one’s paying enough attention to the framing of the game. This might be because…

Reason #4: We Don’t Spend Enough Time Practicing It

Everything we learn in improv class, we spend approximately one week on.

In math class in high school, we’d do the same crap for a week straight every day for 45 minutes and then have a homework assignment reiterating it before you moved on.

With an improv, you do two or three exercises a couple times, and then voila, hope you figured that out and have it down pact now. That’s not a productive way to learn skills!

I think any improv 201 or 301 class could be made easier just by repeating every week once, but especially the framing the game week.

Without enough reps on it with a coach or teacher or director, we’re prone to getting caught in a few bad ways.

One is a loop of statement → question in a talking head scene with only one person adding anything, which I see all the time (“I’m going to teach this history lesson using examples from my divorce.” “You’re going to teach this history lesson only using examples from your divorce?” “Yes, and I’m going to talk about how my kids were like D-Day at Normandy.” “You’re going to talk about how your kids were like D-Day at Normandy?” “Yes, and-” OK WE’RE NOW IN A TALKING HEAD SCENE AND ONLY ONE PERSON IS DOING ANY WORK HERE.)

Another is by yes, and-ing too aggressively, like adding details at the pace of a three-line scene but we’re in a two minute scene and oh no what the hell is happening (“I’m going to teach this history lesson using examples from my divorce.” “You always make the lessons personal.” “I’m going to cut open my stomach when I fill in for biology.” “Great idea, I’m going to cement my face into Medusa for Greek Mythology.” “Oh no your face is Medusa’s now I’m turning into stone.” “Ahhh.” “Ahhh.” Guys we’re 20 seconds into this scene what the hell just happened.)

Man Finishes Yelling at Cloud

Ultimately, all improv problems can be solved with more practice, more reps, more class, more notes.

It’s unfortunate that so much of learning a skill is fixed by practicing the skill instead of absorbing a text (he said on his blog). But that’s life, man. That’s. Life.

Hopefully this helps if you’re under a couple years in on your improv journey.

Parting Shots

• Only one blog post this week because hahahahah I QUIT MY JOB TODAY I PUT IN MY TWO WEEKS NOTICE I’VE BEEN SO BUSY DOING JOB INTERVIEWS AND MAKING SURE MY STUFF AT WORK WAS ALL TOGETHER. Ask me about my new job or how insane the way I quit my old job was. Hahahahahahahahah. Hahahha. hahahahhaa. Haha. Ha.

• Boyfriends in improv Cage Match at Sea Tea Friday April 24 at 9pm!

• Friday May 1 9pm The Dinos Basement Ghost and KnucklePuck yeee. That’ll be a fun one, KnucklePuck is my favorite improv group at Sea Tea. So weird yet so fun.

• Sea Tea’s got auditions in May so in May I expect to put standup on the back burner again for a while as improv is more in focus (probably why this was an improv centric post), but I do love standup. Closed mic at my place Sunday.

• I just want whoever’s reading this to know I wrote it Monday knowing I’d quit my job on Wednesday and this was scheduled for the afternoon to force myself to quit in the morning. Ask me about my Quitting. I promise I had fun doing it.

(No.)

Our minds are weird things. We create our own systems of thought, and then we wonder why we’re stuck thinking the way we do despite being literally in control of it. Our brains are weird little prisons that we are the architects, wardens, commissioners, corrections officers, and yet also prisoners of. That’s maybe not the happiest metaphor, but it can be pretty accurate.

It’s particularly common to get stuck in your head in standup when you first try sitting down to write — if you just go up and improvise, hey great on you man but a lot of people can’t do that yet — and in improv when you learn game, be it at the 201 or 301 level.

Game, particularly, takes something that felt free and natural — act! pretend! play around! explore! laugh! — and for those struggling through it, can make it feel like a math problem. What was the game? What was the right move? How did I miss the thing? Did I say that? What did they just say? Where am I going wrong? Oh no I’m standing still thinking all of this rather than being or doing anything oh no.

With that in mind, I’ll focus on improv and game first, and then later we can talk beyond that.

Stuck Overthinking Game in Improv

Hey, you there. Are you me four years ago? Because overthinking game is the worst.

Game should be a vehicle for fun, and while in a writer’s room we can turn it into a science project or a re-construction, often any note can destroy you when you’re already overthinking.

Odds are you’re trying to analyze the scene as you’re in it.

Odds are you’re so focused on getting the “right” game and making the “right move”.

The thing is, there is no “right”. Sure, after a scene we can have a coach or teacher or director analyze the scene, and for sure we can then look at it and be like: this was the first game offer and it worked but you didn’t do that and bla-bla-bla.

But again I go back to categories:

The first person says “Froot Loops”. OK, seems like the game is breakfast cereals.

But the category — and thus the game — is not settled until the second (if not third) person responds.

If the second person says “Pancakes” or “toast”, it’s breakfast foods. But on the other hand, if you say Froot Loops and I say Pancakes and then the third person says Zebra cakes, suddenly the category — and thus the game — is just foods with sugar in it. (My god, my favorite category.)

You’re in your head because you’ve gotten the note that you missed the game, and then reflected back and been like “my god, I did miss the game.”

But this completely ignores the beauty of improv: the game is whatever you and your scene partner make it, and not the first offer that happened. In categories, the game wasn’t decided until you made your move. Sure, an easier and maybe clearer game would’ve been breakfast cereals, but if your scene partner says “pancakes” and then you say “pananas”, it’s totally OK for the scene to now be about your weird hybrid banana-pancake. (Maybe don’t do that every scene, but it’s not “wrong.”)

Subscribe now

When you’re learning second and third beats, that’s when the game is pretty set in stone. We’re gonna do the same game you played in scene one, but now we’re doing it bigger in scene two. That’s on a path. If you’re having a good first scene and a bad second beat, you do understand the game, you’re just aiming it wrong, you’re just heightening it poorly.

But odds are, if you’re in your head, you’re so stuck on getting things right that you’re forgetting to make a bold choice or a good choice. Odds are you’ve lost confidence and in that same vein, you’ve lost your own taste and personality.

The thing that’s funniest about you is who you are.

Believe in yourself more. Take a big breath. You understand it, and I know you understand it because when you have a conversation, your friends don’t go “what the hell are they talking about? That was very off-conversation.” (And if they do that, please see a doctor or a therapist, as that either sounds like you’re having a brain aneurism, or you have a bad group of friends and need to evaluate your social life deeper.)

Improv Only

There are a lot of common weaknesses in game. As an education field, the whole planet does a pretty bad job; the UCB manual and criteria was clearly not designed by anyone who had real education experience, but just thought “how do I convey this idea in writing that I, someone who already understands, would already understand?” and now we have about 10-15 years of miseducation following suit.

And that’s OK. Both UCB and schools that teach UCB-style have gradually improved over time, and pedagogy evolves over time.

But how does that help you get out of your head and out of your rut of overthinking?

Well, it doesn’t.

But what I can say is, take mental note: if your scenes are going wrong at the same spot each time, make the note of that spot. You’re not overthinking things, you just haven’t figured out the right way to make a right move at that moment yet.

And you will.

That said, for overthinking in general…

Breaking Out of Any Overthinking or Any Rut

Step 1: Self Esteem/Confidence

First off, is your self esteem or confidence tied to the thing you’re overthinking?

Because, stop that.

If you’re determining your worth as a person or comedian based on how this one thing goes, whether it’s a standup set or a scene in improv or a day in class in 301 or whatever, you’re suddenly putting ALL OF THE VALUE OF EVERYTHING IN YOUR LIFE on one deed.

And that doesn’t work! It actively works to destroy you, actually.

Michael Jordan missed 26 game winning shots in his career. Imagine if after he missed one of those shots, he then shot below .100 for the next 10 games because he just kept thinking “man, the ball hates me, it won’t go in.” No, you bounce back by believing the ball will go through the hoop. “But this game is important,” you say.

Is this the look of a man who overthinks a missed shot?

Right, Michael Jordan lost in the playoffs throughout the 1980s and even in 1990.

Your worth isn’t tied to any one shot or game or move or scene or set or thing. Imagine if you were underpaid and overworked and got one job interview, didn’t get the job, and then it made you start sucking ass at your job. Imagine if you felt a deep connection with someone, asked them out on a date, got turned down, and then your response was “I’m awful at this I guess I’ll never talk to another person ever again.” Imagine if we played one-on-one and I missed a shot and then yelled into the world “OH NO, I SHOULD NEVER SHOOT THE BALL AGAIN, I MISSED ONE.” Does that sound like a formula for confidence?

No, it doesn’t.

You wanted that scene to go well. You wanted that job. You liked that girl. Woulda been cool if that ball went through that hoop.

Shake it off. Especially in comedy, there will be other shots, other scenes. At least with jobs and dating and stuff, there’s an argument that somethings are more important than others. (Your dream job is your dream job. Who am I to tell you it isn’t?)

But that scene that didn’t go well? Trust me. It wasn’t your dream scene.

TJ & Dave talk about, at length, in their book, how they will keep working together in pursuit of “The Perfect Scene”, and how despite working together for 25+ years, they have not once had one they thought was perfect. These are two of the world’s greatest improvisors, perhaps the most renowned twoprov team in the known universe, and they’re still going: well, it wasn’t perfect.

Your value, your worth is not determined by comedy. If it’s connected to it, disconnect it right now. Because in that situation you’re not doing improv or standup or comedy, you’re addicted to an idea and you need to break that addiction.

In comedy more than other fields — but again, still true with shooting the basketball, asking somebody out, getting that job — is confidence. If you let a failure break you down, you’re asking to feel broken for a long time.

The best move is to just go, “ah not this time.” Just like with that job, or that woman or man, or whatever it is that’s killing you. Don’t squeeze the hamster to death because you love hamsters. LET THE HAMSTER LIVE!!!1

Detach your worth from the thing. It’s not your worth. You are your worth.

Step 2: Are you overdoing it? Maybe you’re overdoing it.

If you’re taking an improv class, an acting class, a sketch class, and doing standup, maybe the reason you’re in your head is because you are doing four or five intra-related things and holy crap there’s too much going on in your head good lord.

This isn’t to say you can’t take more than one or two of these classes at a time.

It’s just that improv will be the one in which it most suffers (with #2 being acting), because that/those are the ones in which you responding naturally are important, and when you’ve been thinking about your next line and how to say something funny in standup and trying to boil down game for sketch and how do you come up with an original move here and what’s the funniest way to say it, those things are going to creep into improv and acting, where you’re just supposed to… react.

This isn’t to say you’re overdoing it. But if you think you’re doing a lot right now, and improv is really suffering, that doesn’t mean you have to retake a class even if you feel like you missed it.

It’s like you pried open 6 six wounds and rubbed alcohol all over them and went “gee, this hurts, maybe I need to pry open the wound again for them to heal.” No man. No you don’t. You need to let that wound close on its own. The wound is clean. You’re learning, it just doesn’t feel like it because you’re stuck in your head.

Step 3: Focus on ONE THING

I don’t just mean “only improv” or “only standup”. I mean, particularly within improv, but in all forms of comedy, there’s a thousand million things you could think about. Particularly early on in all forms of comedy, but especially in improv, you probably are thinking about a thousand million things.

Pick one.

“I’m going to do clear initiations today.” Great. Don’t worry about your response. Make sure your initiations are clear. The rest is noise.

“I’m going to respond emotionally today.” Great. Don’t worry about justification. Don’t worry about your initiations. Don’t worry about game. Make sure you respond emotionally.

Standup? “I’m only going to worry about having my set memorized cold tonight.” Great. Don’t worry about how you say it or writing new jokes. Just practice memorizing it.

Pick one thing to focus on.

You’re in your head because there’s a million things in your head. You know what load is much more manageable than a million? One.

Make it manageable for yourself. Pick A thing, pick ONE thing, pick a singular focus to do in whatever you’re in your head about. The rest is noise.

Step 4: Have Fun.

You know who doesn’t overthink things?

People feeling joy.

No one’s ever been on a rollercoaster and had a great time, and stepped off and then been like, “Well, I am worried that I filed my taxes incorrectly due to a marginal error on my 1099 form.” That’s not a sentence any human has said after stepping off a rollercoaster. It’s just not.

I can’t put you on the rollercoaster.

But if you’re doing standup and in your head, or doing improv and in your head, or working on sketch and in your head, I’ve been in that prison.

And the best way out of that prison is to enjoy yourself.

Yeah, it’s hard to force yourself to enjoy doing improv when you want to get better and there’s a thousand different things to get better at and it’s all so new ad hard. It’s hard to enjoy sketch when you feel like your peers are better than you. It’s hard to enjoy standup when so many local standups are just genuinely bad people and there’s people out there crushing it as you struggle to find your voice or tackle a deeper topic.

But I guarantee in each one, if you can just make yourself laugh once, some of that weight’s gonna fly off your shoulders. Some of the metal bars locking you in the prison of your mind will wash away.

Maybe that’s your one focus from step 3.

Enjoy yourself.

It’s honestly my go-to move in improv, is just going: let’s make a teammate break right now. If they start having fun and I have fun, the scenes are 100 times better even if the game or characters are less clear.

The major component in all of comedy is joy. (Or whimsy, or goofiness, or fun, or whatever word you want.)

Feel some joy and have a laugh in your thing.

Enjoy yourself. It’ll get you out of your head.

Parting Shots

• So, also, I want to link to this blog post by Will Hines on getting out of your head, which features advice from now-television-star Zach Woods to then-new-student-now-teacher-at-UCB Achilles Stamatelakey. There are some minor parts I don’t agree with, but fuck it, dude: there’s some great advice in here.

• Boyfriends Cage Match Sea Tea April 24 9:00pm!

• There’s a thing I can’t fully talk about yet but know that I’m really excited to talk about it when I can. (This is me signposting that I am excited even if I cannot tell you why yet.) Just know that I’ve got some stuff cooking.

• I had the conscious thought this week that I actually see a path to quitting my job and getting out of aerospace and enjoying my life more. It’ll probably be a while… but just even seeing that path feels nice.

• I’m excited for the closed mic at my place. It’s just funny to think about shoving 15 people in my living room. If you’re one of the people going, please pet Iris. She’s a good dog and I love her very much.

And if it’s not mainstream, it’s alternative. Right?

So what the hell is comedy and what the hell is alternative comedy?

A Brief History of Comedy 1866-1980

Standup comedy originates from humorists touring and vaudeville acts. Why do I pick 1866?

Because that’s when Mark Twain first toured, and he would read his funny things for the audience, and the audience would… laugh. I’d compare him more to a David Sedaris than a standup — he’s a humorist, not a comedian, but jesus what does the English language even mean? — but to that extent, this is basically the invention of standup comedy.

The inventor of the hipster eyebrow, Mark Twain.

Vaudeville went on in the late 1800s. Many of these performances, particularly within burlesque shows, had humorous short plots to their stripping. Eventually, people decided they wanted to see the funny stuff and didn’t need nudity. Voila: we have sketch comedy.

Improv took off in the 1950s and beyond. That’s covered entirely in this post.

And then, in the 1970s, Saturday Night Live became a thing, everyone and their mother had a television set, and late night shows wanted stand up comedians on every night. As this happened, a new type of club formed: the dreaded Comedy Club.

The Comedy Boom of the 1980s

As cable TV came out, more options for things to watch came, and people saw… stand up comedy. To create its own farm system of sorts, comedy clubs popped up around the country (and world).

Subscribe now

If someone you know said they did comedy in the 1980s, that means approximately nothing, because by 1985, reports say1 there were over 400 comedy clubs in the United States alone. “That’s not that many,” you say to yourself. “New York City must have 10 or 12 right now.”

Right, but Rhode Island, Connecticut, and North Dakotah having 4 comedy clubs each is nonsensical. I don’t know what the ideal per capita rate for comedy club to citizen is, but it’s not whatever that was.

Each of these comedy clubs then reinforced “mainstream” comedy: people have a certain expectation of what stand up is based on broad strokes, tropes, references, and what they see on TV, and they expect to see a version of that on whatever random night they show up to whatever the name of their local Chuckle Hut is.2

So WTF is “Alternative” Comedy?

Right. So, as the culture of Chuckle Hut self-propagated its culture, the things inherent to 1980s standup culture become “normal”. Homophobia, misogyny, racism, bullying crowd work: this somehow became the norm and the mainstream. Andrew Dice Clay became the first comedian to sell out Madison Square Garden with an act that was by and large “I’m a racist, hoh!”

So the comedians who didn’t want to do those things started performing in… not-comedy-clubs. And these comedians, even if they were relatively normal and not weirdos or combining sketch with standup, were known as alternative comics. The early prominent ones include Bob Odenkirk, Marc Maron, Janeane Garofalo, Patton Oswalt, Dana Gould (who Oswalt calls “the inventor of Alternative Comedy” in The Comedians of Comedy though I do not know why), and others.

Sometimes, this meant performing standup in a laundromat. Sometimes, it meant doing standup comedy in improv theaters. It pretty much always meant doing comedy in something labeled other than a comedy club.

Sometimes, it meant (means) doing things besides standup (i.e., weird in-character sketch work) at standup venues and not sketch venues. Doing sketch at Second City? That’s not very alternative of you. Doing a meta sketch at a standup open mic? Very alternative of you.

Michael Ian Black once talked about how his first open mic, he went up on stage and sold things from his apartment. I have no idea if that was funny or not, but it definitely was alternative. I wish I could link you to this, but Comedy Central is not what it was and you can’t even find the name of the one-off-special it was. Burned in my brain it remains, though.

Why mention this at all?

Well, sketch comedy sort of has one audience — people who love sketch comedy.

Improv comedy sort of has one audience — people who love improv comedy.

Standup comedy, however, sort of has two — people who love that bro-down, potentially offensive Chuckle Hut mainstream comedy, and people who want something different, whether that’s from a more personal take (Marc Maron, Mike Birbiglia) or a more unique or weird everything (Chris Fleming, Sarah Sherman).

And if you focus on only one of those things, you may never fully develop. The alternative rooms and crowds will appreciate you for you more and will eat up super-specific references to nerdy things, and will understand you, and are fairly easy to get on your side.

The mainstream comedy club crowds want you to be funnier than they want you to be unique, and will be the best way to make you actually funnier as a standup, but also they will eat up the hackiest, worst comedy in the world, as long as there’s jokes. (They’re the ones who demand a high joke frequency, while alt rooms generally don’t.)

This is the thing Pete Holmes always talks about: one is your fruits & vegetables and the other is your meat. One is your strength training and the other is your cardio.

You should pursue both.

But too often now we just say “man, I got the laughs there and then” without asking: was this more of a bar, bro, Chuckle Hut, comedy club crowd? Was this people who are like me at all? And too often we can say “I crushed last night” without asking: do these people even care what the reference is, or are they just charmed by a person like me taking the stage?

There’s no right or wrong answer. But if you’re doing standup, ask yourself the question. And if you’ve mostly been getting meat, go get some fruits & veggies. If you’ve mostly been getting fruit & veggies, go eat your meat.

The Comedy Clubs to some extent scare me. Not because the crowd is inherently wrong or bad (though they often are), but because of the other comedians.

It’s hard to do regular material once someone else has already gone blue. Once somebody starts talking about sex and dirtier things, it’s harder to get a laugh with the cleaner things. Once somebody’s establishes hack material works, not-hack material doesn’t work as well. They talk about this in several documentaries, including I Am Comic3.

This may be a chaotic note to end on, but to me, everything is ultimately in the pursuit of getting better. If I have to go eat shit at a comedy club over and over for two years and be the weirdo at the normal show, I’ll see you in two years all the better for it. Time for the fruits, veggies and meat.

(But also, I want to do more non-standard standup. More sketches at a standup place. I want to let my freak flag fly, and I feel like I haven’t in standup.)

More Late Night TV Jokes

In Late Night TV shows, on-screen graphics will display an image of a person being talked about, and the images are silly and jokey and invite an introductory joke.

As an in-class assignment, we were given six people with images and told to write jokes for them.

Here are those six images and the jokes I pitched (written in 25 minutes total for all six images). Bolded and italicized are the ones the teacher said were her favorite jokes among the class.

1. George Santos - Former United States Representative

• George Santos, seen here being pulled apart by invisible horses

• The only person to lose a wrestling match to a tie, George Santos

• George Santos, seen here mid-transformation as an Animorph

• The man the clown union won’t let wear face paint, George Santos

• Future toupee wearer George Santos

NOTE: None of these jokes are bolded & italicized. I guess I was funny with the other five but not Mr. Santos. Damn you, Georgie.

2. Travis Kelce - Tight End for Kansas City Chiefs / Taylor Swift’s boyfriend

• The only man with less personality than a Hawaiian shirt, Travis Kelce

• Former date rapist Travis Kelce

• The football version of Where’s Waldo on vacation, Travis Kelce

• Travis Kelce, seen here moments after slipping you a mickey

• Cologne overdose recovery leader, Travis Kelce

• Future first man Travis Kelce

3. Mark Zuckerberg - Facebook / Meta founder

• Recovering Blue Man Group member Mark Zuckerburg

• Mark Zuckerberg, seen here with all of his friends

• Mark Zuckerberg, seen here with all of Facebook’s spam junked into his ass

• Totally a Human And Not Just Pretending To Be, Mark Zuckerberg

• Mark Zuckerberg, seen here transitioning between his larval and human state

4. Tiger Woods - Most recent mugshot:

• Future White House administrator Tiger Woods

• The golfer whose favorite club is the dance club, Tiger Woods

• Tiger Woods, seen here being eaten alive by his skinsuit

• Tiger Woods, seen here just beneath the burning glare of a thousand suns

• The golfer whose favorite club is the D-u-iver, Tiger Woods

5. Former Prince Andrew after arrest:
(Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor, formerly known as Prince Andrew, Duke of York, is a British royal who has faced severe public disgrace following his association with convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein.)

• Former Prince Andrew, seen here after eating too much chili

• Former Prince Andrew, seen here exorcising his own demons

• He Who Both Smelt It and Dealt It, the former Prince Andrew

• Eel wearing a human costume, the former Prince Andrew

• Ex-James Bond villain, the former Prince Andrew

• Voldemort with eyebrows, the former Prince Andrew

• The Former Prince Andrew, seen here after Dr. Frankenstein’s machine reanimated him

• The Former Prince Andrew, seen here being pulled out of a drawer from the morgue

• A hairless cat short of Dr. Evil, the former Prince Andrew

• The Former Prince Andrew, seen here being awoken from his casket for the first time in centuries

6. Kristi Noem - Former Homeland Security Chief

• Kristi Noem, seen her posing with the only person of color she ever liked

• Former Cosplayer Kristin Noem

• Future YouTuber Kristi Noem

• America’s female Vladimir Putin, Kristi Noem

• The first person to make Mount Rushmore attempt suicide, Kristi Noem

• Seen here in her human state, Kristin Noem

Parting Shots

• Missed the open mic at the Brownstone on Friday because I wanted to stay to the end of the improv show I was in. Seemed like a decent crew of people went even if it was just a bar crowd watching? I’ll plan for the next one weeeeee.

• Closed mic is happening but it’s already full-up lololol if it goes well I’ll do another in May, hit me up about that if you wanna go up or something.

• I still find standup so hard and it’s so funny to talk to other people who are like “improv is so hard, standup is so easy” or “sketch is so hard, standup is so easy” or whatever. Everybody’s different. I remain myself. I truly wish someone would just text me and tell me what my voice is like. If you’re one of the people who reads every single one of these posts, you probably know my voice better than I do.

• my other improv group, Boyfriends, will be in the cage match this month (April 24, 9:00pm at Sea Tea). Please come and vote for the best improv set.

• Sometimes people have asked me for notes on their standup, and that’s cool and I guess I’ll give them to you, but also like… I’m not teaching a standup class right now! We’re just people! I’m a person!
  
  I sometimes worry that some of my standup friends aren’t my friends at all, just people using me. It happened so much when I was in the music scene. Maybe I’m just weary. I don’t know. I wish some people talked to me about stuff other than comedy.

• The teacher of Late Night TV writing class said the best way to get better was just to keep writing more, which, haha, validation. But she specifically said when she wrote for the Tonight Show she wrote three pages a day and it made her way better.
  
  It’s too late for 2026, but in 2027, my goal will be to write three pages a day, 1,095 pages across the year hahaha I am not joking at all I am putting it in writing you better hold this against me and hold me to this hahaha I’m definitely capable of that but I think you all will see me become a crazy person in 2027 hahaha. My goal for 2026 was 200 pages of comedy but I’m already at like 100. 1,095 is a lot. (Even if we assume she only meant 3 pages a day per episode, there’s 160-170 episodes a year, that’s still 480-510 pages a year. Hahaha. Fuck you I’m going to write 500-1000 pages next year.)

• In class, she also talked about how grim the comedy landscape is, and how grim writing for TV or movies of any kind is at the moment; that with studios conglomerating, so many previously greenlit shows have been cancelled where showrunners and head writers are taking lower-level positions because there are just way less jobs out there now.
  
  Her advice was literally “keep writing, try to work at a comedy theater, try your best and hope things get better.” Which is grim on one level, but on another, it’s nice to know what I’m doing and trying to do is the thing I should be doing and trying to do.
  
  I just want to get better. I hope you do too. When we’re both great, I’ll see you on the other side.4

Some people take issue not with the pedagogy of game, but game itself. Will Hines talks about this a lot, notably here:

…I had a flashback to decades of improv students who would say to me “I don’t like game. I prefer to play the relationship.”

In my history when someone says “I prefer to play the relationship” it’s someone in my class and they are letting me know they will not be taking suggestions, and they are happy doing meandering improv, and they refuse to even consider what makes a scene funny and instead will do scenes where two people do silent object work where they do nothing unusual except fight and maybe cry.

Will Hines, seen here wearing human clothing.

I consider the way most of game is handled as high floor, low ceiling: most game-centric improv scenes are played as improvised sketches, where by the sheer nature of on-the-fly collaboration few people make unique moves because there’s no time to come up with any, and it all becomes a blender of writer’s room first-pitches that alo suffer from being poorly acted. (This is where you tell me I’m a terrible negative person who is no fun at parties and that you don’t like me.)

This problem mostly occurs in full-premise improv: if you just let things happen organically, your scene will feel real because you focused on being real instead of OH GOD WHAT’S THE FUNNIEST IDEA AND HOW CAN I MAKE EVERYONE UNDERSTAND IT IN ONE LINE OF DIALOGUE AND REPEAT IT TWICE MORE IN THIS HAROLD.

I think this is why it often takes a year or two for someone to settle into game: it’s not that you misunderstood it, it’s that your overthinking is preventing you from selling anything as an actor. If you were just comfortable and confident, you’d have it right away, but how can you be comfortable and confident when you’re overanalyzing every thought and move and panicking?

That said… let’s step aside from my gripes with game-game-game, and take a step back and say… isn’t game the best way to think about everything?

What is Game?

The Upright Citizen’s Brigade Improv Comedy Manual defines Game as “the primary funny or unusual thing in a scene that is repeated and heightened.”

I hate this definition! I hate the use of “unusual”! Its anti-diversity and limiting! Plenty of funny things are not at all unusual! “Funny” is subjective. Replace “funny or unusual” with “foolish” or “silly” or “goofy”. I see students screw this up all the time and it’s not their fault! We’re instructing them that it’s the first unusual thing, then they lock at the first unusual thing, and then we get disappointed that the first unusual thing wasn’t a very good game. Well, maybe we should stop instructing them with a crappy definition! ROAR.

My definition of game is “the vehicle for comedy in a scene”. To me, it now works on a broader level. You could say it’s semantics, but I would hope you get semantics right when you put the definition of something in a fucking textbook and one of the authors stalks and creeps on someone for leaving a positive amazon review.1

…anyway…

Game is easily applied to other forms of comedy. Standup and game? Game is now your premise. Milk your premise for all the comedy it’s worth. It’s still game.

Sketch is all game; one of the more common Sketch 101 problems is people trying to jam two games into a scene. It doesn’t work in sketch. Sometimes it works in improv because everyone’s funny and we know you’re making it up on the spot. Improvisors starting in sketch often do this in their pages, with the thought “this would crush in improv.” Yeah, it would! But it won’t in a sketch because we all know you wrote it beforehand. There’s no time. Just go be funny and cut the rest.

But what if we changed game-based thinking?

Narrative and Game, Part One: Education Issue

First, before going into what I mean, another issue I take with how game is taught is “if this is true, then what else is true?”

Then implies chronology.2 It implies one thing happens, then another thing happens.

“If this is true then what else is true” continues to teach our minds narrative, and then teachers yet still will take issue when new students interpret this statement narratively, continue to think of it as plot rather than as a device of which to mine the funny thing from.

I love game but I do not love how game is taught in UCB pedagogy as such.

In more recent years, the collective teaching has seemingly dropped the “then”: “if this is true, what else is true?”. When I was taught, it still had then in it, and that’s a hangup.

How do we fix this?

I honestly think more than watching good improv, watching good sketch teaches students game. (And most people’s favorite sketches, unfortunately, is not good game, as most people just starting off in comedy will name a Saturday Night Live sketch, which we went over here.)

I also think if we say at the start, we are trying to get all the funny juice squeezed out and we don’t want to tell a story, we’re better off. Too often we’re happy to have a story happen as long as there are laughs along the way. The truth is, in improv, story is the byproduct of the game; game is not a side-effect of the story.

Which brings us to…

Narrative and Game, Part Two: Game Improves Narrative

Most stories would be greatly improved by game-centric thinking. Let’s reframe all game not by its definition, but as a question.

The game of a scene is, what is the funniest logical thing that can happen in (whatever scenario of a scene)?

So for example, the game of Key & Peele’s substitute teacher is not the vertical move of “if this substitute teacher says names wrong, what else does he do wrong?” No! We don’t need vertical moves. We don’t need any then what else at all. It’s all horizontal, it’s all another funny name.

This sketch wouldn’t be as funny if he suddenly also said foods wrong, or weirdly “streeted up” white-collar sports. (“Ho key” for hockey is not as funny as any single name in this sketch.) It’s perfect as is.

The game is, he says names wrong. That’s all you need. You don’t need any “if this is true what else is true”, it encourages the wrong line of thinking: it encourages what other behaviors the sub will do, and it encourages you to think like a narrative of “well, he’s gotta go to the teacher’s lounge at some point, how does he say their names?” and neither is a very good thought in this moment.

The question is, what other names will be funny when he says them? And voila. The game is perfect as is.

But apply this type of question to something beyond comedy, and beyond sketches or improvised scenes…

The game of a horror movie often should be, what’s the most horrifying thing that could happen here?

If you play that game, you’ll get a much scarier movie than you get when you go with narrative logic. You’ll end up with something terrifying that feels logical but still have been surprising, because you’re asking the right game question instead of the narratively obvious question of what domino falls next.

Andy Weir has talked about how this is was his way of thinking for both The Martian and Project Hail Mary: you solve one problem, and then as a writer you ask, what’s a bigger problem that happens here because of the previous problem’s solution?

That’s a much more interesting movie or story than the one you get when you ask “what’s the next logical thing that happens?”. That’s a much more interesting story than the one you get when you ask “if this just happened, now what happens?”

It’s a much better product than you get when you ask “if this is true, what else is true?”

For narrative, we should abandon plot and play game.

For comedy, we should abandon plot and play game. And maybe stop asking “if this is true, then what else is true?” and start asking “what’s the funniest logical thing that could happen right now?”.

The aim is the same, but I guarantee one input leads to a better output.

Parting Shots

• In the 9:00 show at Sea Tonight weeeee

• Have the last Late Night TV writing UCB class tomorrow weeeee

• Going back to stand up mics this week weeeeee

• Tempted to sign up for the UCB class, Establishing Your Comedic Voice, if anyone wants to take it with me. I feel like I already know it in sketch, and struggle with it in standup. It’s a sketch class, but there’s always something to learn. Weee?

Subscribe now

My Favorite Part of the Festival

Bad Magicians.

Bag Magicians, to me, owned everything.

I cannot begin to explain what their nearly 40 minute set was like on Thursday other than to say it was unlike any other comedy set I’ve ever seen. I expected it to be more sketch-like because it started with an opening video, but by the time it ended it was clearly not sketch, and then it became avant-garde and clown-like yet still felt like grounded improv and I have no way to describe it other than it was absolutely insane in the best way possible.

They came out wearing trashbags and one of them (Alyssa) struggled to break free from it as the other two members individually thanked every single in person in the room. I thought it was a sketch-like Spinal Tap nod. After the set, I went up to Alyssa and said “that was insane, I mean that in the best way possible” and she responded by saying “I thought I was going to die in that trashbag.” Turns out it wasn’t a bit at all.

I don’t want to spoil what the set was — and I’m not sure I could if I tried — but I will say it involved audience interactions and scenes were always emotionally grounded but physically beyond human, outside human, alter-human, unhuman but humane, and the three members of the group were clearly comfortable with each other because there was a wild physicality I haven’t seen elsewhere.

Bad Magicians are three women I literally do not know: Mary Clohan (@amishmafia24), Alyssa Davis (@alyssadavis264), and Mary McDonnell (@maryinhaste). I know next to nothing about them. I will likely travel to Brooklyn to see them again at some point. That shit was wild. Bad Magicians were fucking incredible.

If anyone wants to travel to see them let me know. I don’t know what else to say. They amazed me. It blew my mind and I don’t say that lightly.

My Least Favorite Part of the Festival

Here is where I will not name names because I don’t think the art of improv should ever be used to make anyone feel bad about something. But I will say some groups rely on fast, easy games, drug-based and sex-based games, and seem to end every scene with loud shouting matches over each other. I know some people were blown away by this and impressed by it and loved every moment of it, but those groups/scenes felt boring to me because they all felt very indistinct, flavorless, and cheap.

One reporter’s opinion, but I’d rather think about a character I can remember for years (like in Connor Ratliff’s The Acting Class) or an emotional moment that made me laugh (like almost every Romantic Baby set) or something unlike anything I’ve ever seen before (like Bad Magicians) than “boy, that hardcore orgy scene sure had pelvic thrusts.”

To each their own.

Why the hell is nostalgia in this post title?

Hanging out at Vaughan’s Saturday night until closing time with a bunch of people I see every week, a bunch of people I’ve never seen before, and a bunch of people I only run into once a year at the Hartford Improv Festival, it’s one of the only times where it feels like everyone is celebrating everyone else.

No one comes to Hartford to compete for a big paycheck or a TV audition or a shot at stardom, or anything like that.

Virtually everyone at HIF come to Hartford because they love improv and comedy and the community.

You get all those people in a room and I just know I’ll hold on to those moments. Better than any set is talking to someone from Minneapolis about the Vikings and how he’s 90 minutes from an improv theater but still trying to start his own group. Better than any set is talking about dumb action movies at 1:45am and how insane the movie Cobra is. Better than any set is talking to people in New York City about how Magnet teaches versus how UCB teaches, or talking to people about what they loved or didn’t love and how things went and how things are different in each area, or paying and receiving compliments and genuinely meaning them. (If anyone in Bad Magicians see this please contact me, I have so many questions and nothing but praise for you.)

About six months into doing improv, Kelly & her husband Tyler, Mike & his wife Baily, Drew and I all went out to Vaughan’s after a show. None of us were very good yet, but we all loved it and it was one of the few times in life where I think everybody realized at almost the same moment that we were all going to be friends for a long time and not just “this is an acquaintance from a comedy class I took”.

I remember having the conscious thought in my head at the time, “These are the good old days.”

People always say you remember the good old days, a romanticized past where your problems didn’t exist but deep down you know you’re overlooking the pains of the moment. Shoot, I was incredibly sad at times this weekend for reasons1, but even with that, there still feels like something higher about a shared joy for the same reasons with people you’re aware you’ll know for a long time.

I’m not always good at it, but if I could give you any piece of advice, it would be to look around once in a while and admit to yourself:

These are the good old days.

Parting Shots

• Somehow I’m in the Friday at 9:00pm show at Sea Tea. Basement Ghost has had a show three weeks in a row, lol. Somehow this show is also with Oops! All Cuties again (and also with Hall of Presidents). I will once again recommend going.

• Think next week I’ll start going back to open mics for standup. It’s hard to be in a writing class and be writing pages and pages each week outside of it and still go perform at mics when you have a day job that eats away at your soul and brain. Imagine how cool life would be if the day job was the writing or performing. Oh well.

• I really want to take the clown intensive at BCC, if anybody wants to make daily Brooklyn trips with me in June. I very much feel like I’d be a fool to do it, but I also feel like it is the thing I am missing out on and want to learn most desperately, so if I have to be a fool, or worse, a fool alone, I will be. Gotta be me.

  

  
  

  No Laughing Matter will always be free, but not always nostalgic.

But what I can do is point you to other people’s treatises on laughter, and so that’s what’s happening.

The Hartford Improv Festival starts today! If you’re in Connecticut you should stop by. I’m in the literal first set of HIF (tonight at 6pm!) but also working bar or tech all of Friday, doing Molly and Connor’s workshops Saturday, and working tech for a couple shows on Sunday. Say hi!

To get a second post in, here’s a best-of what’s out there by other people.

Improv

What We Do About “That Guy” by Will Hines

Will Hines is the foremost improv writer out there, one of only a handful of people to write multiple books on how to do improv and improv’s history. (You should also subscribe to his substack, but I’m not linking you here because you should go to my main page to do it so I can get referral credit. Wahoo.)

“That Guy” is the person you play with who wrecks your scenes and has a flaw that bothers you. Will Hines gives you the best advice on that, which is essentially: deal with it.

Improv is Art by Craig Cackowski

Craig Cackowski is a prominent improvisor, teacher, and coach (coach of the JTS Brown! Star of Drunk History! WGIS Teacher! Husband of Carla and brother of Liz!). He did my favorite Yes, Also interview, and he’s got a post on his substack here that’s basically a speech I wish I heard in my early days of improv.

There is no “right way” to do improv, and sometimes from this, we get conflicting notes. Cackowski outlines these conflicts, and emphasizes how they’re all right even when they’re wrong, and how they’re all wrong even when they’re right. It’s a philosophical text that explains how improv is an art, and not a science, and how that makes it hard sometimes but it also makes it beautiful.

How Can I Get Out of my Head? by Will Hines

We’re not going to just keep promoting Will Hines, but know that he (and his brothers) know what they’re talking about.

Every improvisor at various points will get stuck in their head. Hines walks you through how to get out of it. He also includes an email from Zach Woods that’s very heartfelt and makes me like the guy a lot.

Form an improv team… now! by Patrick Rehill

Too many people are content to audition alone and hope to be placed on an improv team, or worse, are too afraid to audition at all but want to get better.

Well, you get better from doing more improv. You get more improv on a team. Chicken, meet egg.

Rehill outlines the benefits to starting your own team outside of a specific theater, even if you end up auditioning at a theater. (He also outlines how directly competitive UCB can be, which. Yuck.)

10 Things Improvisors Should Do (besides improv) by Kevin Mullaney

Former artistic director of UCB Kevin Mullaney is full of insight. Improv is sometimes the hardest form of comedy to get better at, because you can write more sketches and you can do standup alone but improv inherently requires other people, if not an audience, and you can’t just whip that up alone in your house.

So what can improvisors do? This blog outlines 10 things you can do that aren’t improv that will make you a better improvisor, and also probably have a generally happier life.

Playing at the Top of Your Intelligence by Phil Lusardi

Phil no longer performs improv, but he did learn under Del Close. I will always argue “play to the top of your intelligence” is the literal worst note; it can make a great compliment (“good job playing to the top of your intelligence!” = a-OK), but as a note (“don’t do that, play to the top of your intelligence”) it’s more like a front-handed insult where the teacher or coach is not actually providing real insight.

But the first person to give this note was Del Close. And Lusardi outlines what the note really means. It means be truthful. It means no bullshit.

Stop Trying to Be Liked by Jimmy Carrane

Most improvisors are in it to be liked.

Stop it.

Carrane was a well-known Chicago improvisor in the 90s and now runs a blog and podcast. The podcast is also great. Read this blog post.

Sketch

Weeping over the Jaws Theme by Marina Tempelsman

Marina Tempelsman has a sketch book coming out (that I will surely buy and endorse) and a sketch blog that analyzes sketches from SNL and other places every week. It’s a slick view into a well-informed mind — and the mind of other sketch teachers — that will improve how you write and perform sketches.

But that’s not what this post is about.

This post is about your first time dealing with something that everyone deals with in sketch: it’s funny in your head and maybe even on paper, but then reality doesn’t cooperate.

It’s entertaining and informative and you should subscribe to her blog, too. (THOUGH TRY TO DO IT FROM MY MAIN PAGE SINCE I RECOMMEND YOU aw heck she’s nice just subscribe to her).

How I Made it in Comedy: Bob Odenkirk by Mike Sacks

Okay, so this isn’t a blog post, it’s a newspaper article written by Mike Sacks, who has published multiple books that are based on interviews with comedians. But it’s a great interview! With Bob Odenkirk!

It covers more than sketch but since I associate Odenkirk mostly with sketch (and he said it is his favorite and most difficult form of comedy), I feel most comfortable putting it here.

Boy. There’s not a lot written on sketch. Tempelsman is writing a book, and good thing. There’s a void here. Maybe I should write about sketch more.

Standup

Gary Gulman’s 366 Comedy Tips

This is more like a weird article and not a blog post, but standup Gary Gulman posted 366 standup tips on Twitter over years and someone else gathered them into a google doc. You can thank the internet: Gary Gulman knows what he’s talking about, and he gave you world class advice for free.

My Completely, Entirely Free, On-Line Comedy Class by John Roy

John Roy is a successful standup. He basically runs through what a standup comedy class would/will do, but gives it away for free. If you need discipline, you can still sign up for an in-person one (accountability works!) but if you’re a self-starter, he outlines a path to self-starting with a relatively relaxed timeline.

How To Write Better Jokes (Without Ruining the Setup) and 10 Worst Things a Standup Can Do (Besides Bombing) by Mike Lukas

I’ve mentioned Lukas before on this blog (I still recommend his books). His website has occasionally blog posts that sometimes cover the obvious, but especially when you’re starting out they’re still very helpful. Understanding the clarity and importance of your setup and how people ruin their own jokes is perhaps the most useful thing when you start standup.

Avoiding the 10 things that will wreck your standup career is also helpful. I recommend Lukas as a teacher all around.

Killing Your Darlings, Stand-Up Comedy Version by Rob Durham

Rob Durham is a successful standup with a blog and book by the same name: Don’t Wear Shorts on Stage. I have yet to read the book, but based on the blog, I bet you it’s good.

Your best joke might be holding you back. Durham outlines how, and what to do about it. Ultimately, it shows life and comedy are about evolution. Sometimes, that means letting go of what works to find something that works better.

Parting Shots

• Okay, yeah, I mean, this wasn’t much but I did get two posts in this week with HIF going on and TAing a sketch class so that’s good.

• HIF! Tonight at 6:00 with Basement Ghost! Eeee!

• I’m on all ears of what the next blog post should be, but honestly I’m also half looking forward to next week and having a night where I don’t do a comedy thing for the first time in a couple weeks. I’ll probably miss doing the comedy thing that night.
  
  What do you want the next post to be about? Say hi if you see me at HIF!

The process of getting better has some core tenets no matter what you’re doing: improv, music, sports, taxes, whatever.

Some Book Stuff

I will recommend two books for getting better at a thing, but they apply to comedy (and EVERYTHING):

1. The Practice of Practice

2. Zen in the Art of Archery

I hate how much this book changed me.

The Practice of Practice is actually aimed at musicians. I first discovered it playing in a community jazz band, where the band leader Keith was constantly reading it and re-reading it. I didn’t understand, having not read it, what the practical use of a book on how to practice was, especially when you’re a band leader and not playing in the band. My thought was like: Keith, that book isn’t going to teach you how to solo better, what’s going on in that head of yours?

Unprompted, he told me I should buy a copy and that it would change my life. WELL, THANKS, KEITH.

The book does not focus on fingerings, music theory, physical flexibility, or anything of the sort. It’s not a book for one type of musicians, it’s aimed at musicians regardless of instrument. Treat comedy like your instrument and it’ll be helpful.

The book talks about how to breakdown goals, structure goals, and structure your practice to accomplish these goals. All these goals should be fairly objective, but even if they’re subjective they should not be up to other people’s opinions: it could be “start a band” but shouldn’t be “get the part from an audition.” Most helpful is “play the third movement of Beethoven’s C#m piano sonata” or “perform eighth note paradiddles at 200 bpm.”

(These are music examples, but think of it with comedy: it’s not “get booked on a show”, it’s “get 25 laughs in 5 minutes”; it’s not “write 10 good sketches” (subjective), it’s “perform 3 sketches I wrote on stage”. It could be “perform a set I’m proud of” but it can’t be “perform a set Mom likes”.)

It also talks about methods of practice, my biggest takeaway being something that came from Rachmaninoff: start with the hardest thing first.

Why start with the hardest thing first?

Because then everything else falls into place. If you climb Everest, jogging up a hill is easy. If you jog up a hill, climbing Everest still seems impossible.

But the biggest thing I took from the Practice of Practice is you should have one huge long term goal, a couple moderate sized goals, and a plethora of short term ones.

Choosing Goals, Structuring Goals

First, when thinking in these terms, keep in mind that the moderate and short term goals should fall under the same umbrella. Basically, you’re breaking down your long term goal into more digestible pieces. Going back to music, if you wanted to learn to do a drum roll at 200bpm and you’re starting at 120, the moderate term goal is 160 bpm, and your short term goal might be 125 or 130. You’re making your own baby steps. You’re charting a path.

Second, comedy is way more open and way less objective than music. Are laughs the right measure? What are your aims? Maybe you can keep a giant long term goal that is subjective (“be good at improv”? “be good at standup”?), but for the short term, small size goals, you have to be objective otherwise you will simply feel rejected all the time. The small goals can be as small as “write 10 jokes a month” or “perform improv twice this year”, they can be anything, but they have to be something where you don’t review your goals later and subjectively weigh in.

We need you to know you’re doing it, or you’re not.

The Athletic (effectively now the sports section of the New York Times) has a section called “The Peak” that talks about sports leadership and life leadership. (No! Don’t leave! This isn’t about sports! Come back!)

One of their articles was explicitly about How to Set Goals. (It was a newsletter that isn’t posted online, otherwise I’d link you to it.) Their four keys were:

1. Before anything else, make sure the goal really means something to you.

2. Think big, then small.

3. Find someone to share the goal with you.

4. Discipline is the only way.

Breaking that down:

1. you can’t accomplish anything if it’s for someone other than yourself.

2. Figure out your big goals before your short term goals.

3. Find a way to hold yourself externally accountable, and friendship is pretty good for that.

4. It’s gonna be hard, but you have to do it. (The way out is through, the key to writing is to write, etc. etc.)

It’s nice to think that there’s some magical trick to getting better, but there isn’t. It’s like any other skill. If you suck at something, don’t feel bad: odds are this is just a new instrument you haven’t played before, it’s a sport you haven’t played before, it’s a new job you don’t have experience in. It’s fine. But have discipline, aim well, and go for it.

One Thing At A Time

My own personal advice is to make sure all these things are on the same path. It’s common for improvisors early on to see that they have 40 different things to work on. It’s okay to accept 39 of those flaws for another 3 months as you really work on not-adding-an-argument-in-every scene. It’s okay to continue pirating if your focus is on object work; you can accept one flaw to fix another.

Just remember, when you’ve completed your big goal… you move on to the next one.

That’s actually the thing about Zen in the Art of Archery: in it, our central character talks about learning to shoot bow-and-arrows through the practice of zen. While westerners learn to shoot by, shooting… in the zen practice, they break it down each step and you don’t get to hte next step until you’ve mastered one.

If this book cover feels racist, just remember Eugen Herrigel was a nazi and shit yeah this whole book is racist.

He doesn’t get to pull the string back until he holds the bow correctly.

He doesn’t get to fire a bow until he holds the string back correctly.

He doesn’t get to aim the bow until he’s holding the arrow correctly.

And so on, and so forth. And then one day, when he finally shoots the arrow, he’s already a master, because he doesn’t have to think about 1000 different things. He has to think about one thing: shoot the arrow. He’s zen. He’s already a master.

We teach virtually nothing this way, and you’re already in your journey and self-conscious about 30-1000 different things. Well, I can’t take that way from you. But I can say if you focus on one of those things and improve it until it’s zen and you don’t have to think about it will be a more effective use of your time than it is to chip away at 999 different things a little bit and never feel like you’re making progress.

Practical Stuff for Comedy Specifically

Standup

For standup, you have to watch/listen to your sets.

You can be watching & listening for a bunch of different things, but what those things are should depend on your goal. Some goals could be like this:

(Long term) Get 25 laughs in 5 minutes

(Moderate term) Perform a new 5 minutes 3x this month

(Short term) Put more emotion into how I perform my set

Then, you listen back, and you ask yourself: did you put more emotion into how you performed your set?

There’s other things you can do unrelated to goals, which is more like how to note yourself. For that, it’s: ignore how you feel, watch it as a watcher or listen as a listener. Too many people will listen to their sets and go “man, I’m not good.” Could that response be anymore unhelpful? (That was my Chandler Bing impression.)

You need to listen to your set and go: this was too wordy, I can drop some words here. I didn’t sell this, I need to become better at selling a joke. There’s a clear opportunity for a joke but I didn’t think of it here. I improvised and it worked, maybe let’s add that every time. You’re listening for opportunities for jokes and opportunities for improvement.

A brief list of questions to ask yourself when listening back to your set:

1. Where/when did the laughs come? (Am I pausing for laughter at the right times?)

2. Am I talking and annunciating clearly? Am I killing my own punchlines in a lack of verbal clarity?

3. Am I being too wordy? Where can I cut words to get to the laughs faster?

4. Did I change anything from this set compared to the previous? Which version of a joke is best? Why?

5. What other factors played a role? Was my outfit different than usual? How did this impact my set?

6. How was my stage presence? Do I look nervous? If so, how, and how can I change it?

7. What did I do differently than usual? How did that impact the set?

8. What did I do the same way I always do that got a different reaction? Why?

You should be interrogating your process, your performance, and your writing. Take notes on your own set if you have to. It’s painful, but it works.

Sketch

Never throw out an idea. Bob Odenkirk’s memoir is actually a pretty good book on comedy, and in it he talks about how at SNL, if a sketch died at the table read, it disappeared and was thrown out and never talked about again. And Bob’s position was: hey, I wrote that and I liked my idea!

Bob Odenkirk, seen here playing teenage Bob Odenkirk.

So when he started on Mr. Show (no idea why he didn’t use this on the Ben Stiller Show — I guess he wasn’t in charge?), he made it a point: if something died at table, they didn’t throw it out. They’d ask, what was it you liked? What was the core of your idea? And they’d figure out where it went wrong, and rewrite and repitch as a group until it worked. Some ideas would still falter, but often the best sketches came from “I loved this game idea but I executed it wrong.”

With that in mind: if you feel like you’re struggling, you should constantly be saying “I have a great idea but I executed it wrong.” Writing is rewriting. Try to figure out why your scene was broken, rewrite it with an attempt at fixing it. Eventually, you’ll figure out the common notes and be able to avoid them.

You should also still have goals as you work through it (long term: keep my sketches shorter & faster, moderate term: write 2 sketches this month, short term: rewrite a sketch today and drop the unnecessary words). But sketch and your ability to work through it likely depends on a team of people. You need other people’s reality and performance in sketch. Unlike standup, no man is an island unto themselves. The “have a friend” is really, truly clutch in sketch. If I didn’t have a writer’s group/sketch team, I would never have gotten better at sketch.

Maybe your first goal is to assemble a sketch team?

Improv

You should also still have goals as you work through things. (Long term goal: get to the game faster, moderate term: get better at framing the game, short term: sign post in one scene of a montage this week, etc.).

I feel like improvisors are the ones most prone to switching goals: they want to be more patient players, then see an ASSSSCAT set and decide they want to be faster players, then take a workshop on emotions and decide they want to be grounded players, then see a zany Groundlings sketch and decide they want to be better at being the unusual weirdo.

Well, slow down. Pick one thing at a time. You can do it all, but you can’t do it all at once.

Decide what your biggest area for improvement is, and do that.

The biggest flaw with many, many improvisors, particularly intermediately experienced ones, is they get hooked on how they get their laughs early and never develop a second way. They get comfortable doing the same 1-3 character tropes with the same 1-3 emotional reactions. They pirate and they go “ah, but people love it when I do that”, or they robot and go “I know how to get laughs from being the straight man.”

Improv lets you be anything.

You should be anything and everything in it, not just the first thing you got a laugh from in 301. Eventually, you can focus on honing your strengths. Try to strengthen your weaknesses first.

Parting Shots

• TAing Sketch 201 at Sea Tea tomorrow. I love sketch. I’m going to write a sketch in the same assignment style the students have to (I haven’t yet!). We’ll see how this goes.

• Performing in the literal first set at HIF, Thursday at 6:00 in Basement Ghost with Somewhere in Time and Paging Dr. Pigeon. I always like seeing the out-of-state teams because every area seemingly has its own style. I wonder what Somewhere in Time’s area’s is.

• Late Night TV writing class was super fun this week, but it was odd because me and one other student showed up, and the other student did not complete the homework assignment. You want special attention to your sketch, one way is for your teacher to have nothing else except your work to look at for 90 minutes. Woo boy. At least it was a good sketch, haha.

• Saturday Night Live UK launched Saturday. I haven’t watched it yet. I will. Give me more than two days, jeez.

And for that, I have to tell you how I ended up at the thought of doing this post.

Zen and the Art of How My Mind Got Here

I figured maybe I’d go long and summarize my favorite episode of You Made It Weird: Garry Shandling.

I literally take notes on comedy podcasts as I listen to them and have done this for years, even preceding me doing comedy, for some reason. Listening to the Garry Shandling episode of You Made It Weird was inherently life altering to me at the time. I still have a note in my phone from 10 years ago:

“A real man is someone who gives the love he never got.”

Hearing that changed me in my core as a person. Isn’t this ultimately why everyone has any insecurity? It’s like the inverse of “hurt people hurt people.” So many people want to change the world but just keep passing on what they think is the normal way to be treated. Where does the buck stop? It could stop with us. A real man gives the love he never got.

The episode dropped January 13, 2016; Shandling died March 24, 2016. I remember listening to it once when it came out and being blown away, and then it reposting two months later just as I was starting to become obsessed with Shandling’s comedy. (He similarly had an episode of Comedians in Cars Getting Coffee saying he was at peace with death, and then he died within a week of it posting.) It felt like a parting note to change my life.

I had just read Zen in the Art of Archery - one of two books I will recommend to anyone who simply wants to get better at anything at all, but that’ll come up in a post next week because of a request from Todd. Garry Shandling was all about Zen, and while a lot of people are, most of those people seem naturally relaxed and comfortable in their own skin.

Shandling was not. (A New Yorker article about him is titled “The Tortured Zen of Garry Shandling.”)

No idea how this image represents being a tortured artist or zen. The New Yorker, folks!

He was a bundle of insecurities that kept destroying his own mind, constantly fighting internally to just feel fully present and human, and I found that so relatable. He performed standup at the Comedy Store, and the owner said “You’re a writer, not a performer.” Imagine the most important person in comedy in 1976 telling you that, and that’s what happened to Garry Shandling.1 And yet he became a great performer. He seemed to be conquering his turmoil, not by defeating it but by making peace with it.

To Garry Shandling, being a man wasn’t toxic masculinity, or even traditional masculinity; it wasn’t fighting or hunting or the amount of women he’d been with or lifting some weight or being a great athlete or being the funniest person on Earth or winning a pissing contest or getting the leading role in a movie or getting rich or famous.

It was just giving the love he never got.

I still try to think about that every time someone bugs me, or hurts me, or doesn’t let the buck stop with them. I try to think about it every time my intuition and want is to be a judgmental ass, which is approximately 100% of the time. Let go of the way you were treated, give someone the love you never got.

I try to think of that as the measurement of being a man.

Anyway.

Trying to do a podcast summary about my second favorite episode of You Made It Weird, the episode touched on an idea that really warranted yet another college essay on performing comedy, and oh no, here we are, thick in the weeds of my mind again.

The Goal Is To Write Something Only You Would Write

That’s the real goal; definitely in standup but probably in sketch, too. It’s not just be funny. If it were, we’d all be doing borscht belt jokes and dad jokes and street jokes and you wouldn’t hear me complain about anyone being hack because why would anyone care?.

Dax Shepard talks on his podcast, Armchair Expert, relatively often, about how his sketch ideas would get stolen by TV shows and how his improvisations in commercial auditions would get stolen and integrated into the final commercials even though he didn’t get the job. (Pete Holmes and Ron Funches similarly talk about this in their You Made It Weird episodes.)

Shepard always says (my paraphrasing) if that’s the best idea you’ll ever have, sue them. If you’re going to have other ideas, let it go. I think that’s a sweet notion but also does absolutely nothing to solve the problem and admits that the machine has the power and the rage against it does not. And for that, BOOOOOOOOO.

But standups will talk about this, and at a certain point they will talk about it in two ways:

1. If your joke gets stolen, well, that happens to everyone at some point. You better be a unique performer, because then all your jokes will only truly work when you say them, and thus none of your work will be stolen. Work towards becoming your unique you on stage.
   

2. If you’re in parallel thinking with some other comedian and they came up with the same premise or joke, that doesn’t make them a thief or you a thief or either of you hacks. It does mean, however, that your joke or premise shouldn’t be done yet, that you need to look further, that you need to keep going, you need to dig deeper.

Jerrod Carmichael: Keep Going

If you’re a standup, please listen to this episode of You Made It Weird. I can sincerely say the first visits from Jerrod Carmichael, Gary Gulman, and maybe Marc Maron and Rory Scovel episodes will help you as a standup. (Garry Shandling episode helped me as a person.)

If you’re some other type of comedian, you’d benefit but maybe the recap is enough. Certainly, either way, you can stay in this essay for now, but if you’re a standup I really think you’d benefit from listening to them at some point.

Thee Jerrod Carmichael.

In Carmichael’s episode (40 minutes in), he says:

“I’ve written that on a notebook, no setlist. I’ve just written the words ‘Keep Going.’…

…Keep going. Why would you stop? And even when you don’t feel it, it’s the same thing with just being aware. Even on nights where it’s like I probably shouldn’t be going up, there’s still something to learn. There’s something… if you embrace how you feel, if I’m sick and you embrace it and you’re like ‘I’m sick’ and you talk about it, just go into the moment, just go head on. Sometimes I’m like, you know, not necessarily sad, but just kinda eh, and if I embrace that the set reflects that. The tone of it changes and it’s different. It can still be funny, it can still be great…

…I’ve heard people say “I’m from this area, they don’t understand my material.” Make them understand…

…I don’t gauge a set based on just laughter. We’ve seen some comics do what we consider easy material and destroy. I’ve seen people destroy a room. They were in no way the most effective comedian. But they got the most laughs. People don’t remember anything you said but in a bad way. [They laughed, but] Nothing stuck with them…

Keep going. Keep going! A lot of times it’s a thought. I’ll just say a thought as is. And then it gets nothing [no reaction]. And then it’s like, well let me explain to you how I came to this thought. And that’s where the treasure is.”

Does that provide enough context? If the joke doesn’t work… keep going. Your instinct is to stop: don’t. You had an idea. Believe in yourself. It’s a puzzle and you’ll figure it out. Keep going. You’re afraid and you’re worried and don’t be: keep going.

We should be writing about the things that mean the most to us. If that’s sports or Star Wars or watermelons, fine. You should be the real you, not the easy-haha you. Keep going.

I want to try what Carmichael says he does, going up without a set and without specific jokes planned but just having a note that says “Keep Going”. I don’t think it would work well for me, for months and months. I think a year or two, you’d get the skillset to turn it around and maybe reach a higher level than anyone despite having no floor. (Shoot, Jim Carrey used to do an hour of standup a night and improvise the whole thing. My feeling is this was terrifying at first, but if you’re Jim Carrey, within six months of doing that every night, you’d be … Jim Carrey.)

But if you’re struggling with anything, the last post sort of covered the way out is through with writing. But it’s true with anything. If you’re struggling, the way out is through. If you once thought you had a good idea, you probably did, you probably still do.

If the audience didn’t like it, you can bail if you really want. But the real solution is to push onward. Maybe talk about why you thought this would work, what it actually means to you. It’s probably still a good idea.

If you’re struggling to write by talking about the hard things, that’s fine.

You just need to Keep Going.

My Personal Philosophy: Dig Deeper

Jerrod Carmichael also says on the same podcast:

“Vulnerability. Vulnera-fucking-bility… Bea Arthur says ‘Be an exposed nerve.’…

Less jokes, more me. More me!..

[some jokes work] Because you care! And it hurts when it doesn’t work, but then it’s also like: what do you know. You don’t know funny. What do you know.”

I’ve long thought about being creative this way, dating back to when I didn’t perform comedy and was one of the two main songwriters in an extremely weird band. (Old band here, current band where I play every instrument here.)

In songwriting, people don’t care about the music. Sorry! They think they do, but what they really care about is how it makes them feel. “But that is the music,” you say.

No it isn’t.

This is why covers change the whole song. The music stays the same, but the way the person sings it, or even the person singing itself, changes what it means. There’s nothing inherently funny about Tenacious D’s cover of Chris Isaak’s “Wicked Game” - there is in the video, but that’s not the music. And yet we still find it funny because we know it’s Jack Black.

It’s why certain vocalists feel incredible despite a lack of vocal range: we inherently feel that when they sing it, they mean it, and maybe somebody from your high school could hit the right notes and do a more impressive vocal run, but do they mean it? Yeah, your friend has Adele’s pipes. Does your friend mean it the way Adele means it when she sings “we could have had it all”?

Picture everyone singing and dancing to “Sweet Home Alabama.” Fun! Now picture all those people in klan outfits. NOT FUN ANYMORE, IS IT? Not fun. Music is not just about music, it’s about context and the emotional context and how it makes people feel. The thing that makes the performance work is vulnerability. You take away that vulnerability and you have nothing.

Comedy’s the same - particularly standup, but all forms. Yeah, sure, you can be funny, but you shouldn’t be funny in the easy, layup, mascot-y way. You should be funny in the way that is most unique to you, and you should do it about the topics that mean the most to you. You should be funny in a vulnerable way.

Is that sports, Star Wars, dogs, roadkill? Maybe. Or is it death, suicide, depression, love and loss? Maybe. I don’t know you, specifically.2 But that’s why Gary Gulman says when you have writers block, you can always go back to family and relationships: it’s unique to us, we love them and they love us, they shaped us and messed us up and we messed them up back. It’s inherently deep, and vulnerable, and meaningful, and unique.

But anytime you have a joke, I don’t think you should just go “ah, I’ll write more jokes on this topic.” I think you should look at it and say: “Dig deeper.”

What Does That Even Mean?

Joke about how you hate dogs? You should be talking about why you hate dogs, and not in the “they annoy me” way. I mean in the “it doesn’t give me the gratification of true companionship, I need a pet that would call me” way. (You’re not allowed to steal that joke, it’s something I’m working on you joke thief.3)

Joke about how dating is lonely? You should be talking about how you’re lonely, not in the “aren’t dating apps bad” way but in the “can two people ever truly know each other and do we ever fully become ourselves around someone else” way. You should dig deeper.

Everyone is good at surface level jokes. Throw a few into your set, especially if they’re funny. You need a few jabs to land a knockout punch. But try to make the larger theme something that actually means the world to you, if not something that defines your entire existence, if not something that scares you to talk about at all. That’s where the good stuff is. That’s the juice we should all want to squeeze out.

Riley has texted me about this, about what she wants to do standup about. (I’ll leave it to her to disclose what those things are.) I really admire her aims, because in a way, tackling deeper things removes your floor even if it raises the ceiling. I feel like it takes most comedians four or five years to realize “oh, I should be aiming for meaningful laughs in who I am and the way I want to change the world” instead of just “an old lady farted in yoga class one time, aren’t I funny.”4

Rob Santos openly talks about how he doesn’t care about making you laugh, he wants you to feel something. This is so admirable, and that’s what the goal should be. You think you remember the laugh, but you don’t. You remember feeling something and then laughing. I’ve laughed harder at dumber jokes than Rob’s, but I remember Rob’s set better because it meant something.

It’s a lot harder to get a laugh about your trauma or your insecurity or your worry or your medical diagnosis or your societal concern than it is to get it about something silly. But is your goal as a standup, as a writer, as a comedian, as a person, to be funny, or is it to build something?

If you’re doing improv or sketch and you just want to be part of a community, OK, aim for laughs and be buds with people. There’s no shame in comedy being a hobby you do to experience joy with your friends. (Hell, I’d say it’s the greatest perk of it either way.) If you’re a standup and you just want to be someone who performs at the local room your whole life, then hey that’s OK.

But if you’re trying to build a following of any kind, or if you want people to be fans of what you do, or if you’re a standup and you want to be something greater, if you’re a writer who wants to change someone’s view on something, you need to aim for the deepest part of you.

Get your laugh. Then dig deeper.

Figure out who you are. Then dig deeper.

Write a good joke. Then… Dig deeper.

Think of the thing you’d most be afraid of talking about with your best friend or your family or your lover or your therapist.

Joke about that.

Then dig deeper.

Parting Shots

• One of you paid to subscribe even though I deliberately said there’d be no benefit to doing so. I thank you, but. I guess you know who you are and email me if you want anything specific because you gave me money ahhhh.

• My aunt passed away on Monday morning. She was a bit of the black sheep in her family (i.e., among my mom, her sisters and her brother), but I often related to her because she, like me, was a fucking weirdo. I wish I had done a better job of saying goodbye, and I think that’s true with every family member of mine that has passed away. I don’t know if that says something about humanity or if it’s just me.

• Todd asked for posts on (1) how to engage your audience and (2) how to watch/listen to your own standup performance tape. I think I’m going to change that to (1) how to engage your audience and (2) how to get better at stuff and things. Those are likely posts I’ll do next week or the week after unless THE PERSON WHO PAID ME CRAVES SOMETHING YOU ARE MY MASTER NOW EEEEE.
  
  That said I may only do one post next week, because next week is the Hartford Improv Festival. I’m performing on Thursday, in workshops on Saturday, attending shows Saturday and Sunday night. Presumably I’ll staff Friday and some of another day. I don’t know. If I only do one post next week, don’t be mad, you got three this week. It’s just a busy week.

• I’m in that Sea Tea Saturday at 7:00 show. Hopefully see you there. I’m also TAing the Sea Tea Sketch 201 class this Tuesday. Hopefully if any of you are in that class, I meet or exceed your expectations, haha.

That said, I got this text from Kate Dresty:

Apparently, writing 20-minute-long reads on Substack two or three times a week while also writing a sketch a week while also writing five minutes of standup every week while also taking a Late Night TV writing class while also writing two TV pilots a year while also writing a film script a year is “a lot”. WELL, SORRY.

I promise you can write quicker in this one easy step:

Step 1. Write

See? Simple. If you do it, it’s done.

Not helpful? Right, right. I got you. I understand. The thing is, I want to really hammer this first point home before we go anywhere else and get into anything else.

If you are struggling to write, it’s because your process is you struggling to write. If that’s the case, you should change your process.

I can get into the specifics of your process, but what works for me may not work for you and what works for you may not work for me. What I can say is there’s a great Blind Melon lyric: “When life is hard, you have to change.”

If you’re going to be a full-time standup comedian, that means you likely have to produce an hour every other year, if not every year. That means if you’re going Bill Burr, Taylor Tomlinson one-hour-every-other-year, you basically have to write 30 seconds of material a week for two years. (Because that would be 52 minutes at the end of two years.) But you want it all to be good, right? More on this later.

If you want to do the George Carlin/Louis CK one-hour-a-year special, the thing you have to do is write one minute a week for a year. Really, slightly more than that. Is it as simple as writing just that amount? More on this later.

Subscribe now

But the thing you have to do is write. Maybe you write while you’re avoiding doing your taxes or singing along to a Broadway show tune or walking a dog. Maybe you can’t write then and need no distractions. Maybe you can write via improvisation, maybe you do it on a typewriter, maybe you do it on your phone, I don’t know. But a lot of people say they struggle to write and never actually sit down and write.

Regardless of how you do it, what you have to do is make it a point to actually do it.

The way I do it is, I clear off a set amount of time - as little as 15 minutes, as much as an hour - and make it weekly, and just write the whole time. (Or, really, it used to be weekly, and now it’s like an hour a day without a set idea of what I’m going to write unless it’s a homework assignment.) Don’t even care what. It could be a standup or it could be poetry (it’s not poetry).

I write more than you because I set aside the time and it’s important to me that I put aside the time. Sometimes, that’s Monday nights midnight to 1:00am (see: this post). Sometimes, that’s Saturday morning 10am to noon (see: the sketch I’ll write for Late Night TV class this week). Sometimes, it’s 15 minutes on a Wednesday (that’s not happening this week, sorry standup comedy).

Regardless of what you write, you should make it a point to write. Even if you’re a standup and you end up writing poems, or you’re a poet and you end up writing jokes, that’s great. Even if it’s just recordings of you talking in a mirror that you then go through later.

Seriously, that’s great. Stop worrying about what your creative output is, and start having a creative output.

OK, But Writing Is Hard!

No it isn’t. If you passed a high school English class, at some point the teacher gave you a topic and you wrote a few pages in class. Maybe the essay sucked. Maybe the story sucked. Maybe the poem sucked.

But you did it. Do you need to pretend I’m your high school English teacher? You’re not dumber or lazier than you were sophomore year. You did it then.

You can write anytime you want, because writing is easy.

OK, But Everything I Write Sucks!

See, this is where you’re going wrong. The first thing I want you to do when you write is turn off judgement. Most of what I write is awful. I’m actually quite bad at everything I do the first time. Part of why I’m relatively prolific in output is because if I’m not, you would hate everything I created.

I have mentioned this with improv and sketch multiple times but I assure you it was true of standup as well (and I don’t want to send you those recordings, yikes.)

Standup probably hurts the most to suck at, because in improv and sketch when you fail people don’t like your sense of humor or a character you made, but in standup when they don’t like it what it feels like is them saying “I don’t like you, the actual person on stage.” And yet we keep going up. One day I’ll ask my therapist why, but for now, let’s focus on writing and not the hole in our souls we’ll never fill, shall we?

They say you can’t outrun a bad diet, but you can outwrite a bad creative output. Lets say you write songs only when the inspiration hits. Well, you’re gonna have 3-4 good songs at the end of the year. Let’s say 90% of every song I write sucks, but I write 1 song a week. At the end of the year, I’m going to have 5.2 good songs. I’m still going to have more good songs than you. Stop worrying about “good”. Start worrying about writing.

If you’re going to write one hour special-level standup, that’s a little over a minute of Grade A standup every week you want to write. Odds are not everything you write is going to be Grade A. When you become very good, your hit rate increases. When you start, your hit rate is low. I’d say when I started my hit rate on jokes was about 2%, maybe lower. Now I’d argue it’s closer to 20%. I doubt the jokes in this blog post made you laugh. I’m trying!

I personally find this motivating: hey, I’m decent for a local standup and that’s not good enough for me. In ten years, maybe I’ll be able to write only 3 minutes of standup a week and get where I want to go. Right now I’m trying to write so, so much more than that overall just to hone all the skills. There’s a Demetri Martin quote from You Made It Weird:

“Comedy was the first thing I wasn’t afraid to work hard at... I’m happy to write a million jokes if that’s what it takes.”

Perform a new five minutes at an open mic every other week? No problem, chief. 60-80% of it might be terrible, but boy oh boy, in 2 months I’ll have another 5 minutes of standup that’s good for a local going for me. Maybe in a year I’ll have five minutes that’s good beyond a local level. Let’s churn this mofuckin’ butter.

Your creative mind is like a clogged faucet. We need the water to come out for a while, and then the rusty crappy water’s gonna come out, and then after that the good stuff will come.

Stop waiting for inspiration, stop worrying about how good it is, turn off your inner critic. You don’t need a muse. (Many “muses” were actually just talented women that had their ideas stolen by men. If you’re looking for a muse, try looking in a mirror.) Just write.

If you’re looking at your writing and thinking, “this is awful,” great: everyone feels that way about the first thing that comes out of their faucet.

“But everything flows out of you so easily,” you say.

No it doesn’t!

There is no critical thing you could ever say to me that I haven’t thought in my head 100 times more frequently, 100 times louder, and 100 times meaner, and it was said in my head before the thought even hit the page. The difference is I’ve learned to keep my faucet flowing, even when only muddy water comes out. Primus has a greatest hits album named They Can’t All Be Zingers. Stop trying to pitch a perfect game every time. Start trying to throw the ball. The perfect game comes later.

OK, But I’m Feeling Uninspired!

Man what the hell did I just say about muses?

A lot of people wait around for inspiration to write, whether it’s jokes or poetry or sketches or soap operas or your Great American Novel or whatever. This is a bad process.

If you need inspiration to do something, your process is procrastination disguised as waiting-for-the-right-moment-to-stop-procrastinating. If you’re writing poetry only when you feel absolutely compelled to express yourself in poetry, you’re a slave to your emotions.

As the old proverb says, “The mind is a wonderful servant but a terrible master.” To be specific about this, it means: your brain is terrible at setting yourself up for success but great at doing tasks. If your creative process is “I wait for inspiration to create”, you need to fire your master. Your master has to say: we’re going to create today no matter what.

Your mind is great at doing tasks. Make the task write.

OK, But I Have So Many Other Things To Do!

First off, shut up, you’re spending 20 minutes reading a comedy blog from some random schmuck you met doing comedy somewhere along the way. You could be writing in this time. “But I’m on my phone in the bathroom at work,” you say. Well, your phone has a notes app. You could be writing instead of reading this.

Your phone has a notes app and a voice memo section. Your computer has a keyboard. The person next to you in line at the grocery store will remember you if you turn to them and say “I was thinking about writing a joke about monkeys.” (They may also think you’re insane, but they will remember you.)

This monkey is literally named the long-nosed monkey. Imagine if people were named the way monkeys were. There, there’s a random premise you can steal because I’ll never use it, and now you have a comedic process the next time you wanna spook somebody at the grocery store.

If you literally can’t write, or talk to yourself with your phone recording and then listen back, or whatever, we have to ask ourselves one big question.

What Is Your Process?

Most people with ADHD do not sit at a keyboard and write. That’s fine! I sit at a keyboard and write, but I also type 130 words per minute and decidedly do not have ADHD. (Is my output prolific, or do I just type quickly?)

If you struggle to type, odds are you don’t wanna be near a computer to write your jokes (or screenplay or poetry or whatever).

But what is your process? Is it setting you up for success?

Are you good at improvising on stage? If so, maybe you should get just get on stage more. Do you adapt stories from your real life into jokes slowly? Sounds like you should be writing down as many stories as you know that are interesting. Do you come up with jokes and then reverse engineer premises? You should probably dog-ear every joke idea you’ve ever told and have a notepad or app working with you so when it’s time, you already have the muscles to do your lifting.

What is your process? If your process leads you to struggle, it’s time to try a new process.

When I was a freelance writer, I interviewed Jack Conte. I always liked to ask songwriters and musicians what their process was. Conte told me, and this is a previously unpublished quote (lol me stealing from myself):

“I try to change my process as often as possible… I feel like the same process leads to the same results.”

The same process leads to the same results.

If you’re struggling to write, and you’re using the same process you always do, you’ve set up your process to be you struggling to write.

Is it clearing off your schedule? Is it turning the internet off? Is it putting your phone away? Is it turning music off?

Is it turning music on? Is it having a text message with a friend the whole time so you can spitball your idea as you do it? Is it watching TV so you have something to comment on?

I don’t know!

But what I know is, if it feels hard right now, it’s not because writing it’s hard. It’s because you’re making it hard for yourself.

“I can’t focus.” Well, turn off all potential distractions and sit down and do it.

“I don’t like to sit down and write.” I mean, I do, but maybe I’m a freak. A lot of pro standups come up with ideas and then work them out on stage. (April did this at the Nook and was 10x better than I am!) I’m not personally comfortable doing that; I don’t even think I can do that in real life unless I feel like the people I’m with absolutely think I’m hilarious, which is like maybe six people total on planet earth, two of which are coworkers (Erin and Gabbi if you ever see this I love you and I thank you deeply) and one of which is my cousin (Sue if you ever see this I love you and thank you deeply).

I’m the least funny person in my circle of friends outside of comedy. Half the time I think I got into comedy not for validation, but just to keep up with my best friends when we hang out. (Is this another conversation for my therapist? God damn it.) The idea of just going up on stage and making it up doesn’t feel good to me, but at the same time that’s why I want to run an open mic: to force myself to do it. Maybe that different process will lead to a better result for me. I don’t know.

“I never have any ideas when I can write.” Well, keep a notebook with you so when you do have time to write, you already have the idea.

“I don’t know what I’d write about.” Gary Gulman says we can always go back to our family and our relationships, because they are always unique to us. I’d say anything important to you is part of who you are and is worth writing about, whether that’s the death of a family member or an NBA announcer or a chocolate bar.

“I don’t have any ideas.” Oh my sweet summer child. You are wrong, and here is why.

Ideas Are Easy, Execution Is Hard

If you can answer the question “how are you feeling today” honestly, then you can have something to write about.

Write about how you are feeling today and why. Then look at it, and see what you can pull from it. “I’m good because no one bothered me today” is a joke premise (“I like people, but I want to be left alone. I relate more to ghosts than I do people with iPhones.”) and a poem premise (“the still water remained unchanged, longing never to be stirred”) and a movie premise (someone gets close, he pushes away). “I’m upset because of something my boss said” is a joke premise (“why do people in power get a pass on being an asshole? I think there should be a license exam for middle management. Parallel parking, speed limits, talking to me like a person…”) and a poem premise (“the seed only grows when the large tree swayed away”) and a movie premise (err… Horrible Bosses?)1

Ideas are a dime a dozen, or if you can’t afford that I can get you twelve for ten cents.

When I wrote for Consequence of Sound, one editor (Philip Cosores, now at Uproxx, love you Phil if you ever see this) told one writer (Kevin McMahon, where are you Kevin I miss you are you still in Chicago) to ask me how to write a profile, to ask me what the formula was.

I wrote him a guide, and a template of every generic profile ever. I still look at it sometimes because it’s pretty damn accurate and super funny. (In it, I literally wrote a generic profile, like “paragraph of an action goes here. Quote from person goes here.” Email me if you want it!). I told him that every profile had a thesis, and every thesis could be boiled down to this:

Subject + opinion (of something) = Thesis

Here’s some two examples by me:

Title: Pile: You’re Cooler Than This
Thesis: I only feel cool when I listen to Pile.

Title: The Ivy League of Punk: Loner Chic
Thesis: This band is smarter than most punk bands.

Here’s two clear examples that I pulled from the New York Times today:

Title: Chloe Zao is Yearning to Know How to Love
Thesis: Chloe Zao is yearning to know how to love

Title: How Tragedy, Wealth, and Trump Shaped JB Pritzker
Thesis: Tragedy, Wealth and Trump shaped JB Pritzker.

Dare not accuse the Times of being clever, friends. The New York Times titles really hit home how simple it is.

This is also true with essays, but with essays you don’t have to have the opinion be about the subject in question as much. Like, let’s say you love Breaking Bad. But what you really want to talk about is basketball. Well, that’s insane, but I’d probably click on an article named “How Breaking Bad Shaped The Modern NBA.” Your opinion is wild, and I’m interested.

This is true with profiles, but it’s true with comedy too. (This is, effectively, why emotion is so important in improv and acting.) A joke is not just being silly about a thing. It’s being silly about a thing in the way you feel about it. It’s why it’s relatively easy to make a joke about something absurd on its face (Mitch Hedberg: “A severed foot is the ultimate stocking stuffer.”) but harder to write a joke about something deep and meaningful (insert joke about your deepest insecurity here).

It’s not “this happened and that was funny.” It’s “this happened and I felt this way and that’s funny in this way.” Subject + opinion on some aspect of what they do = thesis. Subject + an opinionated take on the subject with some amount of surprise and whimsy = joke.

Get it? Good.

“But my jokes are bad. My poetry is bad. My story is bad.” Sigh. We just talked about the faucet thing, but here’s another something to remember.

Writing Is Rewriting

NO ONE’S FIRST DRAFT IS GOOD

STOP PRETENDING YOUR FIRST DRAFT HAS TO BE GOD’S GIFT TO EARTH

Sorry about that. By the time you read this blog post, even though a bunch of you probably know I wrote it last night (waka waka), I re-read it and re-wrote it at least twice. You know why?

Because writing is rewriting.

In screenwriting, the first draft is often called “the vomit draft”. You vomit it all out. Boy, it’s a mess. But then you read it and go, oh there’s some good ideas here. Maybe you structured it first and vomited into the structure; maybe you vomited it all and then read it and were like “whoa, this is all out of order” and what you need to do is restructure. I don’t know.

I can say with this post I thought about it as people texted, then I wrote the paragraph headers so that it was structured in a way that would read fluently on a global level, then I wrote into it, and then I reread it to make sure I sounded like my normal level of crazy and not a crazy person’s level of crazy. (That sentence made sense and you understood it.)

There’s a quote from Terry Rossio that hangs in my house:

“Bad writers are bad because they stop too soon. In fact, let’s take a step back. The only quality, I think, that marks the writer as different from everyone else is simply an unwillingness to quit.

Others give up when they learn writing is hard; the writer struggles on.

And underneath that quote on the same mini-poster I made for myself is M. Night Shyamalan on writing the Sixth Sense:

It wasn’t until about the fifth draft that I really began to figure it out. It was then that I realized he’s dead. It took me five more drafts to execute it right.

Imagine if M. Night made the first draft of the movie, the sloppy mess where Bruce Willis was alive and we never really understood what happened or why. Imagine that. We don’t have to. You know why?

Because writing is rewriting.

Go put some words on the page.

Later, you can worry about punching it up and making it good.

For now, all you have to do is write.

Writing is easy in these one easy steps.

Self-Notes / Self-Promotion

• Again, I’m in the Saturday 7:00pm show at Sea Tea and you should go.

• I really want to host an open mic after yesterday’s post, if anyone knows a business with a super slow day that’d want a small crowd.

• Kevin Morrison texted about the blog and said it was “always interesting to glimpse into the mind of Dan Bogosian.” For that, honestly, I fear that you all know my comedic voice better than I do. I would love for someone to give a spark notes summary of what I actually sound like comedically, because I know it in sketch and improv but I still wrestle with what my voice is in standup, and have literally debated having two different ones (like, two different stage personas) for two different types of venues/audiences. And apparently these blog posts sound just like my voice, because I continue to remain myself. (Hi, Kevin!.)

Anyway. As you may have read, last week local comics were really really fucking shitty to Riley. I, personally, did not like this. In fact, it made me really angry. I tried my best to just listen and stay by her side and not be confrontational; if anything, de-escalation is the only real move when you’re surrounded by a flock of meathead misogynists… but what I wanted to do was murder them, even if it meant going to prison.1

They were also racist to Raja. I just don’t fucking understand people. What was the upshot? What was the plan? Is that what being welcoming is? “We all make fun of each other. Like with Dan, a hetero white guy, we make fun of his favorite NFL team. But with Riley we say the creepiest shit imaginable and with Raja we’re a bunch of racist dickheads.” What’s going on in your head. What’s your gameplan. What’s your endgame. What’s your goal. Why are you on this planet.

I was gonna get a Watchmen tattoo but then you nerds had to go and meme it.

Most local standups seem to laugh at the notion of a “safe space”. Let’s ignore that these people get butthurt if you tell them an offensive joke isn’t funny, don’t understand what freedom of speech actually means or what it applies to (you getting kicked out of an open mic is not censorship). Let’s ignore these people are god damn snowflakes and yet call everyone else snowflakes as they use society to systemically oppress others. Let’s even ignore that none of these idiots could pass an American citizenship exam and wear the American flag on clothing in direct violation of the US Flag Code2. Let’s ignore all of that.

Let’s talk about what an Open Mic should be.

What Is The Point of The Open Mic?

One thing I can’t understand about these sausagefest brodown open mics is what do they think the point of the mic is?.

You’re at a restaurant? The point of the open mic, from the business owner perspective, is for it to bring in an audience on a slow night and boost tips for the staff.

At Toyo the other night, there was a waitress and a female bartender, both of which were called derogatory things by multiple comics and the host. Let’s overlook how it wasn’t funny. (Maybe if your IQ is lower than your age, it was?) Let’s overlook how it was offensive.

Are you helping the wait staff get tips?

No?

Why
the

fuck

are you running an open mic?

The point of the open mic from the business perspective is to bring in more business. Now, let’s follow up and ask: is being offensive to any potential patron, no matter how small or uncommon, good for business?

I could be wrong but unless your open mic is at a klan rally, I don’t think it is.

OK But What’s The Point for a Comedian?

Right, fine, you read this blog because you like comedy in some way (or me in some way? I honestly don’t know why the approximately 10 subscribers who are not comedians read this. Marcus are you there? You tell me what’s going on Marcus. HELP ME UNDERSTAND MARCUS.)

The point of an open mic for a comedian is not to try out new material. That’s a subset of the point. The point of an open mic for a comedian is not to get more practice on stage. That’s a subset of the point.

The point of an open mic for a comedian is to get better and for comedians to develop a community.

For some, this may mean performing the same set over and over for a year or years. I am not personally a fan of this, but there’s nothing inherently wrong with it.

For others, this may mean writing a new set every single time. I try to do this, but I’ve also been told that I am an insane person who belongs in an institution by more than one of my peers. Thus far the courts do not agree.

The trouble with bringing new rules into an established mic is, there is already a community there. If this community already tolerates or promotes a certain kind of dickishness, it’s already too late.

“Don’t let one rotten apple ruin the whole bunch,” you say, completely overlooking that this is exactly how apples work. Eh. I think it’s time you throw out the apples or get a new barrel.

How Can You Build Stability With an Open Mic?

Well, you have to have it at whatever frequency you’re claiming it’ll be. If you say weekly and you take a week off, you can rest assured someone may show up and you won’t be there and now that person will never return.

You have to be reliable. You have to build a reason for people to keep coming.

For that, you’re better off starting with less frequent (monthly) and working your way towards more frequent. I’ve seen comedians say “we should do a show like this every month”, paying no attention that they’d do the same sets to the same people and literally kill the ability for anyone to do comedy as other people get bored.

It’s not that less is more. It’s that you have to start small to get big.

Beyond that, you also have to foster a welcoming environment. You know, all that shit that happened at Toyo? That can’t happen. Sorry, Toyo. I’m still fucking mad.

Proposed Rules for an Open Mic

These are the rules that I would propose if I am the host/dictator of a new Open Mic.

1. The Host has to go over the rules at the start. If you miss them, you don’t go up.
   

We’re trying to build a stable body of comedians who go up, and we’re trying to help them get better, and we’re trying to help a business and its employees financially. For that reason, we have to go over the rules. We likely have to go over why with each rule, as I am doing now.

”I was running late and had a friend sign me up,” you say. Yeah I don’t care. We have rules. You missed going over the rules, we don’t have faith you’ll follow the rules, you don’t go up. Your friends favors are not favors to the community.

2. This will be an anti-racist, anti-misogynist, LGBTQIA+ friendly microphone. No TRAASH Comedy.

Nothing Transphobic, Racist, Ageist, Ableist, Sexist, or Homophobic. That is Sea Tea’s term (I believe originating from Allie Rivera).

What is “anti-racist, anti-misogynist, LGBTQIA+ friendly”? I actually really like the guidelines from Do Better Comedy in Phoenix3, of which I am going to remove a handful of things but take several things from:

Do not joke about racial stereotypes, make racial dick jokes, or use racial slurs you don’t identify with. Use discretion with accents; best to stick with your own background. No generic/racist accents. White people hold the most power in society & are generally safe to joke about if it doesn’t punch down…

Do not joke about sexual assault, rape, abortion, miscarriage, roofies, etc. unless it’s about your experience. Do not perpetuate misogynist stereotypes, label women as whores, shame strippers/sexworkers, slut shame, etc. Cis men hold the most power in society & are generally safe to joke about if it doesn’t punch down.

No homophobic/transphobic jokes. No jokes about the LGBTQIA+ alphabet… Do not joke about being gay if you are not gay. No “I’m not gay, but…” jokes… no pronoun jokes if you are cisgender. No “I identify as…” jokes if you are not trans/nonbinary/etc…

There’s a lot more in those guidelines for their mic, particularly in the LGBTQIA+ section but even beyond on doing “respectful” and “clean” comedy. I don’t feel like we need to keep a “clean” environment, and I do feel people who are not in those groups should be allowed to talk about them. But it’s important that they talk about those things from a position of being an ally rather than being a huge piece of shit that makes me want to murder them at a hibachi restaurant on a Wednesday. Do you see the difference? There’s a difference. Do you see it?

If this open mic was done at certain places, like a comedy theater, there may even be a requirement to take a certain class or classes first. Why? Because I think we’d all prefer you having a track record of not being a hateful monster before you go on stage for your first time.

”But I’m a standup,” you say. “I need to figure out the funny way to say something.” Here’s the thing: if you’re struggling to figure out a way to say something in a way that doesn’t sound sexist or racist, it’s because you’re a sexist or racist you dumb piece of shit.

The beauty of the Do Better Comedy Guidelines is it also helps us with the next rule…

3. No Hack Jokes

Well then we have to define what “hack” is. For that, I present to you Wikipedia:

Here’s a few things that are inherently hack on the local level:

• a man talking about his dick for most of his set

• anyone talking about their sex life without talking about any actual deeper feelings

• a woman talking about her pubes. I don’t know why this seems to happen so much, but it does. Is there something about pubes that are particularly fascinating? Why is it a female thing? I don’t… understand?

• pretty much everything covered in the “don’t do this” section of Do Better Comedy’s Guidelines. An “I identify as” joke from a cis straight white guy is one way for society to know you don’t warrant any stage time. You’re not funny, you’re not clever, and you lack original thoughts. Go to therapy, dude.

• joking about being “triggered”. Look, this probably was funny 15 or 20 years ago. I’m not even fully sure that society has caught up to understanding what triggered actually means yet, but I do know that “triggered” is such a common joke that it has its own KnowYourMeme page about it being any hack comedian’s Netflix special’s name, in addition to it actually being a Joe Rogan special’s name. You want to joke about being triggered, you should go get some trauma or shut the fuck up.

There’s a lot more other things, but those are the first few things that I see 100 local comedians do bad variations of the same decades-old joke about. The men joking about sex jokes often aren’t technically offensive, but you know what they are?

They’re hacky as hell. They do not make you look good as a comedian, they do not work with the audience, they don’t have the potential to be great, and often they’re ripoffs of much better comedians even if other people don’t realize it or even if the performer doing it is unaware that this joke was done better 15 years ago by John Mulaney.

I have heard literally five different local standups open with a premise of “men are eating pussy again”. You should throw this joke out. You have the same parallel thinking of four other guys in one of the least populated states in America with a very small standup community. Extrapolate that over the other 339 million people in the other 49 states. Your thought here is hacky. Throw out that joke and start over.

With sex, we may at some point have to say “No Sex Jokes.” Sorry, hacky dudes. It’s not that sex is inherently offensive.

The reason is twofold: if this is at a restaurant, the patrons are potentially eating and no one wants to eat while you talk about fucking your AI girlfriend or how weird your pubes are or whatever perverse bullshit that got you a laugh with your bros. Sex jokes are bad for business at a local starter level. Save them for when you know how to write a good joke, and when you can slip it into a premise that isn’t “I sure wish my penis was used more often” nor “my penis is excellent and I use it all the time.”
We all hear your set and know you’re an incel. If you joke about your loneliness and not your cock, we might even feel empathy for you.

If we’re creating a blanket set of rules for an event that attracts new standups, we have to shut down the hackiest thing that happens, which is Dudes Joking About Their Dick and Sexcapades. Your jokes aren’t funny. You’re welcome to join the mic if you can talk about something other than your hackiest stuff.

If we’re trying to make comedians better, eliminating your urge to please bros as a hack is one of the key ways to do so. Those people need to dig deeper. (But that’s another future post. Maybe Friday.)

4. The order of the lineup will be determined by the host.

"But why?” You say. Well, it sucks to be in the audience when five bad comedians in a row go up at a mic. It’s on the host to say, these are five new people, I’m gonna put someone experienced and decent halfway through that run.

Open mics are not the same as a show or a showcase, but that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try to make this balanced in terms of laughter.

This helps the audience in that they’re more likely to want to pay attention. This, in turns, helps the comedians, as the audience is more likely to stay engaged, pay attention and give actual feedback.

5. If you perform, you have to stay until all the comedians have performed.

Sorry, dude who drove here from an hour and 30 minutes away and thought he could leave at 7:15 after he did his five minutes. We’re trying to foster a community, not honor some meaningless sign-up sheet. We are not New York City, you are not hitting up five different mics tonight. If you’re going up tonight, you’re watching everybody tonight. Which also brings us to the next rule…

6. A hard limit on the number of people who can perform, with a hard time limit on sets.

”I’d like to perform 10 minutes tonight.” I’d like to live in New York City or Los Angeles and not need a day job outside of writing or performing, but I live in the real world. You know what’s fun? Starting at 7 and ending at 9. You know what’s cool? Being able to hang out for a while after and not feel like we’re all losing sleep. You know what’s not fun? The 7:00 open mic that ends at 10:30 or 11pm.

Maybe the limit is 10 people. Maybe it’s 15. I don’t know! The limit would likely evolve over time. But what we’re not gonna do is prevent people from sleeping, because all of us have day jobs. Ultimately, we can either make all the comedians watch the set and have a limit, or not make all comedians watch the set and have no limits. This mic has taken its side: we’d rather build a community and be good to each other than ram as many people as possible. In some places this might be the wrong choice. But you gotta make that choice, and that’s the one I’d make.

Maybe the time limit gets shorter as the night goes on to fit more people in. (The Nook does this.) Maybe it’s 5 minutes for all. But it’s not going to be ”I know you so for you I’m giving you 8 minutes and the others can suffer.” No. We’re trying to build a good thing here. For that, we have to have these rules. We have to make it start as a good thing. And we have to work hard to maintain that good thing.

7. If you talk about the establishment or the staff, you will talk about them positively.

It’s fucking pathetic that this would have to be a rule. I think the reasoning for this is clear: at that mic, those guys were shitty to the one waitress and the one bartender. We’re here to help the business, not give someone grounds for a sexual harassment case at their day job. Jesus Christ.

8. Breaking the rules will be handled in proportion to the way in which they were broken.

You made a generalization and it wasn’t offensive? Well. We can talk. We can figure it out. I didn’t like it, but I can see how it happened, and people make mistakes.

You were a misogynist on stage and made someone fear being assaulted off stage? You will not finish your set. You are not welcome back. You will not enter these doors again. Your rights are not being violated. Your freedom of speech is not being violated. If this were a high school we would call your parents. You are an idiot and a monster and you will be treated as such.

Everyone is human. We have to operate on the belief that this also means that, most likely, everyone is trying their best. If you are an outright bad human being, a bad person, a creep, a violent asshole, a misogynist, a racist, whatever: you will not be tolerated. If your intentions are clear and your aim is good but you made a mistake, there may be a talking to but it’s not the same thing. We do not want anyone to operate from a place of fear.

We just also don’t want fucking assholes.

So What Would a “Closed Mic” Be?

Right, I keep talking about this. That’s basically the same rules as above but invite-only. Maybe I’d add you have to do something new every time, since your audience would already know you as a person in this invite-only event. It’d be like one of those standup classes, but rather than refine material, we’re refining your comedic voice and you’re creating new material to do at an open mic or show later.

”Closed” just means I wouldn’t let Johnny Fuckboy4 into my house. That’s all it means. I don’t like Johnny Fuckboy. He makes me angry.

A Final Thought

Most open mics are run by a host who just wants more opportunities to do standup. (I mean, shit, it’s the reason I’d like to run an open mic: not a tit-for-tat “book me” thing, but just being able to riff jokes between comedians and open with a new five every time would be nice experience. And it seems like there aren’t any mics with a good, healthy supportive community nearby.)

The problem with that is, hosts can keep doing standup at their mic even without caring about the important parts of the mic. They can do it without caring about the business, or the other comedians, or their general audience. They are the master, so they can still get their opportunities from it.

For that, I wish more hosts cared about getting rid of Johnny Fuckboy. I wish more hosts cared about the wait staff. I wish more hosts cared about human beings.

I’m still mad. But maybe one day I’ll have a mic to run, and then people can shit on me in a Facebook group because I cared and had to kick some idiot out.

Somehow, that’s the optimistic future.

Self-Notes / Self-Promotion

• If I did it correctly, this was the first email where the site has a logo. Full credit to Erin Batrna for its graphic design. HI ERIN THANK YOU ERIN I APPRECIATE YOU ERIN.

• Ran the late night Harolds. They got weird and wild at the end, which I love, but there was one that dragged (a 34 minute Harold should never happen). I also feel like some people don’t respect the community aspect of it: at least one person said they were leaving and thus joined up on a team they weren’t called for because it was their “last one”… and then did two more Harolds.
  
  My guy, if there’s even a chance of you not-leaving, then don’t cash-in the “I’m leaving” card. You’re not indecisive, you’re inconsiderate. You’re setting a terrible example for less experienced players and community members.
  
  Maybe I’m getting too old or too experienced but in past years I’ve enjoyed the sloppiness and chaos of the marathon more, and this year flying solo as the leader it took more of a toll on me. I think if I host at all next year, it’ll be in the day hours with awake people. I don’t know that I need to be the Night King ever again.

• The Harold Show was really fun! Part of me wishes Sea Tea had more Harold teams, but part of me also thinks the UCB form of the Harold is so strict and there aren’t enough people that truly understand it to form two Harold teams, let alone three or four.

• The St Patty’s Day Variety show was really fun! A wild improv scene which lead me to an on-stage kiss (lololol) was super funny, and I had a sketch that involved improv with audience members that crushed and went as good as it could’ve. (Some people thought the three audience volunteers were plants, and none of them were.) I received texts from people saying they cried laughing. Mission: accomplished? I think? Yeah.

• Next Sea Tea show: March 21, 7:00pm, Oops! All Cuties, Basement Ghost, Part-Time Lifeguards. Should be a really awesome show, as the two groups I’m not in are legitimate favorites. (You may hear me praise Brad & Maddie a lot; they are both on Oops!, as is Lily, someone who I wish did more sketch and improv stuff because she’s brilliant. Part Time Lifeguards is one of the groups with some of the founders & teachers at Sea Tea. It’ll be a great show.)

• HIF is coming up - that’s the Hartford Improv Festival. In years past I’ve done workshops all day every day. This year I capped myself at two workshops. I don’t think I’m anywhere near done growing as a comedian, improvisor, writer, actor, or performer, but I do think if you do six 2-3 hour workshops in 48 hours, your brain becomes fat free American cheese-like product and stops functioning as anything besides dairy substitute. I made a choice to take only two. I could be convinced for a third, but I don’t think I’ll ever do six in two days again. Know your limits. I’ve found mine.

Subscribe now

In the year 2019, two world-class improv teachers, Will Hines (UCB, WGIS) and Billy Merritt (…UCB, WGIS), released a book: Pirate Robot Ninja: An Improv Fable. These terms existed before then (apparently because of Merritt himself?), but the book certainly popularized the terms for types of improvisors: we got Pirates, we got Robots, and we got Ninjas.

What are they? And how does this apply to sketch, standup, or any other art forms?

Pirates and Robots and Ninjas

Pirates

Per Merritt, Pirates are right-brained.

Off the bat, boooo. Right-brain/left-brain is phrenology, it’s pseudoscience, it’s total myth based on when we didn’t understand anything about the brain. It’s not real. (This is also true about “we only use 10% of our brain.” No! In the 1800s, they didn’t know what the other 90% did and it wasn’t clear how damaging things were because damage to some areas, particularly the cerebral cortex, is subtle. Just because you can’t see it right away doesn’t mean it’s not doing anything. You’re still using the other 90%. You’re using 100% of your brain. Stop thinking like a 1950s Sci Fi writer who doesn’t know what an atom is. Please never show me Limitless again.)

The writer of this movie used 10% of their brain.

But, in the real point of the idea, so-called Pirates make loud, bold choices and take risks. They tend to have a fuck-your-fear attitude, jump into scenes without much of a solid idea or thought in mind and certainly without much of a plan. Their strengths include strong initiations, big characters, being the “wise guy” or “unusual character”, and being high energy.

Picture your scene partner hopping out and embodying a wild character. “Arrr, matey.” There. That’s a Pirate. Pirates should be mindful of not trampling over their scene partners suggestions, continuing to listen, and giving their scene partners the chance to play bold or weird characters.

I’ll personally add I see a lot of pirates always playing high status.
Hey man, add variety to your big character.
You can do two different kinds of big characters. Shoot, I hear numbers go even higher than two these days. New research shows that there may be numbers as high as four. You don’t always have to play the king of the scene. You can play a big loser, too, pirate. Even if you’re gonna stay a pirate, try some new things.

Robots

Per Merritt, Robots are left-brained. (YOUR BRAIN DOES NOT WORK THIS WAY GOD DAMN IT. OUR EDUCATION SYSTEM IS FOUNDATIONALLY BROKEN.)

More helpfully, Merritt suggests so-called Robots are in their head, more think-y types. Robots are good at adding necessary details to a scene (justification, location, etc.), keeping track of information, and justifying what’s happening and keeping it grounded. Similarly, Robots should be considerate towards making their own bold choices, not always relying on others to initiate, and not compromising their character’s deal even as other players make big moves. Picture your scene partner stiff as day after you do something weird. “Your action does not compute.” There, that’s a Robot.

I’ll personally add I see a lot of veteran players fall into being “robots” because they’re used to playing with wild or chaotic players. And that stinks! We all need to do this sometimes, but if you always find yourself being the straight man and grounding everyone else, you might be a robot and you may not be having as much joy as you could be. Imagine all the fun you could be having if you were … having fun. Try embodying something! Go out there with your brilliant idea! Gah!

Ninjas

Per Merritt, Ninjas are people who balance between the two and do what each scene calls for. (But! Our brains! They’re in two halves and surely one dominates the other! Do Ninjas primarily use the middle third of the brain??? YOUR BRAIN DOESN’T WORK THIS WAY PLEASE NEVER TALK ABOUT LEFT-BRAINED OR RIGHT-BRAINED THE YEAR IS 2026 THIS SHIT WAS DISPROVEN MORE THAN HALF A CENTURY AGO GAAAAARRRALK$#*&$#!@!%#@DAAHSLKJDHSLKJD.)

Everyone should, within this theory, strive to be a Ninja, and Ninjas need to be conscious that they’re doing the right thing the scene calls for. (The book touches on being kind with editing, letting scenes breathe and have faith, but… you know. Ultimately, it’s “do good improv.”)

Diagnosis

If you find yourself identifying as either a pirate or a robot and it’s still your first two years of improv, fear not: you are simply human. We all have a natural tendency and style. So you’re a thinky-thinker and have a hard time without planning ahead. Robot, my guy, it’s OK. Work on your weaknesses and they’ll get better.

So you love big characters and steamroll your scene partners. Pirate, my friend, it’s OK. Work on your weaknesses and they’ll get better.

If you’re in your first two years of improv and think you’re a ninja, first off: haha, let a teacher judge that, you don’t even know who you are as an improvisor yet. Second, you still get to focus on your weaknesses and they’ll get better, you just don’t fit into this sort of binary worldview. (I know there’s three pieces but it still feels binary. After all, your brain is either left-brained, or right-brained, or it’s neither. Do you see how nonsensical the left-brained/right-brained idea is? I hate phrenology unless it’s an album by the Roots.)

What I’d like to do, is reframe these things and adjust them a bit, as…

Actor, Writer, Comedian

Let’s look at it this way instead. This is my hypothesis, and I’m honestly surprised I have yet to really hear other people talk about it in these terms.

Actor

Oh man. You always play with emotion. You steal scenes. You’re the star of the show. You come out and you embody something.

Sure, yeah, you forget your scene partner’s details, the things that were said before, and yeah sure, you often “yes, and-” the wrong thing. But you’re the star. People like the star, right?

Your strengths are often that you’re not making game moves, that you’re embodying someone and filling out the world. You’re probably better than your peers at object work. You fill out the scene. You react when someone does something to your character. You get laugh lines from just playing the character you’re playing.

Your weaknesses are often that you’re not making game moves. You’re too focused on embodying your character that you’re not paying enough attention to others. Or sometimes, with some actors, you’re paying so much attention to your scene partners and what they’re doing, that you forget to add anything — you remember to “Yes,” but forget to “and”. You forget or lose sight of the original comedy of the scene and just stick to what you know - yourself.

Going back to my own sketch & game terminology, some actors tend to make horizontal moves. “This is what my character does,” you say, rarely expanding on who your character is in a meaningful way. But you act the crap out of that simple thing you do. When you ride a bicycle on stage, people see a bicycle. You see a bicycle.

You might struggle to write a sketch. You tell yourself you don’t need sketch, you’re an improvisor. Later, someone else is in a great sketch and you feel sad that you didn’t write a good one or get to be in one. “Oh well,” you tell yourself. “I’m an actor.”

Writer

When you see a game established, you play it like it’s a violin. You’re the second person in on every tag-run, and you’re always thinking of the biggest thing to close with, a new final beat.

Sometimes, you get bummed when someone edits a tag-run, because you know there was a higher place beyond God, Santa, the ship sinking, the plane crashing, the volcano erupting, and outer space for your finale to take place.1 You had creative ideas.

Sure, yeah, you often just stand there. Sometimes you just say things dryly and you don’t really emote. You forget to embody something because you’re not actually imagining the world around you. You can’t help but see the improv stage for what it is: a stage with people on it, dressed in regular old clothing.

You’ll get a big laugh and remember the exact thing you said forever, wondering how it is you did it, reconstructing, analyzing, trying to mish-mash your star moment back together since you’re often used to being the straight-man. Often, your laughs are simple like, “don’t do that.” Sometimes, they’re clever, and you think it’s funny but no one else does.

Often, you get laughs but don’t even understand why people are laughing. “I’m just saying how I feel and what I think,” you say, overlooking that those are things you are supposed to do, you’re just supposed to do it in-character. Some writers verge on the character always being themselves.

You’ll write good sketches but other people won’t always cast you in their own. You’ll read a line and mumble to yourself, “I know (other person) would’ve read this better.”

One easy way to know if you come from a writers-brain is if you’ve started an email newsletter about comedy. Hey-oh! Self-burn. Give me some ointment. Yikes.

Comedian

Hey! You’re a comedian! You mix writing and acting depending on what the scene needs! Alright! You may have as many as two skill sets!

Pretty similar to pirate / robot / ninja, but I think it’s easier to think in these terms because it’s more clear on where you start, and it’s more clear on where you need to go.

Diagnosis for Improv

If you’re an actor, you should focus on listening more. You should focus on The Game. You should focus on writing. You should try to be the straight man and endowing your scene partner and making them be the funny one (or if you’re always the straight man, try being someone who is not yourself on stage). Try something new every time.

If you’re a writer, stop writing your scenes. Start embodying it. Try to make every line full of emotion. And if you’re trying to be clever: fucking cut it out. Be genuine. Feel something. (Preferably not anger, and not horny with anyone who could realistically be perceived as someone you actual wanting to date. Sorry, hetero men, you really shouldn’t play horny to younger women. It’s not funny; it’s creepy. “But it’s just what came to mind in the scene!” Yes, because you are a shallow horndog. Keep it in your pants.)

If you’re a writer, try genuinely feeling something on stage. Try more horizontal moves. Try acting.

These three types also fit things in other types of comedy.

Diagnosis for Sketch & Standup

You can often tell who someone is deep down by what they laugh at: the writer laughs at the good joke, and doesn’t always care for the personality — or worse, sometimes feels guilty for laughing at the personality & acting. (In my heart: it me.) The actor laughs as long as the person on stage is charming. (In my eyes, it most people.)

The comedian either never laughs or always laugh. Never laughs? Stop analyzing it, stop thinking about how you would’ve done it. Always laughs? Raise your standards unless you’re teaching a class, in which case please support your students. You can dislike some things. It’s totally OK to not find something funny. There are jokes in this post you didn’t find funny. It’s fine.

Truthfully, I think rather than speaking in terms of “weakness” or “strength” — self-improvement is so judgmental — it helps to think in terms of natural versus focus. You’re naturally a writer, so focus on your acting. You’re naturally an actor, so focus on your writing.

In standup, some comedians overpower the stage and are all personality. These people are effectively actors who may only be able to act as themselves. Dane Cook, Bernie Mac: these people are easy to imitate, but if you wrote down their jokes and told them to your friends, they wouldn’t laugh. You know why?

Because you’re not fucking Bernie Mac, dude.

A thousand years from now, anthropologists will study this pant-shirt combo. It looks like an advertisement for 1992.

Some comedians are all the written word, and then end up succeeding by growing a pseudo-personality around that: Steven Wright, Mitch Hedberg, to a lesser extent Demetri Martin. Yeah, we get glimpses of a personality, but these guys aren’t winning you over by taking the stage and dancing (Bernie Mac) or by taking off their shirt and doing a weird tongue wiggle (Dane Cook). They’re doing it with jokes, jokes that if were written down and told to your friends, they’d laugh. These people are writers.

Focus on your focus. Your jokes are good on the page? I’m not saying go take dance lessons (though that or acting class might help). I am saying consciously make an effort to put some stank on how you say jokes. (I’m a writer by nature, so this is always what I’m thinking on stage, in improv, sketch, acting or standup.)

You know how people like you off the bat and people say you just speak funny? Sit down with the blank page and actually write some stuff.

I think a lot of fun-people-at-the-party are satisfied with just coasting off their personality. To them, I suggest writing better jokes and focusing on doing the right thing instead of costing off knowing how you do it crushes.

There’s an old saying attributed to Ed Wynn: “A comic says funny things. A comedian says things funny.”

Well, Ed, imagine how funny the people are who say funny things funny are. When you say funny things in a funny way, you’ll be great.

I’ll always be chasing being a comedian. I don’t yet know how to just say a normal sentence and get a laugh. (What’s more, I know someone feels like they’re being laughed at instead of with in standup because their setups get laughs, and I am constantly telling them: girl, that’s the goal, you should be celebrating, you’re already a pro. You can do improv and sketch all you want but if they’re laughing at the setup you’re already a master of standup. YOU ARE SUBSCRIBED TO THIS BLOG YOU KNOW WHO YOU ARE.)

A BOOK (SERIES) REVIEW

Standup comedian Mike Lukas wrote a trilogy of books called the Funny Muscle series. Book 1, Finding Your Funny Muscle, is one of the only books I’ve ever seen on finding your comedic voice, which is the most important thing.

Anyone can write jokes. What’s your perspective? Where are the jokes coming from and aimed at? He has one good chapter on it, but references it a lot and asks good questions on it.

Book 1 (Finding Your Funny Muscle) also touches on how there are 36 types of jokes. I’m not going to go over them here, but rest assured: uuuuh there aren’t 37. He’s right. There’s 36.

Book 2 (Fine Tuning Your Funny Muscle) delves into these types of jokes more deeply. I found it less helpful, and is my least favorite of the trilogy, but it’s real in-depth analysis of joke writing and how to sense other comedian’s comedic voices. (I call it voice, he calls it lens.) He does some additional digging in to your Comedic Lens/voice as well. If you’re mostly performer and not a writer, this is the book that’s most helpful for you.

Book 3 (Flexing Your Funny Muscle) ironically fine tunes your performance, teaches you how to inflect certain emotions, gives you tips on making your setups more interesting to lead to bigger laughs… honestly, if you’ve been performing standup a little while and want a refresher of why some things work and why other things don’t, this is the book for you. This is the one I personally found most helpful. Which book is best depends on who you are and where you are in your journey.

He offers his own email in the books. Verified! It’s real! I’ve emailed him and he responds back.

He offers one-on-one coaching; I’ve done one session with him and likely will do another after I focus on certain things for a few months. He, like me, has a very analytical mind and is focused on process and structure rather than one specific joke or story. He’s personal throughout. It’s easily readable. He shits on his own mistakes rather than other people’s.

As a trilogy, 5 stars two thumbs up. The whole series can be purchased here. Probably the best set of books for standups I’ve read so far. I love the Judy Carter books on comedy, but they are stuck in the bygone era of the 1980s. Mike Lukas’ books were written in 2023! It’s useful in the present moment.

SELF-NOTES AND RANDOM UPDATES:

• I don’t think enough people in improv and sketch consider how each school teaches differently and how each school leads to a certain sort of improv/sketch, and how if you’re trying to find yourself, you’re better off looking at who your favorites are and looking at that path. I was already thinking that when it came up in conversation with someone which is why two of the last three posts were about it. (Hi, Riley!)

• Jerry’s Pizza open mic is fine. Huge bar crowd, not a lot of other people paying attention. A true open mic: a chuckle is a victory and a laugh from 3-5 people is a sweeping victory. I’ll still go most Sundays. 20 minutes away is so much closer than everything else.

• Reminder: Hosting tomorrow’s Harold Marathon at Sea Tea from 10:30pm to 2:30am! I’m in the 9pm Harold show with Blind Date! I’m in the 7pm variety show! Come to the Sea Tea Comedy Theater!

• I wish local standups would stop applauding hackery. I’d elaborate but…

• I am still constantly shocked by how many local standups are just… douchebags and go on stage and try to be douchebags? I totally admit when I started I had 2-4 douchey jokes per set, but they were also aimed at how these are my character flaws and I don’t like these things about myself, instead of just “here’s another joke about my penis”. Pro-tip: if you’re going to an open mic and you’re primarily going to talk about your dick, stop going to open mics and please never do comedy and don’t reach out don’t comment don’t hit me up don’t call me stop unsubscribe goodbye.

• So many local standups are fucking creeps. The Toyo open mic was partially funny (a great 9/11 joke! Darren was hilarious!) but majorly infuriating and most of the comics as people were… awful. I don’t want to be overprotective but watching a group of men talk about the one woman standup at the open mic as if she isn’t a human being is disgusting and awful. Who raised these fucking losers?

• After that happened, Riley (hi Riley!) said I needed to start an all-female open mic. One minor problem: I’m a man.
  
  That said, I do think at some point I’m going to host a closed mic at my house, where I’d limit it to like 5 people going up but have invited 10-15 people, and if go up you have to do 5 minutes of all new material, and afterwards you have to pet my dog Iris. She’s a good girl. You should pet her.
  
  Sincerely though, tell me if that’s a good idea or a dumb one. Even if it’s a dumb one, please pet Iris. She wants you to pet her, specifically you, the person reading this right now.

This past Sunday, my girlfriend of three & a half years and I broke up. It was not bitter; no one cheated on the other, no one was cruel to one another. In the end, we wanted different things long term and decided it was better to split up so one day we could be friends. Breaking up with her was the hardest thing I’ll ever do.

It’s put me in a sensitive place, because, as it turns out, I’m a human being who feels emotions. Gross, I know.

As I get space from it, I think about how there are two version of us. There’s the us when we’re alone or with friends, and then there’s us on stage. So many people are fearless on stage but fearful in real life; this is super common in improv (“that’s the character doing it, not me” somehow shielding us from judgement).

I think the inverse is true in standup: in real life, we can do the brave thing, but on stage alone, we’re fearful.

But in the context of how hard real life is… why is anything in comedy hard at all? Why are we so afraid of the judgement of strangers and whether they laugh at what we clearly thought was funny?

I Ain’t Scared of You, Motherfuckers

As mentioned in a previous post, there is a quintessential Bernie Mac story from a Def Comedy Jam.

For those not in the know, Def Comedy Jam was a series on HBO in the ‘90s, primarily featuring black standups, and it could make-or-break a comedy career, particularly black comics because, while it’s still fairly segregated today, standup was ULTRA segregated in the ‘80s and ‘90s.

Bernie Mac was a relatively unknown up-and-coming standup comedian. Accordingly:

Bill Bellamy was backstage with Bernie at [HBO's] "Def Comedy Jam" when he coined that phrase. The story goes that when [Bernie] did "Def Comedy Jam," it was a big night, with Bill telling him how everybody knew that if you did really well, it meant good things were going to happen to you afterwards. The guy that went on before Bernie got booed--and Bill was backstage with Bernie and told him, "Be careful out there--this audience is tough." Bernie replied, "I've been going at this too long--I've worked too hard--I ain't scared of 'em!"

When Bernie Mac hit the stage that night, his jokes were … mostly fine. But his personality won over the show. And he did it right off the bat by dancing his way out there and telling the crowd “I ain’t scared of you, motherfuckers.”

You can watch a longer version without the dancing here, or a short version with some of the dancing here (please watch, it’s worth if only as a time capsule):

These jokes are really just okay. Some, not-good even. But what is funny is a guy whose face is airbrushed on his pants dancing around awkwardly and then commandingly saying he is not afraid of me.

In my dreams, I wear pants with Bernie Mac’s face on them.

What is funny is that he is not scared.

Bernie Mac named his book after this moment. It’s also the name of a good documentary about him.

But the specifics, in this case, is less about “how can your personality win over people?” and more “why are we scared in the first place?”

Bernie Mac won out because he wasn’t scared. If you fail at a joke and you bomb, your significant other isn’t leaving you1, you’re not getting fired from your job, you won’t have a heart attack: nothing happens except you feel bad for a while.

Fail Day

Experienced improvisors at Sea Tea will know the short form class, 302, has several important lessons in it that go well beyond short form improvisation.

The biggest lesson I learned in improv came from Improv 302 at Sea Tea, on a day called Fail Day.

In it, you perform standard short form games - party quirks, the dating game, you name it. But instead of normal, easy references and cultural icons and historical people, it’s… weird references, things no sane human being would know, obscure movies only 12 people on earth have seen and Marvel characters that got thrown out and will never be seen in the movies. (Hellcow, anyone? No? Suit yourself!)

And you go up there, and you try to perform the crap out of it. And it’s hard, because no matter how intelligent you are: you do not know.

And the guesser guesses, and it’s hard, because no matter how much pop culture they have consumed: they do not know. (If Hellcow isn’t obscure enough, try Dogwelder. You know how sometimes you weld dogs? Dogwelder: comic books can be stupid.)

And the laughs still come, because in improv, the laughs often come from genuine, sincere effort, and not excellent comedy writing.

I think this carries over to standup somewhat. (Genuine, sincere effort failing will always be funny on some level.) The same lesson also has a different takeaway: in standup, you can go up and fail, and people don’t really care if you fail or you bomb. People care if it rattles you. They just want to see someone maintain control. (Turns out it was Bill Cosby who first said “You can’t come over the PA and say you’re going to try to land the plane. You have to land the plane.”)

Don’t Be Afraid…

There is no way to avoid bombing except to get better and gain the experience of knowing what works in what rooms and why it does or doesn’t work.

So go up there and fail. Why are we afraid? Your effort is funny enough.

If it’s standup, acknowledge it and stay in control.

If it’s improv, know your failing was a success.

There’s a scene in Band of Brothers I think about all the time. After they land in Normandy, one soldier is rattled and afraid. Another is seemingly fearless. The scared guy says he’s afraid of dying. The other says:

There’s a saying in mountain biking. There’s two types of riders: those who’ve fallen off their bike, and those who haven’t fallen off their bike yet.

You are going to fail. It could be once, it could be ten thousand times, but it’s going to happen. So why are we afraid?

There’s a song by Akron/Family: “Don’t Be Afraid, You’re Already Dead.”

The lead singer/songwriter has since actually died, but he wrote very simple lyrics: “Don’t be afraid, it’s only love. Love is simple. Don’t be afraid, you’re already dead. Love is simple.” (Which, if we want to be a total theory nerd: the only time in the whole song the music isn’t in a simple time signature is on the word “simple”. Musical subtext is awesome.)

The point is…

You can’t avoid failing sometimes. (Don’t be afraid.) To try and avoid that failure is foolish: it’s a totally necessary part of the process. (You’re already dead.)

I can tell you a general idea of what works and what doesn’t in improv, sketch, and standup, but there are things we are all only going to learn by putting ourselves out there and eating tons and tons of shit. Our individual senses of humor only get refined by eating tons and tons of shit. Our joke writing gets better by eating tons and tons of shit. I still have to eat tons and tons of shit (errrrrrrrrr); if I didn’t, I’d be on tour as a standup or in some TV writer’s room right now.

Why are we afraid?

Life is hard. Life is painful. Comedy isn’t going to hurt you.

I ain’t scared of you motherfuckers.

See you at the open mic.

Self-Notes / Self-Promotions

• Late Night TV writing class is going well. I never really thought of how the intro bits to these late night shows are sketches, but in a way they are the best sketches to learn from: you have no time to write them because if it takes more than a day it’s old news, you have to keep your production values low, and you have to ream 3-5 jokes in 60 seconds off 5-15 seconds of setup. If you wanna learn how to be good at sketch, watch Trauma Me, Elmo from Late Night With Stephen Colbert or Celebrating Great Black Americans from Colbert. That’s a comedy writing masterclass.

• I am in the 7:00pm St. Patty’s Day Variety Show on Saturday. Please come!

• I am also in the 9:00pm Blind Date Harold show on Saturday. Harolds are fun and a great way to just see pure Game in improv. If you’re trying to understand Game, I recommend going — even if you despise me, there will be 3 Harolds, which means you should see 15 different games in less than 90 minutes. That’s pretty good, imo. Also, the team Blind Date are all great at game. It should be a really fun show.

• Saturday is also Sea Tea’s Harold Marathon, where people do Harolds all day. I will be hosting it from 10:30pm to 2:30am. (This will be the first year I am not trying to do the whole thing; I have the aforementioned Late Night TV writing class from 2-5, and every year for the past 3 years I’ve come in second in total Harolds despite being there all day, and doing improv from 9am to 2:30am just to fall one Harold short of being ‘the guy’ is just… like… fuck how many I’m gonna do, let’s just do some good ones.)
  
  If you’re a night owl who wants to join in on the loopiest, weirdest improv you’ll ever see, see you tomorrow night!

• When I lived in Brooklyn, I saw standup once or twice a year despite loving it and never saw improv because it just made me feel bad from being priced out of UCB classes. (You try to spend $500 on a class when you make $28,000 a year and spend $1000 a month on rent. In retrospect: jesus christ how did I exist in New York City 2013-2015?) Now I’m going to a bunch of shows and traveling to see a lot of the major standups with some people I like (Ilana Glazer, Gary Gulman, Josh Johnson).
  
  In some ways, I’m not at all the person I thought I’d turn out to be. In other ways, I’m exactly the person I thought I’d become.

• I hope this post wasn’t too personal since it is a comedy blog. Thinking of my life from this lens helped/helps me. Life is so weird and if anyone tells you otherwise, they’re hiding something. I’m fine and I’ll be over it soon enough.
  
  I’m not afraid of trying to be the person I want to be and I refuse to regret effort spent towards that. I’ll try again soon.

This post is just to list who went where.

If you feel something is wrong, please email, comment, or contact me. I’m danielbogosian@gmail.com. It’s pretty easy to get in touch with me.

Note I include (never made house teams) because in some cases, it’s a core part of their story. (Broad City wouldn’t have happened if they just, made a Harold team. Nick Kroll wouldn’t have done stand up if he just, made a house team.) Other times, I use it to show how it is very clearly not a measure of how good someone is. (How dare you imply Donald Glover is anything short of incredible.)

If you’ve auditioned for something and not gotten it, look at those people. It’s not the final station on your train ride and it’s not the end of your story. It’s one chapter.

Also note I tried to only include people who are moderately famous or have television appearances. I’d love to have listed all the people from Sea Tea, for example, but to my knowledge there’s only truly two who have TV credits. No shame. We’re in Hartford, Connecticut. It is not a hub of television production.

Because this post needs an image to lead and I didn’t want it to be a logo, here’s a photo of Will Forte with half of his face shaved.

There goes my hero. Watch him as he goes…

* - Asterisk indicates their inclusion in at least one other group.

Groundlings / Groundlings Sunday Company

Gary Austin
Jordan Black
Heather Ann Campbell* (note: she hated it, claims to have learned nothing at the Groundlings, and says they were incredibly sexist. Only made Sunday company)
Tony Cavalero
Jennifer Coolidge
Valerie Curtin (founding member)
Mikey Day
Christian Duguay
Nat Faxon
Will Ferrell
Chloe Fineman*
Will Forte
Daniele Gaither
Ana Gasteyer
Heidi Gardner
Ryan Gaul*
Lisa Gilroy*
Kathy Griffin
Phil Hartman
Cheryl Hines
Jan Hooks
Nicole Randall Johnson
Chris Kattan
Taran Killam (note: was still doing the Groundlings while on SNL, and was a Groundling after already being on MadTV. Dude has the weirdest comedy performer timeline I’ve seen.)
Lisa Kudrow
Phil LaMarr* (note: to my knowledge, was the first Groundling to also be trained elsewhere)
Jon Lovitz
Tim Matheson (founding member)
Melissa McCarthy
Michael McDonald (the comedy one, not the singer)
Pat Morita (founding member)
Oscar Nunez
Laraine Newman (founding member)
Kaitlin Olson
Cheri Oteri
Ashley Padilla
Brian Palermo
Chris Parnell
Edi Patterson
Nasim Pedrad
Cassandra Peterson (aka Elmira)
Jim Rash
Paul Reubens (aka Pee Wee Herman)
Maya Rudolph
Dax Shepard
John Solomon
Jack Soo (founding member)
Octavia Spencer
Mindy Sterling
Julia Sweeney
Brooke Totman
Michael Watkins
Kristen Wiig

Groundlings Training (were never Groundlings or Sunday Company but took classes there)

Cecily Adams*
Tyra Banks
Joe Canale* (note: explicitly states he just wanted the training)
Adam Carolla*
Matt Cook
Eliza Coupe*
Greg Daniels* (note: was Conan O’Brien’s sketch writing partner and was assumed to be a shoe-in but got SNL instead of the Groundlings)
Abby Elliott*
Jimmy Fallon
Josh Gad
Jay Kogen
Desi Lydic*
Conan O’Brien* (note: was assumed to be a shoe-in but got SNL instead of the Groundlings)
Tom Segura
Paul Vogt* (may have declined being on main stage, is occasionally a guest on main stage)

Upright Citizens Brigade / UCB: Original Members

(Note: None of these people were trained at UCB.)

Matt Besser*
Armando Diaz*
Ali Farahnakian*
Neil Flynn*
Drew Franklin*
Rich Fulcher*
Adam McKay*
Amy Poehler* (note: was still doing Sunday UCB shows while on SNL)
Ian Roberts*
Rick Roman*
Horatio Sanz*
Matthew Walsh*

The Family

(Note: this was an iO/improv Olympic group coached by Del that just all went on to greater things and I find it worth noting. Also note they started as The Victim’s Family.)

Matt Besser*
Del Close* (coach, not player)
Ali Farahnakian*
Neil Flynn*
Pete Hulne*
Adam McKay*
Amy Poehler*
Ian Roberts*
Miles Stroth*
Tina Fey*

Upright Citizens Brigade (House team members)

Aziz Ansari (NYC)
Eric Appel (NYC)
Anthony Atamanuik (NYC)
John Ross Bowie (NYC)
Kurt Braunohler (NYC)
Nicole Byer (NYC)
Heather Ann Campbell* (LA)
D’Arcy Carden (NYC)
Neil Casey (NYC)
Wyatt Cenac (LA) (note: was already a successful comedy writer, having written for King of the Hill for three years, season 8 & 9, 2003-2005 and Daily Show from 2008-2012; UCB LA opened up in 2005)
Sebastian Conelli (NYC)
Rob Corddry (NYC)
Eugene Cordero* (NYC)
Mel Cowan* (LA)
Andrew Daly (NYC) (note: was notoriously the first UCB graduate to get a big TV or movie role with MadTV in 2000)
June Diane Raphael (NYC)
Katie Dippold (NYC)
Colton Dunn* (NYC)
Abby Elliott* (LA)
Bridey Elliott (NYC)
Chloe Fineman (LA)*
Ali Ghandour (LA)*
Brett Gelman (NYC)
Chris Gethard (NYC)
Lisa Gilroy* (LA)
Matt Gourley* (NYC)
Ed Helms (NYC)
Will Hines (UCB)
Rob Huebel (NYC)
Brian Huskey (NYC)
Jack Johnson (LA)
Ellie Kemper* (NYC) (also was taught improv in high school by Jon Hamm. Just had to say that.)
Jen Kirkman (LA)
Jordan Klepper* (NYC)
Lauren Lapkus*
Jason Mantzoukas (NYC)*
Jack McBrayer* (NYC)
Kate McKinnon (NYC)
Billy Merritt (NYC)
Eric Moneypenny* (LA)
Kyle Mooney (NYC) (Sketch, not improv)
Seth Morris (NYC, later became director of Los Angeles)
Bobby Moynihan (NYC)
Brennan Lee Mulligan (NYC)
Ego Nwosdim (LA)
Shannon O’Neill (NYC)
Adam Pally (NYC)
Lennon Parham (LA)
Vladimir John Perez* (NYC and LA)
Dannah Phirman (NYC)
Aubrey Plaza (NYC)
Rob Riggle (NYC)
Matt Rogers* (NYC)
Paul Scheer* (NYC)
Ben Schwartz (NYC)
Kate Sidley (NYC)
Jessica St. Clair (NYC)*
Drew Tarver (LA)
Chloe Troast* (NYC)
Paul Walsh (NYC) (note: auditioned 5 times before getting on)
Casey Wilson (NYC)
Harris Wittels (LA) (note: was already a successful standup comedian)
Zach Woods (NYC) (note: started at UCB at age 16)
Sasheer Zamata (NYC)

Upright Citizens Brigade (never made house teams)

Lucia Aniello* (NYC)
Mary Beth Barone (NYC)
Mike Birbiglia* (NYC)
Rachel Bloom (NYC)
Key Cannon* (never took training there – only performed)
Adam Conover (NYC)
Tarik Davis* (NYC)
Paul W. Downs (NYC)
Ayo Edebiri (NYC)
Ilana Glazer (NYC)
Donald Glover* (NYC)
Peter Gwinn* (NYC) (note: may never have tried, was a teacher at UCB more than a student)
Pete Holmes (MYC)
Abbi Jacobson (NYC)
Jordan Klepper (NYC)*
Nick Kroll* (note: him not making a Harold team is one of the reason’s he pursued standup)
John Mulaney (NYC)*
Jamie Rivera*
Kelly Marie Tran* (NYC) (note: both her Second City team and the only UCB shows she performed only have Asians. Cannot find whether that’s their choice or whether the schools lumped them together.)
Milana Vayntrub (LA)
Bowen Yang* (NYC) (note: was put on the all Asian sketch shows that Kelly Marie Tran took part in; also note, was not UCB trained. Came from Dangerbox, an NYU improv team not taught at UCB and as far as I can find was never trained in UCB improv.)

Note: many performers performed at Second City as well that are not listed in “never made house teams” because they never auditioned nor took training there (and Second City doesn’t have house teams). This includes most of The State, Rachel Dratch, and several other Poehler-era SNL cast members who would guest at UCB, but are in no way UCB trained.

Just A Weird Thing Worth Noting About Eliza Coupe

Eliza Coupe* could not afford UCB or Peoples Improv Theater classes, so she actively attended UCB shows and read improv books and self-taught herself the improv she knows when it comes to UCB style. UCB shows are and have always been $10. Improv classes are now over $500. This didn’t fit very snugly in “didn’t make UCB house team but took classes there”, so it gets its own weird section. She has performed there but rarely, if ever, took a UCB class or tried out for UCB teams. This is per a Variety Article. Seriously.

Second City

(Note: no separation from the Players Workshop, which is inseparable to Second City from 1985 to the mid90s in terms of training)

Scott Adsit* (Chicago, 1989-1998) (note: performed at iO but never trained there)
Alan Alda* (Chicago)
Bill Alton (Chicago)
Alan Arkin (Chicago then New York, performer 1960-1963)
Dan Aykroyd (Toronto, performer 1973-1975)
Dan Bakkedahl* (Chicago)
Nate Bargatze (Chicago)
Ike Barinholtz* (Chicago)
Ali Barthwell
Vanessa Bayer* (Chicago)
Jim Belushi (Chicago, performer 1976-1978 & 1980-1981)
John Belushi* (Chicago, performer 1971-1972)
Matt Besser* (Chicago)
Ashley Nicole Black (Chicago)
Roger Bowen* (Chicago)
Peter Boyle (Chicago)
John Brent (Chicago)
Quinta Brunson (Chicago)
Jack Burns (Chicago)
Aidy Bryant* (Chicago)
Liz Cackowski* (Chicago)
Frank Caeti* (Chicago)
Hamilton Camp (Chicago)
Joe Canale* (Chicago)
John Candy (from Toronto, but Chicago then Toronto per the Second City history book, 1973-1976)
Key Cannon* (Chicago, Las Vegas)
Steve Carrell* (Chicago, performer 1988-1994; understudied Chris Farley)
Dan Castellaneta (Chicago, performer 1982-1987)
Bill Chott* (Chicago)
Del Close* (Chicago – people think of him as original teacher more than alumni, but he was in second wave of Second City, performer/teacher 1972-1982)
Stephen Colbert* (Chicago, performer 1988-1994; understudied Steve Carrell)
Mel Cowan* (Los Angeles)
Bill Cusack* (“Northwest” – Rolling Meadows, IL, then Chicago) (note: this is John Cusack’s brother, but there is no record I can find of John Cusack ever getting SC training, even though he has taken part in occasional Second City shows as a guest.)
Severn Darden (Chicago)
Martin de Maat* (Chicago) (NOTE: Also taught at Columbia College and was Scott Adsit’s and Mick Napier’s favorite improv teacher.)
Armando Diaz* (Chicago)
Andy Dick* (Chicago then Los Angeles)
Melinda Dillon (Chicago, performer 1959-1961, 1964-1965)
Paul Dinello* (Chicago, performer 1987-1993)
Kevin Dorff* (Chicago)
Kevin Doyle (Chicago)
Rachel Dratch* (Chicago, performer 1995-1998)
Andrew Duncan (Chicago)
Matt Dwyer (Chicago)
Marc Evan Jackson (Detroit, later taught in Los Angeles - if this should be under J for Jackson, let me know)
Ali Farahnakian* (Chicago)
Chris Farley* (Chicago, performer 1988-1991)
Jon Favreau* (Chicago)
Tina Fey* (Chicago, performer 1995-1997)
E.R. Fightmaster* (Chicago)
Eric Filipkowski (Los Angeles)
Pat Finn* (Chicago)
Joe Flaherty (Chicago and Toronto, performer 1969-1979)
Neil Flynn* (Chicago)
Drew Franklin* (Chicago)
Rich Fulcher* (Chicago)
Jeff Garlin* (Chicago, performer 1985-1986) (NOTE: was never mainstage or TourCo)
Tom Gianas (Chicago, performer 1990-1995)
Lisa Gilroy* (Toronto)
Jon Glaser* (Chicago)
Matt Gourley* (Chicago)
Pete Grosz* (Chicago)
Peter Gwinn* (Chicago)
Bill Hader (Los Angeles) (note: got SNL off a class share and thus was never mainstage or TourCo.)
Charna Halpern* (Chicago)
Valerie Harper (Chicago)
Barbara Harris (Chicago)
Sean Hayes (Chicago – only took classes, never made TourCo or Mainstage or Etc)
Anthony Holland (Chicago)
Pete Hulne* (Chicago)
Bonnie Hunt (Chicago, performer 1985-1990)
Brendan Hunt* (Chicago)
TJ Jagodowski* (Chicago)
Jay Johnston* (Chicago)
Tim Kazurinsky (Chicago, performer 1977-1979)
Keegan-Michael Key (Detroit then Chicago)
Richard Kind (Chicago, performer 1983-1987; Los Angeles, performer 1988-1989)
Robert Klein (Chicago, performer 1965-1966)
Jordan Klepper (Chicago)*
David Koechner* (Chicago)
Mina Kolb (Chicago)
Phil LaMarr* (Chicago)
Zohra Lampert (Chicago)
Eugene Levy* (Toronto, performer 1973-1975)
Shelley Long (Chicago, performer 1976-1977)
Julia Louis-Dreyfus (Chicago)
John Lutz* (Chicago)
Jane Lynch* (Chicago)
David Mamet (Chicago) (NOTE: Never made TourCo or mainstage, but says classes and attending influenced him as a playwright.)
Joe Mantegna (Chicago)
Andrea Martin (Toronto, performer 1974-1976)
Mae Martin (Toronto)
Jack McBrayer* (Chicago, performer 1997-2002)
Abby McEnany (note: only joined Touring Company at age 40 in 2008 despite taking classes since her early 20s in the 90s)
Adam McKay* (Chicago, performer 1993-1995)
Tim Meadows* (Chicago, performer 1989-1991)
Susan Messing* (Chicago)
Seth Meyers* (Chicago)
Thomas Middleditch* (Chicago)
TJ Miller (Chicago)
Jerry Minor (Detroit then Chicago then Toronto – the first person to do all three)
Colin Mochrie* (Toronto)
Jordan Morris (LA)
Lamorne Morris (Chicago)
Andrew Moskos* (Chicago)
Felonious Munk
Bill Murray* (Chicago, performer 1972-1974)
Brian Doyle Murray (Chicago, performer 1969-1971)
Joel Murray* (Chicago, performer 1985-1989)
Mike Myers* (Toronto, performer 1986-1987, Chicago, performer 1988; then back to Toronto, performer 1988)
Alan Myerson* (Chicago)
Jessica Myerso* (fka Irene Ryan) (Chicago)
Mick Napier* (Chicago)
Amber Nas
Tara Ochs
Bob Odenkirk* (Chicago, performer 1991)
Matt Offerman (Los Angeles)
Catherine O’Hara (Toronto, performer 1974-196)
Nicole Parker* (Chicago)
David Pasquesi* (“Northwest” – Rolling Meadows, IL, then Chicago)
Sheldon Patinkin (Chicago, one of the originals)
Ronald Pederson (Toronto)
Jordan Peele* (Chicago)
Asher Perlman* (Chicago)
Amy Poehler* (Chicago – never made main stage)
Eric Price* (Chicago)
Gilda Radner* (Toronto, performer 1973-1974, then Chicago)
Harold Ramis* (Chicago, performer 1968-1974, then Toronto for SCTV)
Sam Richardson (Detroit, then Chicago)
Jamie Rivera* (TourCo, no idea if he got training here)
Joan Rivers (Chicago, performer 1961-1962 – though note, the biography of Second City says she preferred bits to scenes and never quite fit in)
Ian Roberts* (Chicago)
Tim Robinson* (Detroit, then Chicago)
Rick Roman* (Chicago)
Jon “Pep” Rosenfeld* (Chicago)
Amber Ruffin* (Chicago)
Tami Sagher* (Chicago)
Paul Sand (Chicago and New York)
Horatio Sanz* (Chicago, performer 1992-1998)
Will Sasso* (Chicago)
Avery Shcreiber (Chicago)
Amy Sedaris* (Chicago, performer 1987-1993)
Martin Short* (Toronto, performer 1977-1978)
Paul Sills (founder)
Robert Smigel (Chicago)
Jim Staahl (Chicago, performer 1970-1974)
Brian Stack
David Steinberg (Chicago, performer 1964-1966, brief 1967 stint)
Ryan Stiles* (Toronto)
Eric Stonestreet* (Chicago)
Cecily Strong* (Chicago)
Miles Stroth* (Chicago – Note: Was the Player’s Workshop and said he learned almost nothing there)
Jason Sudeikis* (Chicago – the only person to get mainstage on first audition, Las Vegas when it opened)
Rich Talarico* (Chicago)
Robin Thede* (Chicago and Los Angeles)
Betty Thomas (Chicago, performer 1973-1976)
Dave Thomas* (Toronto, performer 1975-1977)
Miriam Tolan* (Chicago)
Kelly Marie Tran* (note: both her Second City team and the only UCB shows she performed only have Asians. Cannot find whether that’s their choice or whether the schools lumped them together.)
Eugene Troobnick (Chicago)
Nia Vardalos (Edmonton and Toronto, performer 1987-1990; Chicago, performer 1990-1994)
Gillian Vigman* (Chicago)
Matthew Walsh* (Chicago)
Stephnie Weir (Chicago)
George Wendt (Chicago, performer 1974-1980)
Fred Willard (Chicago, performer 1965-1966)
Steven Yeun (note: never made main stage or TourCo, but took classes)

iO (fka Improv Olympic)

(Note: no distinction made between iO and iO west)

Scott Adsit*
Dan Bakkedahl*
Ike Barinholtz*
Vanessa Bayer*
Matt Besser*
Matt Braunger (note: was kicked off his improv team for not taking further classes and started stand up as a means to keep doing comedy)
Aidy Bryant*
Heather Ann Campbell* (note: started at iO as a freshman in high school.)
Joe Canale*
Key Cannon*
Jeremy Carter*
Bill Chott*
Del Close* (co-founder)
Stephen Colbert*
Eliza Coupe*
Armando Diaz*
Andy Dick*
Paul Dinello*
Kevin Dorff*
Rachel Dratch*
Ali Farahnakian*
Chris Farley*
Jon Favreau*
Tina Fey*
Pat Finn*
Neil Flynn*
Drew Franklin*
Rich Fulcher*
Jon Glaser*
Matt Gourley*
Pete Grosz*
Peter Gwinn*
Charna Halpern* (co-founder)
Pete Hulne*
TJ Jagodowski*
Jay Johnston*
David Koechner*
Phil LaMarr*
Lauren Lapkus*
John Lutz*
Desi Lydic*
Jack McBrayer*
Adam McKay*
Tim Meadows*
Susan Messing*
Seth Meyers*
Thomas Middleditch*
Eric Moneypenny*
Andrew Moskos*
Joel Murray*
Mike Myers*
Arden Myrin
Mick Napier*
Bob Odenkirk*
David Pasquesi*
Asher Perlman*
Vladimir John Perez*
Amy Poehler*
Andy Richter*
Ian Roberts*
Tim Robinson*
Rick Roman*
Jon “Pep” Rosenfeld*
Amber Ruffin*
Horatio Sanz*
Will Sasso*
Megan Stalter (note: this is the only iO person of note that I 100% know never made an iO team)
Eric Stonestreet*
Cecily Strong*
Miles Stroth*
Jason Sudeikis*
Rich Talarico*
Robin Thede*
Vince Vaughn
Gillian Vigman*
Matthew Walsh*

Annoyance Theatre

James Asmus
Ike Barinholtz*
Vanessa Bayer*
Aidy Bryant*
Beth Cahill
Joe Canale*
Stephen Colbert*
Martin de Maat*
Paul Dinello*
Jon Favreau*
Kate Flannery
Jeff Garlin*
Pete Hulne*
Melanie Hutsell
Lauren Lapkus*
Lisa Lewis
Jane Lynch*
Susan Messing* (co-founder)
Mick Napier* (co-founder primarily a teacher here as opposed to someone trained here)
Conner O’Malley
David Pasquesi*
Asher Perlman*
Kerri Randles
Andy Richter*
Adam Rubin
Amy Sedaris*
Faith Soloway
Joey Soloway
Jason Sudeikis*
Matt Walsh*
Chris Witaske

Toronto Production of Godspell

Note: This is not comedy training, but look at the overlap with Second City Toronto. Felt notable to me.

Victor Garber
Eugene Levy*
Andrea Martin*
Gilda Radner*
Martin Short*
Paul Shaffer (musical director)
Dave Thomas*

Compass Players

Note: Many of these don’t have other training but this also predates improv schools really being a thing; this group more or less lead to every major school everywhere.

Alan Alda*
Ed Asner
Roger Bowen*
Del Close* (note: ImprovOlympic co-founder, Second City teacher, widely considered the father of the Harold)
Elaine May
Mike Nichols
Byrne Piven* (note: Jeremy Piven’s dad)
David Shepherd (note: founded Playwrights Theatre Club, The Compass Players, the Canadian Improv Games, and ImprovOlympic)
Paul Sills (note: Second City’s original director, but never trained there – he was the OG director)
Jerry Stiller (note: Ben Stiller’s dad)

boom Chicago

Note: though now they offer education, all of these people were performers there, and their education through boom was simply performing shows every night of the week and the training for joining the team.

Ike Barinholtz*
Suzi Barrett
Ally Beardsley
Liz Cackowski
Heather Ann Campbell*
Joe Canale*
Kay Cannon*
Tarik Davis*
Colton Dunn
E.R. Fightmaster*
Pete Grosz*
Brendan Hunt*
Matt Jones*
Joe Kelly
Jessica Lowe
Josh Meyers
Seth Meyers*
Andrew Moskos* (co-founder)
Dan Oster*
Nicole Parker*
Jordan Peele*
Jon “Pep” Rosenfeld* (co-founder)
Amber Ruffin*
Tami Sagher*
Allison Silverman
Jason Sudeikis*
Carl Tart
Miriam Tolan*

The Improv Institute

Note: Improv Institute only existed from 1984 to 1994.

Paul Dinello*
Joel Murray*
Jon Favreau*
Adam McKay*
Dave Pasquesi*
Horatio Sanz*

National Lampoon Radio Hour (writers and radio performers)

Henry Beard* (co-founder of National Lampoon)
John Belushi*
Chevy Chase
Christopher Guest
Doug Kenney* (co-founder of National Lampoon)
Bill Murray*
Gilda Radner*
Harold Ramis*

National Lampoon (print magazine)

Ron Barrett
Henry Beard* (co-founder)
Anne Beatts
John Hughes
Al Jean
Doug Kenney* (co-founder)
Brian McConnachie
Chris Miller
Michael O’Donoghue

Harvard Lampoon

Henry Beard*
Andy Borowitz
Greg Daniels*
Jim Downey
Fred Gwynne
Al Jean
Colin Jost
Doug Kenney*
B.J. Novak
Conan O’Brien*
George Plimpton
Alan Yang

Honestly, a ton of others, but mostly names as writers as opposed to improvisors or comedians or actors. I tried to list only the ones I thought people might know.

The Actors’ Gang

Note: They are not a comedy troupe or school, but an acting troupe that has stumbled into a lot of comedians.

Jack Black
John Cusack*
Jon Favreau*
Kyle Gass
Helen Hunt
Jeremy Piven*
John C. Reilly
Tim Robbins (founder)

ComedySportz (short-form focused)

Steve Agee
James Thomas Bailey
Joe Bereta
Wayne Brady
Liz Cackowski*
Frank Caeti*
Jeremy Carter* (Kansas City)
Key Cannon*
Bill Chott*
Jeff Davis
Jack DeSena
Colton Dunn* (note: was on a high school ComedySportz team with Nick Swardson)
Matt Gourley*
Dan Harmon (Milwaukee)
Dustin Hodge
Derek Mears (Bakersfield)
Eric Christian Olsen
Jack Packard
Asher Perlman*
Eric Price* (Milwaukee)
Lauren Pritchard (note: Wayne Brady taught her improv in Florida way before then. Weird!)
Rob Schrab (Milwaukee)
Iliza Shlesinger
Ari Stidham
Nick Swardson (note: was on a high school ComedySportz team with Colton Dunn)
Jason Sudeikis* (Kansas City)
Chris Tallman
Victor Varnado
Jessica Williams (aka Punkike Johnson)

ACME Comedy Theatre

Cecily Adams*
Greg Benson
Alex Borstein
Adam Carolla*
Felicia Day
Jackson Douglas
Ralph Garman
Fred Goss
Maz Jobrani
Jamie Kaler
Jessica Kiper
Lisa Kushell
Jerry Lambert*
John P. McCann
Joel McHale*
Paul Rugg
Wil Wheaton

Chicago City Limits in New York

Eugene Cordero*
Jerry Lambert
Paul Scheer *

The PIT (Peoples Improv Theater)

Hannibal Buress (was already a successful standup)
Ali Farahnakian* (founder, was not taught there)
Ellie Kemper* (was also taught improv by Jon Hamm in high school, see below)
Patti Harrison
Kristen Schaal

Magnet

Lucia Aniello*
Armando Diaz* (founder, not instructed at Magnet)
Jamie Rivera* (teacher & performer, was not instructed at Magnet)
Matt Rogers*
Miriam Tolan* (teacher & performer, was not instructed at Magnet)

Theatresports

Thomas Middleditch*
Colin Mochrie*
Ryan Stiles*

The Footlights (College Sketch Group for Cambridge)

Douglas Adams
Clive Anderson
Richard Ayoade
Martin Bergman
Tim Brooke-Taylor
Graham Chapman
John Cleese
David Frost
Stephen Fry
Eric Idle
Paul King
Hugh Laurie
Dan Mazer
David Mitchell
John Oliver
Robert Webb

The Oxford Revue (College Sketch Revue for Oxford)

Rowan Atkinson
Terry Jones
Dudley Moore
Michael Palin

Unexpected Productions in Seattle

Joel McHale*

Improv Asylum

Ryan Gaul*

Sea Tea Comedy Theater

Vladimir John Perez* (co-founder, not trained at Sea Tea, TV actor)
Lori Michaud
Kate Sidley* (co-founder, not trained at Sea Tea, Emmy winning writer for Late Show with Stephen Colbert)

The Pack Theater

Heather Ann Campbell* (founder)
Eric Moneypenny*
Miles Stroth* (founder)
James Austin Johnson

Improvised Shakespeare

Peter Gwinn*
Thomas Middleditch*
Asher Perlman*

The Piven Theater Workshop

Craig Cackowski*
Joan Cusack*
John Cusack*
Jon Favreau*
Byrne Piven* (note: Jeremy Piven’s dad, founder here)
Jeremy Piven*

Dudley Riggs Brave New Workshop Classes for Improv (or just Brave New Workship) - MN

Louie Anderson
Mo Collins
Tom Davis
Al Franken
Penn Jillette
Carl Lumbly
Peter MacNicol
Paul Menzel
Melissa Peterman
Pat Proft
Nancy Steen
Peter Tolan
Linda Wallem
Lizz Winstead
Cedric Yarbrough

Various Chicago Theaters that are not Second City or ImprovOlympic/iO

Chris Hogan

The Committee (San Francisco)

Scott Beach
Roger Bowen*
Hamilton Camp
Del Close*
Gary Goodrow
Larry Hankin
Kathryn Ish
Ellsworth Milburn
Alan Myerson* (founder; was fired from Second City because of a grudge from Del)
Jessica Myerso* (fka Irene Ryan)
Irene Riordan (aka Latifah Taormina)
Richard Stahl

On NYU collegiate improv/sketch teams

Donald Glover*
DC Pierson*
Matt Rogers*
Chloe Troast*
Bowen Yang*

On Georgetown’s improv team

Mike Birbiglia
Nick Kroll*
John Mulaney*

Ark Improvisational Theater, Wisconsin

Joan Cusack*
Chris Farley*
Pat Finn*

Ultimate Improv

Heather Campbell*
Ali Ghandour*
Matt Jones*
Dan Oster*

Trained in improv at Middlebury college in Vermont

Jason Mantzoukas*
Jessica St. Clair*
Rodney Roffman

Trained In Improv at local theater(s) that never got named or cannot find the name of

Lisa Arch
Nelson Ascencio
Whoopie Goldberg (San Diego somewhere)
David Herman
Anjelah Johnson (note: she says it was at her church, but I’m skeptical of the Church -> MadTV pipeline.)
Spencer Kayden
Jill-Michele Melean
Amber Ruffin* (somewhere in Omaha for years before Charna Halpern told her to move to Chicago)
Debra Wilson

Another Just Fun Weird Thing Worth Mentioning

Jon Hamm taught Ellie Kemper improv in high school as her drama and theater teacher for one year. She went to the same high school as Jon Hamm just years later. Jon Hamm went to high school with Paul Rudd; Hamm’s older sister dated Paul. Paul Rudd is older than Jon Hamm.

Isn’t life strange?.

OK Fine Here’s One More Weird Thing

Seth Meyers and Peter Grosz were college roommates at Northwestern.

Famous Comedians Rejected from SNL Auditions

Note: These were not declined, but weren’t offered; this also excludes those who were offered or took jobs as SNL writers. I again point at things like this to show that your failure or rejection at an audition does not mean anything about your future or the quality of your work.

Nicole Byer (2013)
Steve Carrell (1995)
Jim Carrey (twice, 1980 and 1986)
Louis CK (1993)
Stephen Colbert (1992)
Jennifer Coolidge (1995)
David Cross (1992)
Tommy Davidson (1987)
Geena Davis (1984)
Pat Finn (1995)
Dave Foley (1985)
Jon Glaser (1995)
Donald Glover (twice, 2002 and 2008)
Godfrey (1998)
John Goodman (1980)
Kathy Griffin (1990)
Tiffany Haddish (2013)
Kevin Hart (2001)
Caleb Hearon (twice, 2019 and 2022)
Rob Huebel (multiple times, unknown years)
Kevin James (unknown year in the 90s)
Ellie Kemper (2008)
Kerri Kenney-Silver (1996)
Tom Kenny (1990)
Nick Kroll (2008)
Lisa Kudrow (1990)
Lauren Lapkus (2012)
Marc Maron (1995)
Jack McBrayer (2001)
Bruce McCullough (1985)
Kevin McDonald (1985)
TJ Miller (2008)
Kel Mitchell (2003)
Eric Moneypenny (2005)
Lamorne Morris (2010)
Kumail Nanjiani (2012)
Jordan Peele (2008)
Aubrey Plaza (2008)
Paul Reubens aka Pee Wee Herman (1980)
Jeff Ross (2000)
Paul Scheer (twice, 2001 and 2002)
Amy Sedaris (1995)
J.B. Smoove (2003)
Scott Thompson (1985)
Keenan Ivory Wayans (unknown year but credits the rejection as the reason In Loving Color happened)
Stephnie Weir (1999)
Henry Zebrowski (2010)

Famous Comedians Rejected from SNL Auditions Who Became Writers On SNL

Basically an addendum to the previous section: these people wanted to become sketch TV not-ready-for-primetime-players, and instead, became… people in the writer’s room on SNL.

Dave Attell (1993)
Zach Galifianakis (1999, but he only wrote for 2 episodes before quitting)
Mindy Kaling (2005; was offered a job as a writer but declined)
Adam McKay (1995, became the head writer and is probably the best success story of “just a writer on SNL”)
John Mulaney (2008, similarly, this worked out for him)
Akiva Shaffer (2005, but, I mean, The Lonely Island, so in a way he was on SNL)
Jorma Tacconne (2005, see: The Lonely Island)

Worth Noting Overall About Schools & Philosophies

• iO/ improv Olympic came up with the term “Harold” but used it as a blanket term for all longform improv.

• Keith Johnstone focused on “improvised theatre” more than “improvised comedy” but is not associated with a particular comedy theater.

• Second City focuses solely on “Yes, And” and then teaches sketch structure in sketch writing classes.

• Predating the mid90s, Second City had no education wing; The Players Workshop and iO taught and Second City only had performances. This is why there is so much overlap until the Players Workshop closed. (Still: Second City only cares about “Yes, and” and about sketch performance, iO is more focused on longer forms and what we think of as improv.)

• The Pack Theater (or at least, Miles Stroth) focuses on “position play” rather than “game”; this is more about how to position characters to ratchet up the humor through recognizing what type of scene you’re in than it is about “establish the form of what we’re doing”. It’s a different way of looking at game, but still essentially game.

• UCB’s “Game” is essentially a short-cut to sketch form, and how to make a rapid-fire comedic show. They used to say this upfront. Now they do not, and people sometimes look at longer forms (monoscenes, spokanes) and wonder why there isn’t always game there.

• Second City’s style of coaching is “no notes.” They essentially encourage you to find your own voice (good!) but also don’t typically provide a framework for how/where/why things didn’t work (bad). This isn’t true if you’re on the mainstage, in which case the director is giving you a ton of notes and molding you to their taste.

• UCB’s style of coaching is game-centric. “You missed this game opportunity” “you ignored this game move” “the true first unusual thing actually was this”? UCB style coaching. There are compliments/positives in here, too, but the focus is primarily on game.

• iO has recently moved away from coach- and teacher-centric coaching to class-centric coaching. This isn’t to say the coach or teacher isn’t in charge. It’s that “what did we like?” “what didn’t we like?” leads the way. This style? That’s from iO.

• Mick Napier, most associated with The Annoyance, feels both iO and Second City are too “note free”. He tries to provide a framework to success by pointing out common faults. (“You’re performing for an audience. Your goal is to entertain an audience, not do good solid improvisation.” “There should be variety to your choices and staging.” These are paraphrased quotes from one of his books.)

• The Annoyance itself focuses on holding character, and has an additional two rules to improv: “Protect the freak” (don’t ruin the weird thing) and “Get your own shit first” (everyone should be funny, focus on establishing yourself and your bit before you focus on giving someone else a bit.)

• TJ & Dave focus on listening and patience. They are slow players even from their respective school(s). For this reason, many non-improvisers do not find them wonderful, and many improvisers are blown away. You can buy their full sets. I have, and in my opinion: they’re excellent.

• You may have noticed several people with the name Cackowski. Craig Cackowski is a legendary improvisor and teacher, part of the threeprov team Dasariski with Rich Talarico and Bob Dassie. You’ve seen him on Drunk History, among other things. His sister is Liz Cackowski, someone you’d recognize from several appearances in things by The Lonely Island including Popstar. She’s married to one of the Lonely Island, Akiva Schaffer, who also directed The Naked Gun remake, among other things. Carla Cackowski is Craig’s wife. They met doing improv. IMPROV: PEOPLE LIKE EACH OTHER.

• Because boom Chicago is in Amsterdam, and an English show for visiting tourists and natives who primarily speak Dutch (but remain fluent in English), boom Chicago effectively teaches improvisers to never use references and seek universal humor. Its founders also intentionally looked for physicality and big characters when at the time Second City and iO focused on truth; in Vulture’s words, “baring your soul was far less important than being able to stand on a stage with good posture, eyes on the audience, project to the last row of the theater, and make people laugh.” They notoriously even had a heckling workshop: to get on stage, you had to deal with your castmates heckling you until you customized a joke to make them shut up. Per Liz Cackowski: “Physical comedy, voices, big gags – that’s what worked. Boom helped us all become character actors.”

In Heather Ann Campbell’s words, all improv is the same, but schools have different approaches to the same thing: character (Groundlings), game (UCB), sketch-and-beat-centric (Second City), position (The Pack). The philosophies and approach differ, but they’re all ultimately aiming for the same thing. (Listen to the Yes, Also podcast interview with her. It’s great.)

Shoot, there’s a whole Wikipedia page on differing theories of how humor works - personally, a big fan of the benign violation theory, I think the others are a bit outdated or stupid. There is no consensus on anything and this is an art, not a science.

But what we can talk about with more concrete and less ethereal vibes is pedagogy. This may seem like me using an SAT word to some, but I was a Music Theory major, and in any good collegiate Music Theory class, pedagogy comes up because the way we teach music theory changed and basically inverted in the past 100 years. (And, also, if you’re that big of a nerd: in my opinion, that’s why people are so uneducated when it comes to music theory and that’s why music is so much simpler now. We stopped teaching people how music works and to think independently, and started teaching them to play the recorder and go work in the factory. But I digress…)

Pedagogy, per the Oxford English Dictionary, is “the art, occupation, or practice of teaching.” Wikipedia says its “the theory and practice of learning.” The point is, it’s the history of what we teach and how we teach it.

There is no definitive universal way of teaching or doing comedy, sketch, or improv. But we can say that each school has their own pedagogy, and we can examine it. We will start with some brief history of improv - but this will branch into comedy beyond improv.

A Brief History of Improv Pre-Chicago

Theater has existed for millennia. (Remember, the ancient Greeks did theater, not just the English bards. Every culture has a history of theater. PEOPLE LIKE ENTERTAINMENT.)

The Italians did what was called commedia dell’arte - essentially, they had a collection of tropes and narratives that actors would get to make their own, telling the same fables over and over with their own spin on it. (I encourage you to re-read that sentence if you ever feel like you can’t come up with a fully original scene, sketch, or premise. It’s always about how, and not about what).

Over time, these improvised theatrics developed their own games.

In the mid 1900s, Viola Spolin collected all these theater games and taught them to communities believing play was the best way to unite people of different cultures together.

Spolin then founded Theater Games at the Playwrights Theatre Club in Chicago. Two guys in Theater Games went on to found the Compass Players (one of which was Spolin’s son), also in Chicago, which, as it turns out, lead to virtually every comedy theater you’ve ever heard of.

The Compass Players, aka Everything You’ve Ever Heard of

The Compass Players were a little over 30 different people who did improv, 95% of which have their own Wikipedia entry because they’re freaking notable people, man.

The Compass Players did improvised scenes (from here out, we’re just gonna say improv). Some were funny, some weren’t - they thought of themselves as theater, not comedy. They were based in Chicago.

A photo of some of the Compass Players. From Left to Right: I don’t know, I don’t know, Elaine May, I don’t know, Mike Nichols, I don’t know, and I don’t know.

Two of these people were Elaine May and Mike Nichols, aka Nichols and May. They moved east, to New York City.

Two of these people were David Shepherd and Paul Sills, who founded Second City. They stayed in Chicago. (Though eventually, they took their idea of “New York and LA argue over #1 city, we’re #2” and took it to Canada, in Toronto.) Paul Sills was Viola Spolin’s son.

Another one of these people was Del Close, who was one of the main teachers/leaders/directors at Second City in the 1970s but eventually founded iO. iO used to be known as ImprovOlympic, but the Olympics threatened to sue them — not a joke — so they’re just iO and we can all wonder what those initials stand for. Del founded it with Charna Halpern. (Del briefly moved slightly west before moving back to Chicago, and that’s why he missed out on starting Second City.)

Several members of the Compass Players co-founded The Committee. These were people that briefly moved to New York before moving to San Francisco. Once in San Francisco, they took on more members. (Del Close was also a part of The Committee before moving back to Chicago and joining Second City.)

Some of those members from The Committee (then known as The Committee Theater) founded The Groundlings.

But What About the Other Schools?

OK, fine. Here’s a summary of the 70s through present day:

Second City originally didn’t teach classes; a school nearby, the Players Workshop, did. That is, until the 90s: then Second City opened up their own school and by the early 2000s the Players Workshop was dead because their source of business was people who wanted to train for Second City. Second City did and does improv into sketch, and each sketch show had a director that guided its players on how to be funnier, what sketches were good and bad, and, you know, directed.

Del Close was considered the guru of improv there in the 70s, but as it turns out he was a sexist racist drug addict asshole, so he got kicked out somewhere along the way. That’s arguably why he founded improvOlympic: man’s gotta do something.

A director at Second City in the 90s was Mick Napier. Mick Napier founded The Annoyance while working at Second City because he disagreed with how most of improv was taught (more on this later in this post). His sketch shows as director were also more adult-oriented and off-beat.

The Upright Citizens Brigade was a huge experimental sketch group across all of the Chicago scene in the 90s. Eventually, everyone except four people left (mostly to go be successful comedians - Adam McKay became head writer on Saturday Nigh Live, Neil Flynn left to pursue movies and appeared in The Fugitive before starring on Scrubs, etc.). This is the UCB4. They moved to New York City and started their own theater, and school, and education program.

The PIT and the Magnet are UCB spin-offs, in a sense. Two Chicago comedians who taught at UCB in New York, Ali Farahnakian and Armando Diaz, didn’t like how UCB was teaching people improv. They left to create their own school - The Peoples Improv Theater, or The PIT. In 2005, Armando Diaz decided he didn’t like how things were at The PIT and started his own school - that’s the Magnet Theater. For a while in the mid-2000s, none of the schools “got along” with each other and people from one would rarely play with someone from the other. That is not the case at all anymore.

By the time it was known improv and sketch schools lead to people being on television, several cities formed their own schools. This includes the short-form focused ComedySportz and long form improv schools like the ACME Comedy Theatre in Minneapolis.

Rewinding for a bit, in the 70s, Keith Johnstone was a guy taught directly by Viola Spolin but was focused more on theatrical improv than comedic improv. He wrote a book in the 70s called Impro (which suggests the only on-stage object you can use in improv is a balloon but provides no guidance on how to use said balloon??? Keith are you OK???). Some people who learned under Keith moved to Seattle where the improv theaters there are more theatrically focused.

In the 2000s and 2010s, UCB opened up another location in Los Angeles. This lead to a boom there: Second City and iO also opened up locations in Los Angeles. In New York, there was a weekly show that was a Cage Match, an improv team versus another where the winner moved on to improv next week. The original record setting duo was Heather Ann Campbell (now a writer on Rick & Morty) and Miles Stroth.

Miles Stroth was an in-demand teacher. He and Campbell moved to Los Angeles. He founded The Pack Theater. Later, Eric Moneypenny joined and leads their sketch school.

Will Hines was a big UCB improvisor, more or less part of the first wave of students taught by the UCB4. He went on to found his own school, based in Los Angeles with some teachings in New York City and plenty online, called WGIS (pronounced “wee jus”), which stands for World’s Greatest Improv School.

Got it? Good.

What Are These Schools Philosophies & Pedagogies?

iO teaches you to improvise theater. They are less comedy focused, but are almost certainly the best school for stage presence and object work. Reviews change on how good of a place they are almost each season as they continuously re-tool their education system. Historically, it’s where its students learned theater, object work, stage presence, and embodying a character. In 2022, it was bought out by two real estate magnets. iO is likely not what it used to be as its program is always changing, for better or for worse, but it’s worth noting it’s historical culture because the culture is the culture.

Second City teaches “Yes, And.” They focus on improv-to-sketch: to them, improv is idea generation. Second City Toronto is known to be less-patient, less-political and more laugh-oriented than SC Chicago. SC Chicago is historically known for more patient play and some local/regional political commentary. This hasn’t been the case for a while — they, like UCB, were bought out by a corporation and are not what they used to be — but it’s worth noting the reputation as the culture is the culture.

The Annoyance teaches you to be funny and hold on to your schtick. Not necessarily at the expensive of your stage partner… but it’s less concerned with them than you. It’s where people get their weird on. Their philosophy is literally “Protect the Freak”.

Essentially, most schools teach you to listen to your stage partner and let them change you (primarily emotionally, but in other ways too). The Annoyance tells you the best thing you can do to make it easier for your scene partner is embody a character and figure out your deal and hammer it, so your partner can have an easy time responding to it. “Protect the freak” could also be taken as “don’t stop someone from doing their bit.”

Similarly, The Groundlings teach character-centric comedy. In improv they teach you short form almost the entire time. Even when they do long form, it’s rarely purely organic or premise; it’s mostly “we have this character, where do we put them? Who do they meet?”. It’s much more on rails, which is why people from The Groundlings rarely end up playing with people from other schools on stage. Their sketch program is character-sketch or character-game centric. Their education itself is much more acting-focused than writing focused.

The Pack lets every teacher teach their own way their own thing. Miles Stroth himself teaches what he calls position play - that there are only a few types of scenes in improv, and by learning them we know the handful of types of moves we can make, and voila, we can become masters knowing how to position ourselves within those scenes for success. The Pack used to number their classes, but none are prerequisites for the other. I took improv 401 there having not taken 101, 202, or 301. I believe they do not number their improv classes now but do number their sketch classes.

They allow sketch teachers to teach their own philosophy as well, though 101 is a prerequisite for 201. Eric Moneypenny runs the sketch program and is the best sketch teacher you could ever hope for.

Upright Citizens Brigade, or UCB, teaches you “game” or “game of the scene”. This helps with shorter long form stuff - the modern Harold as we know it and montages need people to find funny fast and make funny moves fast, and that’s game. Their improvisors often go on to explore other forms, but their core teachings rarely inform this playing, and it comes to its players with time.

It is worth noting, if I may create my own stereotype: most SNL successes from the 1980s through the year 2000 were an actor from the Groundlings paired with a writer from Chicago (Will Ferrell & Adam McKay comes to mind). It’s worth noting most people who come from UCB and become stars were rarely the house team members - they’re mostly standups who didn’t get on house teams but used their training to assist in joke writing (John Mulaney, Pete Holmes), people who left to do their own thing after not making house teams (Ilana Glazer and Abbi Jacobson / Broad City), or people who got small roles on TV shows (Ben Schwartz, Ayo Edebiri, every small person on sitcoms basically).

It’s also worth noting that the iO used to teach the Harold a different way. UCB’s rigid structure is not what the Harold always was. It was originally the word Del Close used for all of long form improvisation that was just a random collection of scenes. You can thank the UCB4 for there being two wildly different versions of what a Harold is.

The PIT and Magnet still essentially echo UCB’s teachings but have their own approach to it. Or at least, that’s my understanding; those are two schools I’ve yet to take a class from. If I’m wrong, hit me up, email me, comment, punch me in the face, follow your heart.

The Brooklyn Comedy Collective was founded with the idea of being more inclusive to other communities, having noticed that most of the other New York City schools were (i.e., definitely still are) a wee bit straight-white-man. They teach standup and clowning, too; some of their teachers overlap at other schools, including UCB.

boom Chicago is, ironically, in Amsterdam and not Chicago. They recruit the best improvisors, historically from Chicago, and take them to Amsterdam where they have daily improv and sketch shows. Their alumnus have talked about how performing for an international audience teaches you to perform better and be less referential. They now have an education program, though I’ve read very little on what it’s focused on.

School Crossovers and Which One is Best?

Are any of these philosophies “better” than the others?

No. You may like one more than another, you may find yourself naturally better at one style than the other, but that doesn’t make any “better”. Only a handful of people have truly done all the schools; because the Groundlings is only in Los Angeles, east coast improvisors rarely learn those ways and tools. Most of the Chicago scene learns from more than one place because they’re all there (also several schools not listed that don’t have famous alumni yet are there! There’s so much in Chicago!).

Most of the New York schools still essentially teach game but have their own approach. Some people overlap as such.

There used to be more overlap in Los Angeles, because there was iO west and a Second City there in addition the Groundlings and UCB-LA. Now there is not much overlap between UCB-LA and the Groundlings, but there is some, and there are a bunch of schools developing independently that will happily accept you and help you on your way if the Groundlings fail you on your sketch 101 class (which is not only a thing but is their literal business model).

One of these such schools is WGIS, which stands for World’s Greatest Improv School. Its founders are based in Los Angeles, but they have a New York City campus and offer online classes, too. It’s worth noting they are by far the most cost-friendly option, as its owners are teachers. (The omnipresent improvisor Will Hines, who is probably the foremost writer about improv between his substack newsletter and his old tumblr blog.) If you like my substack, you should probably subscribe to Will Hines’, because he’s Will Hines and I’m Dan Bogosian.

Heather Ann Campbell is one of the few comedians to have attended many, many schools: she was on the Groundlings Sunday Company, was part of boomChicago, taught at The Pack, was part of UCB-LA, learned at iO and Second City. She’s said that all schools are just trying to teach you to get to that place you were as a kid where you’re in full imagination and can just play without worry or fear. (She’s also said she learned nothing at the Groundlings in her Yes, Also episode, which: lol.)

Brian Palermo, a Groundling who sometimes travels to teach improv (and appears as Mark Zuckerberg’s Computer Science professor in The Social Network), made this Facebook post, of which you can also see my response:

One of the ‘Likes’ I got on my reply to that post was from Joel Murray, one of Bill Murray’s younger brothers and an actor I really love. He’s also a great improvisor in his own right, and had several of the funniest moments on Mad Men as Freddy Rumsen. Don’t remember Freddy Rumsen? This is Joel Murray on Mad Men:

One Final Thing

This post goes out on Friday. On Monday, there will be another post that is just an incomplete list of comedians and where they were educated.

It will be a separate post so I may update it as time goes on

My advice, as such, is to look at that list and find your 3-5 favorite comedians, and then ask: where did they learn from? What did they learn there? How do I learn that?

My taste leans away from UCB and more towards The Annoyance (the freaks are my people!), with some 90s Second City freedom in there and an occasional weirdo Groundling (aka I love you Will Forte). Many of my favorite standups have some UCB training, though, and I think that says something.

Your taste might be all Groundlings except for one person who went to iO one time. I don’t know. You tell me! I’m just here to help.

All of these things ultimately boil down to: what do you do if it feels like shit?

Universal Advice For When It Feels Bad

A few things you can do when anything feels bad, in comedy or beyond:

1. Take a break

2. Do something that makes you feel good / confident

3. Change what you focus on

#1 is probably no one’s favorite. “Man, I’ve bombed four times in a row going up for standup. I think I’ll not go up for two weeks.” That feels like giving up. That doesn’t feel good, but there is a loss-of-confidence spiral that can happen in any form of comedy — or anything! Ask four people out and get rejected! It sucks! Apply to jobs and not get them! It sucks! Shoot the basketball and watch it not go in the basket! It sucks! Lift weights and have them not go up! It sucks! Life! It’s hard! And yet it keeps on going!.

But sometimes it’s necessary. If you’re haunted by your rejections or failures, you’re going to hone-in on those failures. You’re gonna be scared or nervous on stage, at least early on, but sometimes we get rattled and it comes back later on. (Watch me audition for something this year and not get it - I guarantee my improv will be better in March at HIF than it will be after not getting something at an audition. I know it doesn’t always seem that way, but I do still feel human emotions.)

Or maybe you’re comparing yourself to your friends. I personally would leave my sketch 201 class every week and feel awful: Brad handed in complete, stage-ready sketches; Maddie was a joke machine and is the funniest person alive; Shannon had the best ideas; Doug was so much smarter than anyone else that even if his stuff didn’t always land it still felt like “this man is so smart, this is comedy for geniuses”; I was… … … physically present and alive? It’s not a competition, but that doesn’t mean performing worse than your friends feels good. It feels awful.

So get away from it. Get away from the people you’re comparing yourself to. Think about something else. Read a damn book. Breathe some fresh air. Eat a pizza. There’s a world out there, go live some of it. Realize that all of this is virtually meaningless. No one’s life is on the line. Your dream never depends on this one single show, audition, sketch, standup set, or improv scene. “I really wanted to nail this sketch so that this person would know that I’m funny.”

Great. Other people don’t have food, clothes, or shelter. Let it go. Get away. It’s fine, dude.

#2 is probably everyone’s favorite, but maybe don’t do it if it’s sex, drugs, alcohol, or an addiction. (And if you’re like “comedy’s the only thing that makes me feel good,” it’s probably time for therapy and a second hobby, homie.) I’m not suggesting you eat a tub of ice cream while binging the Gilmore Girls every night for two weeks. I am, however, suggesting that if you need a night in and some ice cream and Lorelai Gilmore always makes you smile, go ahead and wrap yourself in your comfort blanket and fire it up.

Oh Lorelai. Take me with you.

We’re all just big children. Comfort your inner child before you go out there again. It’s OK, dude. No shame.

#3 just means, everyone has strengths and weaknesses. You should always be working on your weakness, but if it’s killing you, it’s OK to do a show or two and say “I’m just gonna be me and so what.”

Less specifically, Michael Jordan pictures the ball going through the hoop. Stephen Curry pictures the ball going through the hoop. You may have been missed your last 40 shots.

If you’re gonna keep shooting, you gotta picture the ball going through the hoop.

Michael Jordan missed 26 potential game-winning shots in his basketball career. We still think of him as the most clutch NBA player ever, because no one makes all of them. Bounce back.

It is not our mistakes that define us, but how we respond to them. Remember that in comedy, but please, I beg of you, remember that in life. (Reach out to someone you haven’t heard from. Apologize to somebody who you should apologize to, even if the wrong doing was tiny. Go thank someone you haven’t thanked. You’re better off for it.)

We are defined not by our mistakes, but how we respond to them.

Now, some specifics…

Improv and Feeling Bad

There are only two real notes in improv. There’s a thousand specifics (add subtext, emote, add details, know each other, play to the top of your intelligence, etc etc etc etc).

But the ideological note is only ever one of two things:

1. Be more confident.

2. Pay more attention.

Forgetting a character name? Pay more attention. Undoing teammate’s details? Pay more attention. Forgetting the setting? Pay more attention. Not ‘getting’ the game? Pay more attention.

Just take a breath. The stakes are nothing. You are literally playing pretend as an adult. No one will die from your bad improv. Breathe. It’s OK.

But also, pay more attention.

Making bad moves? Trying things you think are funny but the audience doesn’t and you hate it? Feeling like no one trusts you? Feel like you’re going dark and people are running away from you? Be more confident.

I remember the exact moment I learned this lesson, in Spokane class at Sea Tea. I initiated a base scene, and I went dark. (I tend to go dark, my humor is way darker than most improvisors… and yet way goofier than most standups… and yet way more bizarre than most sketch writers. When will I fit in? Probably never.)

I was trying to convince someone to do a motorcycle jump over school buses, like Evel Knievel. I told the other improvisor in the base scene I wanted to live vicariously through him (dark details!), because I was afraid of heights since my best friend had died falling off a ski lift (SUPER dark details!).

Someone clapped out, and acted them falling off a ski lift, and me just watching it. I played it real. I played it sad, and not fun-funny-Charlie-Brown sad, but Oscar-drama-oh-no-Dan’s-feelings-are-hurt sad.

No one laughed.

It was not funny.

My inner monologue was sort of like, “that’s preposterous, this is kinda funny, you guys are wrong, you’ll see.”

Later, it was referenced that my parents weren’t around. I think I clapped out, and again, two people were my parents, and I again watched them fall off a ski lift and die.

A few people chuckled, most likely out of pity. That guffaw you sometimes get from a shock, more common in standup than improv. I got a guffaw pity chuckle.

My inner monologue was something like “you guys are wrong. I know I can make this funny. You’ll see.”

Later, it came up that one of the buses still had kids and a bus driver in it. The bus driver was labeled a ghost by someone else.

I clapped out.

Dark, serious, and not comically acting, I kept them where they were, school bus in place, and said: “How did a school bus get on a ski lift?”

Huge laugh. Could not have happened if not for my prior misstep and the commitment to “no, actually, I think this can be funny. You’ll see.”

So you misfired. Who cares. So what. So, the fuck, what. “You’ll see.” Maybe they won’t. But you can’t be rattled because you liked an idea and they didn’t. You’re in charge. As long as it’s not offensive, double down, buckle up and keep trying.

Make them see.

I’ll also note, Will Hines has said many, many times: You do not have permission to use this art form to feel bad about yourself. The point of improv is to play like a kid and feel joy. The laughs are a side-benefit. Fuck whatever’s haunting you. Go feel joy out there. When it goes wrong, make them see.

Sketch and Feeling Like Shit

Sketch is weird because sometimes it feels like US versus THEM. If you bring it to a table read and it dies, and you love the people you’re at the table read, it’s time to make some adjustments to the sketch. I spent 2024 writing a sketch a week, committed to doing it until I felt like I was genuinely good at sketch and fully understood it.

Eventually (40something sketches later), I did. But there were hard times in there. I wrote a sketch about cancer.

It was not funny.

People did not laugh.

I wrote a sketch that was outright offensive. I’m pretty sure some people judged me for that, even if my intentions were good. Lessons had to be learned and I learned the hard way. Some people take the easy path. Sometimes I charge full-steam through pricker bushes and fall off a click. To each their own.

If you feel like you’re bad at it, remember that everyone else has a different starting point. It’s not where you start, it’s where you end up. You can get there.

If you feel like your sketch is funny and the audience didn’t, ask yourself: did your teammates like it? If not, why on earth did you perform it ? ? ?. But if so, then who cares about the audience. You have a team. It’s us versus them.

Most of the time you exist to please the audience. Every now and then you gotta do one for you or one for your team.

One day there will be another Sketch Versus at Sea Tea, and hopefully I’ll be on a team that wins, because there is one sketch I think would only get on stage if I had a last-sketch-of-the-night absolute-weirdness victory-lap you-can’t-stop-me-from-performing-this sketch. I think if you put it up in a “vote for us” situation, it would not receive votes. It would be like 10% of the audience’s favorite and 90% of the audience’s “I can’t believe he did that.” People will likely laugh. Others will likely say I am the worst person and not a comedian but a grown man-child who lacks taste.

I am prepared for that moment and I do not care. Because I am in the 10% of people who think the stuff I find funniest is the funniest. (This also includes the movie Macgruber, which has nothing to do with anything other than to say that if you think I am funny we should hang out and watch Macgruber.)

Jim Downey once said “all comedy eventually boils down to, am I going to make this funny for more people, or am I going to make this more funny for less people?” He then said Norm Macdonald was the only comedian who always, always chose ‘more funny for less people.’

You don’t have to live your life like Norm. But if you and your team think it’s funny, and it got on stage: you already won. Don’t pretend them not liking it is a loss. You got to perform what you loved on stage. The audience wasn’t your people that night. So what. You were on stage with your people. Hold on to your people.

Standup and Feeling Like Shit

If you’re doing standup comedy, you inherently agreed to feel like shit. The trick is learning to love the bomb.

Genuinely good human being Paul F. Thompkins.

Paul F. Thompkins talks about on his first You Made It Weird podcast episode, how your number one thing in comedy cannot be success. Your number one thing has to be “am I as good as I want to be?”. If you’re chasing success, you’re never going to be satisfied. You’re going to be the thing Dax Shephard and Jim Carrey talk about, where they got money and awards and all their dreams came true and then they wake up the next day and go … now what? I still feel awful.

Let go of success. Are you as good as you want to be?

If you aren’t as good as you want to be and it feels bad and want to keep trying, congrats! That’s what it takes to do standup comedy. As previously stated: we’ve created a machine that makes sociopaths, and it’s called standup comedy.

I think the trick is learning to love the bomb. Not, tolerating the bomb. Not, being unafraid of the bomb. But loving it. Genuinely loving it.

Like, looking forward to this joke because I love it, and either it’s going to work and that’s awesome, or it’s not going to work, and that’s awesome.

I am personally not yet at this point with standup. (And how do I work on this? By writing jokes that are not funny? I… don’t… fully… want to do that… I sort of do… but I don’t fully…)

But everyone doing standup has a little bit of that “fuck you, this is funny” energy in them. So many people — sooo many people — SOOOO MANY PEOPLE — on You Made It Weird talk about how you need a bit of ego to keep going at standup at all. Gary Gulman talks about how people left before him at his first ever open mic, and he told them “you’re not gonna wanna miss this” because even though he had never done it, and even though he sucked, he still just somehow believed he was going to be great.

Jim Gaffigan similarly talked about how he was awful, but he not only “knew” he could figure it out, and he knew he needed to. Not that he wanted to. That it was a need. “I have to go up again soon. I have to figure this out.”

Maybe you have neither of those things. But if you’re going to keep doing standup, maybe you have to find one of them, or something else to keep you in it. At some point it hurts. You gotta learn to love the bomb.

I’ve told this to people newer than me in standup: let’s say you become a pro standup, an A level act, you sell out comedy clubs, you’re on TV, people know who you are. Great job!

So you do your first special and it kills, it crushes, you win a Grammy, you’re a household name. Awesome job!

Well now you have to throw out your entire act because everyone has heard it and everyone knows it. Now you have to start over again. Are you going to be afraid of bombing? Sure, in this hypothetical, your joke writing and performing skills will be higher, your hit rate will be higher. But you’re still gonna bomb once in a while.

The skill you still most need inside of you is a lack of fear, a confidence and belief in yourself.

Go find that. That’s your focus.

A Brief Summary of Some You Made It Weird Episodes

Previously mentioned I’ve been burning through the first 100 episodes of You Made It Weird since Taylor Tomlinson said it would’ve helped her when she was starting out as a standup. I’m going to divide my notes by episode - these are all the first appearances. Many appear later, this is the first 100.

Hannibal Burress:

• His brain (and apparently all comedy brains at some point) look at everything and start thinking “Is this a bit? Is this a bit? Is this a bit?”

• When he’s watching or listening to comedy, he’s only analyzing, never fully experiencing the comedy. (I RELATE TO THIS UGH)

• Pete Holmes: You don’t consider that fans are there for that specific comedian when you watch a comedian’s special. (Personally? I have always considered this. That’s why I talk about how Dave Chapelle gets to slack off for his first two minutes on stage and you don’t. But I can see why a new comedian may not know that.)

• Wow, even these supposedly progressive comedians are huge dirtbags regarding women. Hannibal talks about women like they’re meat. It’s mad uncomfortable!

• Hannibal struggled a lot then got a lot better. His reasoning? “Yeah, I was 21.” It’s referenced that Jim Gaffigan was the same way. Hannibal has a narrative from that era of someone who was the worst and then in less than a year was the best. Pete says it’s because we want some sort of frog-into-prince story. Apparently he was just like everybody else and just put in more work.

• Hannibal talks about how killing it feels different when you’re good versus when you start out, how your standard for crushing it is so much lower when you’re doing open mics and just a local guy. (Maybe that’s my thing? I already have seen enough pro standup and local standup, I know what killing really is and motherfucker I have never done that. One day. Mark my words.)

• They both point to Bernie Mac’s I ain’t scared bit for how personality and confidence is more important than jokes, but I’ll write about that in another post.

• They talk about how cultural references ultimately date you. Hannibal literally says “When I’m 65, will that Lil Wayne reference hold up?”. It won’t, Hannibal. It’s not even 15 years later and no one cares about that Lil Wayne song anymore.

Demetri Martin

• All comedy has an ideal form. Some jokes are best for standup, some are best as conversation, some are best as a movie, some are best as a drawing. (Seems obvious in retrospect, but what a clear powerful thought: if you have a joke, find the best form it. Maybe it’s a sketch and not standup, or vice-versa.)

• Two types of comedians (again, dated offensive language): those that were called a homophobic slur in high school, and those who called other people a homophobic slur in high school. (I think this also applies to comedy rooms. As a guy who was called homophobic slurs a lot growing up, I really don’t want to participate in the bully comedy scene.)

• He thinks that standup is time but sketch and improv are about space. I had never considered it but this is an excellent idea to consider. Standup is not THAT visual, even in its object work. Improv and sketch, the stage setting is so important. Time vs space. Nice.

• “My worst day in comedy is still better than my best day in law school.” Martin dropped out of his law school in the final semester because he knew he was going to be a comedian. I admire him for that. What a sentiment.

• Comedy was the first thing Demetri Martin was not afraid to work extremely hard at, including this exact quote:

• “I’m happy to write a million jokes if that’s what it takes.” Me too, Demetri. Me, too.

Paul F. Thompkins

• The first comedian on this list I listened to who was clearly not a douchebag. (Demetri Martin wasn’t either, but everyone else seems at least slightly sexist at least once. If you listen to all these episodes, you’ll definitely be like “jesus christ why do men hate women.”)

• He talks about how half of comedians are in it for the art and half are in it to get laid. I think this is similar to the Demetri Martin sentiment above. Let the record show I want to be good at comedy, and I’m sure I’m surrounded by people who just wanna fuck some chick, and I truly wish those people would die in a fire.

• “The number one thing cannot be success. It has to be: am I as good as I want to be?”

Dana Gould

• This is it, I’ve found the most transphobic podcast by a supposedly progressive comedian out there. We were probably all this bad in 2012, but dear god it’s bad and it’s bad how Pete just goes along with it.

• Gould talks about the differences of comedy club audiences vs travel audiences. “Are you trying to make your people laugh or everyone laugh?”

Jim Gaffigan

• He knows who Eric Bogosian is and felt it changed the game in the 80s! Hey. I wish Eric Bogosian knew who I was.

• He sucked ass at first.

• “Alt rooms are better if you’re not a drunk comedy fan.”

• Gaffigan does what’s called chunking: you compose 2-5 minute bits, and build them into 10-15 minute chunks, and then you build 4-6 chunks to get your hour. He tries to work out a chunk at a time.

• He compares standup comedy to boxing, saying: at first you wanna start by just hitting them hard enough to win, and later you realize you slap and jab them a bunch so a regular punch can be a KO.

• “It’s all pacing.” Timing? Or pacing? I wish you talked about this more Jim Gaffigan.

Harris Whittels (RIP)

• Talks about how comedy writers are really only entertained by the fourth thing past the normal thing and most comedy audiences like the first thing past the normal thing (oh no, I’m a comedy writer already even if my skills aren’t high enough to be a professional, my brain is the worst of both worlds)

Neil Brennan

• Brennan believes there’s hack comedy and there’s alt-comedy-hack. Alt hacks includes singing your punchline and shoving unicorns in there. (I have never seen either of these things but I bet it was common live in 2012.)

• Brennan loves racist comedy, to the point that this episode has aged very poorly even though Brennan’s recent standup is super excellent. Hopefully he’s learned and changed.

• Comedy clubs “teach you paying your dues and how to endure and get your chops,” while alt rooms “give you nutrition.” Neil: “You gotta work both sides.” Pete: “It teaches you to write about things everyone relates to; fear of death, fear of love. Not your dumb RoboCop bit.” YOU SEE! I’M TELLING YOU I WAS RIGHT ABOUT HUMAN BEHAVIOR!

Gary Gulman

• “If you even show potential after three years, you’re great.” Someone do me a favor and tell me they see potential in me.

• Gulman makes it a point to handle hecklers in proportion, as many pro standups don’t.

• “Six years in is when you start to get good.” Welp! 1 more year of improv, 2 more years of sketch, and 3 or 4 more years of standup and maybe I’ll start getting good.

• “When you start, you’re ripping other comics off. Eventually, you’re you.”

• Pete Holmes remembers seeing pro comedians kill, crush, destroy, and thinking “I’ll never destroy that way.” He blames cutesy jokes, “What’s the employee discount at the dollar store?” is his throw away example. I wish they talked about this more because I often feel this way. I know I have it in me but god damn I have not cracked the code to just fully crush it yet in standup.

Sean O’Connor

• Both Pete & Sean feel like they’re the least funny person in their childhood friend group. Me too, guys! Jimmy, if you see this, I still think you’re funnier than me.

• “Comedians are looking around for observations to make into jokes all the time, comedy nerds just like the art of comedy.”

• Comedians understand jokes so much they can hear a setup, name five punchlines, and one of them will be the real punchline. (By god I’m pretty sure I have a comedy writer’s brain. I really need to up my performance skills.)

Ron Funches

• It took Pete Holmes eight years to understand how to talk about himself on stage (!!!)

• Funches thinks a woman who has had an abortion should be the one to joke about abortions, not straight white guys. Ron Funches is a good person.

• Ron forgets to have fun because of his comedy obsession. “Why would I go play softball?” “Because it’s fun.” “Oh, right. You have to have fun.”

• Ron Funches’ advice: “Stay in your scene until you’re crushing at your level. It’s better than crushing at some chuckle hut.” The implication is you learn less on the road than you do at home. I wouldn’t know.

John Mulaney

• He nerdily obsesses and listens to comedy podcasts even though all the comedians are people he knows and could call at any time

• “You exhaust all your thoughts and opinions that are small, little bits for yourself, your Seinfeld years.” Oh no am I in my Seinfeld years I need to keep digging deeper.

• He had a joke (ironically about Donald Trump pre-politics) that Pete Holmes loved that never did well live, Holmes told Mulaney it was his favorite, Mulaney kept it in and apparently it got an applause break on Conan. Mulaney thinks its in the performance: if it’s your favorite and they like you. they will buy in and love it even more. THERE’S A HUGE LESSON HERE AND ALSO IT SAYS SOMETHING ABOUT HOW AUDIENCES ARE SO CHAOTIC.

• Every comedian has bombed in the run through of their big set at some point. John Mulaney’s run through of his tight 5 for TV died the night before he went on Conan. He crushed on Conan. There’s another huge lesson in here. The audience isn’t the real judge. Standup is such a fucking hard art form, wow.

TJ Miller

• This man is the opposite of Ron Funches and Gary Gulman and Paul F Thompkins and Demetri Martin. This man is clearly a douchebag.

• It took Miller 7 years to realize he needed a life outside of comedy. (Dude, what.)

• TJ would only go camping to do jokes about camping. (Dude. What.)

• He was doing 1-3 sets a night 7 nights a week for years. Pete apparently never came close to that and has cancelled doing sets to watch the Notebook.

• The audio on this episode was recorded very badly. His S sounds are piercing to the ears. If you listen in earbuds or headphones it will hurt you. Dear god.

OK, that’s it for this one! Bye!

Riley texted me

and hahaHAahAhAhaahahaaaaaa here you go.

On Game and Proposing a New Definition

With that in mind, a brief definition of Game in improv - my definition, not Upright Citizen Brigade’s - is “the vehicle for the comedy of the scene.” There are thousands of different ways to think about how to play the game, and a few different ways of talking about it (“the next move”, “if this then what?”, “if this is true then what else is true?”, “heighten”, “repeatable playable behavior", etc.)

But something a lot of game teaching doesn’t tell you enough about is what you’re actually making funny. In UCB’s way of thinking about it, it’s “the first unusual thing” in improv. I have always hated and will always that, because it shows absolutely no patience - oh you said something wrong, LOCK IN - and ignores that what’s unusual for you isn’t unusual for me and vice-versa.

Eugene Cordero talks about how awful this was when he started at UCB in his Yes, Also episode (can’t remember if it’s the paid second half or the free first half), where he would eat a typical meal for someone from the Philippines and all the white guys in class would be like: LOOK AT HOW INSANE THIS GUY IS, HE’S EATING CHOPPED UP HOT DOGS, WHAT A MAD MAN. Turns out “first unusual thing” is a pretty broad and pretty unhelpful definition.

Furthermore, for outright offensive proof of how bad this definition is, you can literally watch old UCB Asssscat’s - they still sell the DVD on Amazon! - and watch people who are A-list comedians build entire games off of pedophilia, rape, racism, sexism, and homophobia. “Haha, it’s unusual if we rape you, so let’s heighten that” is literally something UCB does to Tina Fey on a DVD they first released in 2008.

18 years ago, the theater not only supported you RAPING WOMEN FOR LAUGHS BUT THEY STILL SELL IT AS A DVD YOU CAN BUY HOLY SHIT WHAT IS WRONG WITH YOU PEOPLE

Call me crazy, but I think that’s both fucked up and shows how awful their definition is. At best, it’s inherently flawed; at worst it encourages you to do terrible things, make people uncomfortable and be remorselessly unfunny if you, y’know, respect people who are different than you.

Now, you can try to modify that to say “first unusual thing, but don’t be racist, sexist, homophobic, ageist, ableist, prejudice, discriminatory, etc” but wouldn’t we be better off just saying “the funny thing” (or goofy, or silly) instead of “unusual”, and maybe then a class or group can have a sincere discussion on what they find funny (or goofy or silly)? Wouldn’t that be better?

Improv pro-tip: do your thing until a laugh comes, and then sell out, the audience is in charge, that’s the thing you’re supposed to heighten.

I’ve never taught an Improv class, but I have lead my fair share of workshops for TourCo and been the Teacher’s Assistant in many 201 classes, and I often see the struggle of new people to grasp game when we use the “first unusual thing” definition. If we want a broader definition of game, I think “the vehicle for comedy” is all you need. Suddenly, the definition works beyond scene-based comedy.

The game of Austin Powers is “secret agent from the 60s in modern times”. The game of Home Alone is “child left alone without parents” (or, toward the end, it’s “Straw Dogs For Kids”). This can also make a good improvised show: Sea Tea did an Improvised Final Destination, and it’s great; the game of Final Destination is “everyone dies in a certain order in really elaborate ways.” Game! Lets use my definition and not UCB’s.

Moving on, sketch is all game. In improv and narrative, some scenes and moments want non-game moments. In sketch, you only get game, and here’s a collection of every note you’ll hear in your first sketch class: label your game for more clarity, get to the game faster, heighten it more, let go of your narrative, be more thought provoking and less offensive, be more original with your twist, be more original, go go go.

The SNL Problem and Mistakes Everyone Makes Early On

As previously mentioned every damn time I can, I sucked when I started improv and sucked when I started sketch. Game made no sense to me, or more: if you label it, how is it going to be surprising, and doesn’t comedy have to be surprising to truly be funny?

In improv, because the audience is always there for what you’re basing it on, the game itself is never the surprise. It’s how you do game that’s surprising.

It didn’t click for me until I thought of it like a magic trick: if the magician steals your wallet before you leave the show and doesn’t tell you, that magic show sucks. When the magician asks you to pull a card and give it back to them, you know the magician is going to bring the card back and wow you with it, you just don’t know how yet. He tells you he’s going to trick you, you just don’t know how he’s going to trick you. That’s Game, that’s Sketch, that’s good comedy.

We all heard the monologue in improv, we all hear the thing you’re going to heighten to laughter. (“I enjoyed the feeling of getting tattooed, do I like BDSM now?” becomes ripping off a band-aid and going “do I like BDSM now?”. This example is pulled from a show I was a part of and is in no way hypothetical.) The surprise is in our choice of how we make this silly, not in what we’re doing: the game is doing something painful but tame and thinking you’ve got a kink now.

How the game is played and not what the game is, is true in most of sketch and improv, and in both situations I think some chaotic players fall in love with the idea of always being surprising, always doing an unprecedented thing, always being zany and crazy and wild.

On Saturday Night Live, the longest running and most successful sketch show of all time, they directly go against the notes I said earlier: they often avoid labeling the game, they intentionally bury the game so it doesn’t appear in the first 30 seconds, they often fall into narrative structures rather than sketch structures. They have a reason for this, and that reason is Lorne Michaels.

If you read his biography or any SNL memoir, you know how SNL works: Michaels intentionally keeps it as a competitive atmosphere and is quiet and mum about what to do in hopes that you’ll figure out your voice and grow into confidence. Because of the atmosphere, the table read is bordering on a competition: you don’t want to say the name of the game in your sketch title at SNL, because you want your laughs to pop louder than the others at the actual read through.

In live and local and filmed sketch, you want the clarity to get the laughs.

At SNL, it’s the world’s most famous sketch show. Even if no one is yet the next Chris Farley or Will Ferrell or Eddie Murphy or Kristen Wiig or whoever your favorite comedy superstar is, everybody there is trying to become that person and everyone in the audience and watching live is viewing with hopes of one day going “I remember their early days, when ___” (or watching to say it was better when they were young).

Live at your local comedy theater, no one expects you to become a Hollywood star and no one has the patience to wait for you to be funny. We paid $10 a ticket. Give me a laugh in 10 seconds or get out of here.

It works for them at SNL because people are tuning in to see SNL. Unless you’re a movie star, people are looking at your sketch to laugh. Get to the laugh.

Similarly, as is inherently self-evident, Saturday Night Live predates Twitter. (…lol.) In the oral history of SNL book, people talk about how by Saturday night, people have already heard the jokes everyone made at the water cooler. Because of this, Michaels wants to throw out all the obvious jokes but still set them up. Michaels loves burying the game for 30 seconds, to the point where writers add it in even if they know better. (They say as much on podcasts.)

It works for them at SNL, because that’s their boss, that’s their culture, that’s their job.

Michaels also defines the difference between a “sketch” and a “skit” is that a sketch has a narrative with a beginning, middle, and end. This is NOT the definition nor the distinction between those two things, and don’t let Lorne Michaels’ boomer insanity force you into writing crappier sketches because you grew up watching SNL. We all did.

Sometimes, a narrative forming can elevate a sketch - but more on that later.

You are at a local theater, narrative can be a side effect of your sketch but it can’t be the way you think about it, you need jokes, you need them constantly, you need them fast.

Going back to what vs how, a lot of people in early improv get stuck on being surprising with what they do instead of how they do it. These people are often rewarded for those moves early on in improv - you undercut the scene, but baby you’re getting laughs!

I often see those people not growing, and I assume that their internal monologue is “this is just my taste” and “this is funny, who cares about the rest?”. But the thing is: if you want to grow, you have to let go of the easy laugh of chaos, of “I’m going off-book on this one” and start leaning into “what’s my version of the thing we know that’s going to happen?”.

In improv, if you’re not clear about the game, people will fumble it.

In sketch, if the game isn’t clear, your sketch dies.

A (Proposed) New Language for Sketch & Game

With that in mind, I like to think of Game in a different way: scope. I propose new terminology here: scope, vertical/horizontal moves, sub-games or mini-games, and zooming in/zooming out.

Take the improv warmup game Categories. (Or if somehow you’re a UCB LA improvisor reading this, “Fingers”.) You point at someone and say a word, they point at someone else and say a word in the same category, that person points at someone else and says a word in the same category, and so on until everyone has pointed at someone and we all laugh and hopefully we all know the category.

Let’s say I point at you and say “Froot Loops.” Great, a breakfast cereal. But we can’t know the category until the second and third person really go and show the commonality.

You point at someone else and say “Cheerios.” Another breakfast cereal! I think we all know the category…

And then the third person points at someone else and says “pancakes.” Oop. Turns out the category is breakfast foods?

I would call “Froot loops” and “Cheerios” horizontal moves. I would call pancakes a vertical move. I am taking this from capitalism and horizontal integration (buying your competitors) versus vertical integration (buying upstream/downstream suppliers). Essentially, a horizontal move is a variation of the expected category or move, and a vertical move expands on the moves we know at hand. Horizontal moves can still heighten, but they’re plays on established behavior. Vertical moves are new behaviors that force us to zoom out and broaden the scope of the game.

Scope is how I refer to looking at the size of the game and where we are in it. So, going back to that Categories hypothetical, for two moves we are in a regular Scope, and then we “zoom out” and the category expands.

So what’s a mini-game or a sub-game?

A mini-game is game within a game. For example, in my all-time favorite sketch Spelling Bee, the game is “man who cannot spell fails spelling bee.” If you haven’t watched it, please do so before I spoil it.

Within this game of “man who cannot spell correctly at spelling bee”, there are a few mini-games: there’s him stalling by asking questions that are ridiculous (this has 3 quick beats!), there’s the main game of him spelling the word wrong and insanely, but even within that insane spelling there are at least two mini-games: he never says a vowel, and he repeats Q an insane amount of times.

This, to me, is an amazing performance, but it is also a different scope of game: while writing it, Will Forte may be asking what are the funniest letters to say for this word?, but when he stumbles on Q, the game is “how many times is he going to say Q in a row?”. He zooms in for a while before zooming out.

(Then there’s a Tenacious D song, which literally exists solely because by doing that, Jack Black forced Lorne Michaels to put it on air. Hell yeah, Jack Black. Boys night out indeed.)

The Right Scope

Most great games have one of two things:

1. A perfect scope, where every character has their own mini-game forming a larger game as a whole. To praise Maddie Murphy again, I often feel like Maddie writes sketches with 3-4 characters, each character gets their own game, and then they all fall under the umbrella of a larger game. That’s a perfect scope right there, having 4 separate characters deliver 4 different kinds of jokes all within one broader game. That’s good stuff.

2. What I call a Reverse Russian Doll (or a Russian Doll for short), where we think the game is one thing, and then we zoom out and its a different, broader in scope game, and then after a few beats we zoom out and its a different, broader in scope game. The Lonely Island are masters of this. The Mirror is like this (it’s a play on horror movie tropes, until it’s… not… and then it’s something bigger):

Similarly, it’s like this even in their music sometimes, like in Two Worlds Collide:

Two Worlds Collide is also an example of a sketch Lorne would love - its games and reverse Russian doll end up forming a narrative with a beginning, middle, and end! However, if you wrote it from a perspective of “this is the story” and then filled in jokes, it’d probably be less funny and less good.

I propose this language for game-based thinking. Honestly, in improv, I sometimes seem to be pirating (i.e., steamrolling your scene partner - the term comes from this book but that’s another post for another day), but what I’m trying to do is a vertical move after I feel enough horizontal moves have happened. Sometimes, you get on a roll and do a bunch of vertical moves in a row, and some people will think “WHAT IS GOING ON.”

If me trying to expand the game gets lost on some people or comes off as a bit of a chaos player or someone with no patience who plays fast and loose, that’s OK by me as long as we all accept my intentions are good and I am listening to my scene partners.

So with that in mind, how do we make a good sketch?

How To Make Sketch Easier, and Sitcoms for Game

Choose the right scope for your funny idea and execute it your way instead of someone else’s.

That’s it. That’s all.

It’s easier said than done, but it’s not complicated. You can sit in your room combining words or hunting for a combo for a funny idea, or you can live your life until something makes you laugh and you can reverse engineer a game, or you can wait for something that bothers you and then go “I want to make fun of that”, or any number of other ideas to generate a sketch/game idea.

But think of the funny idea, your game. Figure out the right scope. Do it your way, not mine (see the next section). Try to make each move something you would do your way and not the way everyone else would. This can be in line delivery/acting, or casting, or the text itself. It can be in the game idea itself: the first sketch I wrote I actually liked was Bicycle Cops, about two cops, one of whom was an alcoholic, the other of whom was … a bicycle.

Was it the best sketch? No, it was still too narrative-driven, but I still love the idea and revisit it all the time because I don’t think other people would come up with it. (I also wrote a TV pilot and a movie with this idea. Despite my best efforts, I remain myself.)

Identifying a Game vs a Joke

Drew once told me a sketch idea he had, and he said “but I can’t think of a second beat." And I told him he didn’t have a sketch idea: he had an idea for a single beat. I told him he needed to zoom out. I won’t spoil what that game was (maybe he’s gonna write it, it’s his idea!), but I can say a hypothetical example would be something like this:

“I have an idea for a sketch where a person has to run in slow motion.”

“That’s a funny idea for a beat, not a game. You need to zoom out. Why would they run in slow motion? Is it that they used to be a Baywatch employee and now they do everything Baywatch style? Is it that sports excite them so they only do things sports-broadcast-style? There’s a hundred different games this could be, but you’re zoomed into a beat of a game, not a game.”

I think that’s still true. If you have a funny sketch idea, it’s probably very funny. Like in standup, sometimes the thing to do is think of your funny idea or your punchline, and then reverse engineer the setup to be specific enough that it’s yours and only yours but broad enough that there are multiple beats I can do easily from here. Are you a Baywatch fan? Write the Baywatch sketch. Are you a sports person? Write the sports sketch. Are you a drug user? Make it a drug side effect. There’s a million different games/sketches we could do with that. Choose the one that is most uniquely you.

My thoughts on game ideas in both sketch and improv are, if you can’t think of 2-3 game moves or beats right away, you need to zoom out and go broader. If you can think of 10,000 game moves instantly, you probably need to zoom in a little bit (or write it as a movie or TV show).

Movies & TV shows have inherently broad games. When I direct the improvised Seinfeld, I always tell the players each character has a renewable series of game types: Jerry has relationship problems where something petty is too much for him or a petty social grievance with someone in his life (comedian, dentist, etc.); George has a societal grievance over something petty but he has to take a stand against it or its betrayal is killing him, or a petty relationship problem; Elaine has a petty relationship problem or is caught up in a social misunderstanding at work; Kramer has a crazy new idea to solve a problem, whether that problem is “make money” or something like “keep the chicken restaurant open”.

All sitcom characters have this: Frazier on Frazier is always ruining a common social situation when his high-society attitude interferes; Michael on the Office is doing social faux-pas or wrecking company secrets but threads the needle through someone else’s teamwork; so on and so forth for every sitcom character ever.

Great pilot episodes outline how everyone’s game is going to work for years to come. Watch the first episode of Scrubs and tell me that you don’t know exactly what that show will be like. They needed to make 20+ half hour episodes of these characters every year, of course their comic vehicles and games are broad.

Sketches are more specific. You could make a sketch about one of Jerry’s relationships but not all of them. (“The Close Talker” sketch. “Man hands” sketch.) You could make a sketch about one of Michael’s social faux-pas, but not all of them. (Or if you did “boss who makes social faux-pas and wants to be friends,” it would easily be good but to be great you’d have to make some pretty unique-to-you choices and you’d have to figure out a way to reverse Russian doll it.) And so on.

What I Like Basing Games On

My personal belief-set aims towards basing the game in sketch on either:

1. Human Behavior, or

2. Tropes

It is odd to say, because I started my sketch career by starting absurd, but now any starting move I make I’m thinking: how do I base this on human behavior or a trope?

Improv disappears - it’s once and then it’s gone unless you’re recording and releasing it - but sketch could last forever. You get a video of a sketch and you can still watch it. YouTube has launched and made careers. Sketch shows are a TV mainstay. With sketch, if you want something to last the test of time, it needs to be Human Behavior or an age-old trope.

Even live sketch unrecorded: 10 years from now, you’re gonna have an easier time laughing with the memory of a sketch about an overbearing mother or a business trying to rip you off or longing for someone than you would remembering the moves of a Pokemon Go sketch or a sketch about Vine shutting down or whatever was going on ten years ago. My favorite SNL sketch is Spelling Bee, not Sarah Palin Cold Open 3 and certainly not Dan Quayle Advice. If you’re writing a sketch show a week, be topical. If you’re not, aim deeper.

By doing a game on human behavior, it’s inherently recognizable and we all get the setup right away with no need to clarify a bunch of stuff. “Overbearing mother” is something we all recognize even if our personal Moms are chill. “Cheap scammy salesman” is something we all recognize even if we haven’t worked with a salesman.

By doing a game on a trope instead of a specific reference, we ‘get’ it right away. I can write a sketch about something that happens with an interrogation room and make fun of Good Cop/Bad Cop and we’ll all get it right away; I could write “Nice Cop/Naughty Cop” and you’d get it instantly as a misinterpretation of Good Cop/Bad Cop. (Shoot, don’t steal that, I’ll write that for the next Christmas sketch show.) It’s a trope: we may not know specifically where we’ve seen a good cop and a bad cop, but we know we’ve seen this multiple times in multiple places and recognize it inherently, and when you go comedic we know we’re making fun of a bunch of things.

I could write the same sketch and cram it full of Lethal Weapon specifics and references, and probably 4% of the audience would eat it up when I mentioned how Riggs stopped that guy from killing himself, but the other 96% would be like “who the hell is Riggs? God, that was awful, wasn’t it?”

Please note: this is true with live sketch. Online, go nerdier, make the specific reference or sketch if you want, the YouTube algorithm is more likely to serve up a Lethal Weapon sketch to Lethal Weapon fans than it is to serve up “Naughty Cop/Nice Cop” to anyone. Tech conglomerates are evil. Oh well.

The best ever to do sketch did so long ago. They are…

Nichols and May

Every Nichols and May sketch is based on human behavior. Even if some seem like tropes, they are tropes because Nichols and May used them in a best-selling Broadway show and then they were copied.

Before Nichols and May (and Lenny Bruce), comedy was basically borscht-belt “take-my-wife” level joking, what we’d now recognize as inherently hack comedy. This is because of how genius those two (and Lenny Bruce in standup) were: why joke about fake things when real life is right there for the taking.

Note Lenny Bruce has actually aged pretty poorly (he goes for shock laughs, and the laugh is often “oh my god he’s talking about his life/feelings” and not a real joke, something like “my wife sucks and I want more sex” and the audience is like WAHAHAHA). Nichols and May has aged super well because it’s not specific to their life, it’s about all human behavior.

The only real way to see Nichols and May is to watch the documentary Nichols and May: Take Two or watch individual fuzzy videos on YouTube. Their audio recordings exist, and since these sketches are very little object work and more like radio plays, they may suffice to some. I prefer to watch, though my only notes for Nichols and May would be “do more than sit there” and “cut this so its under 5 minutes instead of going 8 minutes”, and I say that because modern audiences are impatient, not because Nichols and May have anything to learn from me. They don’t. They’re the greatest to ever do it.

That said, the sketches you can find online from them are all classics. I will do an analysis of “Mother and Son” in the next part (though you can easily find the Telephone Company, Teenagers in a Car, and Funeral Salesman), and then this post’s over baby!

An Analysis

Here is a transcript of “The Mother and Son Sketch”, with transcriptions in code and notes in outside of code in normal font. Laugh lines are bolded italics.

SON: Hello?

MOTHER: Hello, Arthur? This is your mother. You remember me?

We understand right away that this mother is both overbearing, and that she hasn’t heard from her son in a while. Going back to the last post, it’s the inherent emotion and acting that takes it over the top, though the emotion of a mother asking her son if he remembers her is funny. It’s the emotion.

SON: Mother, I was just going to call you. Is that a funny thing? I quite literally had my hand on the...

MOTHER: Arthur, you were supposed to call me last Friday.

SON: Mom, I know, I just didn’t have a second, and I could cut my throat over...

MOTHER: Arthur, I sat by that phone all day Friday...

SON: Mom, I was working...

MOTHER: And all day Friday night...

SON: Mom, I was in the lab...

MOTHER: And all day Saturday, and all day Sunday. And your father finally told me, “Phyllis, eat something. You’ll faint.”

You’ll note I feel like the best rhythm is two horizontal moves, then one vertical move. Theirs is a little different, a little more patient, but this is for a 1950s Broadway and radio play audience. Conceptually, I’m stealing it from Nichols & May. The horizontal move is just keep naming days, the vertical move is to show something beyond that. Minigames!

MOTHER (continued): And I said, “No, Harry, no. Because I don’t want my mouth to be full when my son calls me.”

SON: Mom...

MOTHER: And you never called.

SON: Mother, I was sending up a rocket. I didn’t have a second!

MOTHER: Well, it’s always something, isn’t.

SON: Alright, honey, look, I-

MOTHER: You know, Arthur, I’m sure all the other scientists there have mothers, and I’m sure they all find after their breakfast, before their countoff...

SON: Down.

This gets less laughs. It’s a new mini-game that hasn’t been thoroughly set up, and could probably be dropped, but was probably kept in so Nichols could get at least ONE LAUGH LINE before the turn, the real zoom out.

MOTHER: ...to pick up a phone and call their mothers.

SON: Well, now you have me on the phone.

MOTHER: And you know how I worry...

SON: Well, that’s the point...

MOTHER: It says in the paper that you’re still losing them.

SON: Mother... Mother I don’t lose them...

MOTHER: I nearly went out of my mind.

SON: Honey, listen, I-

MOTHER: I wondered, “What if they’re taking it out of his pay?”

SON: Mom, look, listen... just tell me how you are. How are you?

MOTHER: I’m sick.

SON: I’m sorry to hear that. What’s wrong?

MOTHER: Nothing. Well, you know what it is, Arthur.

SON: Yeah.

MOTHER: It’s the same thing it’s always been.

SON: Yeah. Yeah, sure.

MOTHER: It’s my nerves.

SON: Yeah.

MOTHER: And I went to the doctor...

SON: Of course yeah...

MOTHER: And he tells me, “Listen, look, you’re a very nervous, very high-strung woman...”

SON: Well, god knows that’s true...

These laughs are coming not just from horizontal moves, but the relationship game - instead of a simple game of “mother annoys son”, the dynamic flows and changes as things happen but still makes sense because its overbearing mother and son who wants to please mother but is annoyed. They’re going specific in a way we’ve all seen, if not experienced, and it lets the ridiculousness of the emotion flow naturally and often.

MOTHER: “... and you cannot stand the slightest aggravation.”

SON: No, you can’t.

MOTHER: And I said, “Doctor, I know that.” And I do know that. So I said, “But you see, doctor, I have this son... and he’s very busy, I know the truth. He’s very busy. But the problem is he’s too busy to pick up a phone and call his mother...”

SON: Mom, listen...

MOTHER: When I said that to him, that man turned pale. He said, “Mrs. White, I have been a doctor for thirty five years and I have never heard of a son too busy to call his mother.”

SON: Mom...

MOTHER: That’s what he said to me Arthur, and that man is a doctor.

Again: we’ve all had our Moms argue some complete nonsense at some point with this kind of ideology behind it. Nowadays it might be “and it was on the news!”, but it doesn’t matter: we’ve all had or seen a Mom be completely obtuse but have her argument be validated by some external power that doesn’t know the complete story. It’s funny because it’s relatable yet still so ridiculous.

SON: Mother. Please, tell me what the doctor said they’re going to do with you.

MOTHER: Well, I may be in the hospital for a while.

SON: The hospital? What are they going to do?

MOTHER: I don’t know. X-ray my nerves.

SON: Mother, why don’t you let me know?

MOTHER AND SON (jumbled arguing)

MOTHER: Please listen about you: how is your hangnail?

More golden specifics. The game is still overbearing mother but the game move in this moment is “mother cares about something totally embarrassing at inopportune time.” This is the Nichols and May specific version of it. You could rewrite this sketch for 2026 (“How is your sex life? Are you getting laid?” “Have you been eating? You look skinnier.” “Have they promoted you at work yet?”) and cut some wasted lines in this sketch and it would still crush live, because Mom’s still love their sons and still do not care about context or how overbearing it can be.

SON: Mother, listen to me, please. Please. Just don’t worry.

MOTHER: Arthur. What does that mean? Honey! What does that mean? “Don’t worry”?

SON: Well, nothing, actually. I don’t know. It was the first thing that came into my head.

MOTHER: Listen to me, Arthur. I’m your mother.

SON: Well, that’s the thing...

MOTHER: Oh, what’s the use in talking, you know? You’re very young. Someday, honey, someday, you’ll get married.

SON: Mom.

MOTHER: And you’ll have children of your own.

SON: Mom...

MOTHER: And when you do I only pray that they make you suffer the same way you’re making me suffer.

One of the two biggest laughs of the sketch. One of two turns. Now we’re golden: the mother is being outright insane, but we see why and it feels so grounded and real even though no mother would ever say this. She’s openly rooting for his unhappiness in a way that feels human.

The “turn” is commonly used phrase to show a whole new way to view what’s happening. (It’s like a bigger zoom-out, using my phrasing: zoom-out is we see a new kind of move, a turn is we understood everything that came before in a whole entirely new way.) Another way to think of a “turn” is it’s when the same characters feelings change. The turn is that Mom before Mom wanted the son happy, now she wants her son unhappy.

MOTHER (continued): That’s all I pray, Arthur. That’s a mother’s prayer.

SON: Okay, Mom, thanks for calling.

MOTHER: You’re very sarcastic.

SON: Mother, I’m trying to do my best here. You call, I’ve tried to explain to you that I’m busy...

MOTHER: Alright, don’t bite me. I’m sorry. I’m sorry I bothered you when you were so busy. Believe me, I won’t be around to bother you much longer. Listen, I hope I didn’t make you feel bad.

SON: Are you kidding? I feel awful!

MOTHER: Oh, honey, if I could believe that I would be the happiest mother on earth...

There’s an applause and laugh break here because of how ABSOLUTELY INSANE THIS IS but it’s not insane, it’s just bordering on third beat territory, because we know exactly why she’s being insane before she gets there. Every sketch should end in insanity, and if you did the first few parts right, it will not feel insane (or it’ll be insane and work and be such a “you had to be there” kind of thing that when others talk about it, they won’t know why their friends aren’t laughing). That’s why you start grounded: to make the insane parts funny instead of crazy.

SON: Well, Mother, what do you think? I feel rotten!

MOTHER: Well then Arthur, honey, why don’t you call me? Honey, you know, I know that I nag you. You’ve got a nagging mother! What are you gonna do? HA HA HA HA!!! I’m kidding... You know, you’re my baby. You’re the only baby I got. And I’ll tell you something, when you’re a hundred years old you’re still going to be my baby, you know? And when you don’t call me, I can’t help it, I worry. Is it so hard to pick up a phone and call your mommy? Baby. Oh, please, baby, please...

These laughs are all in the delivery. Watch/listen and don’t just read - Elaine May acts her ass off.

SON: I will, I promise...

THE BIG TURN! Now Nichols is the laugh man because he’s being a baby. We’re in pure insanity territory, but we’re in the sketch territory Lorne Michaels likes too: there’s a three beat story here (Mom upset with son, Son upset with Mom, Son becomes baby), but it’s under a broad sketch umbrella (Overbearing mother) executed with specifics (Nichols and May 1950s style, not Dan Bogosian 2026 style) with zoom ins and zoom outs and a balance of vertical & horizontal moves and two turns. And it ends in absolute crazy town, but it makes sense that we don’t even really recognize we’re in crazy town.

MOTHER: Aw honey, you do, you make your mommy happy...

SON: Well, if my mommy’s happy then I’m happy...

MOTHER: Thank you, baby. And mommy wants to wish you lots of luck with your rockets...

SON: Thank you, Mommy.

MOTHER: And you remember that Mommy loves you.

SON: I love you too, Mommy.

BLACKOUT

That’s a mo-fuckin’ sketch right there. 10/10. Love me some Nichols and May.

SELF-PROMO / SELF NOTES:

• Helped teach a Quinnipiac Improv workshop with Maddie & Norm this past Wednesday and two weeks prior. College kids are the most fun: young enough to still be wildly creative and not unlearn a bunch of things, nervous enough about making an impression that they tend to care if they’re into it at all, old enough to listen and not just say “6-7” or “Ohio” a bunch of times.
  

• I think there’s a lot of similarities between ‘premises’ in standup and ‘games’ in sketch/improv, but I still find game in sketch/improv a lot easier to work with than premises in standup. I get tired when other comedians milk a premise for more than a few minutes (seen a comedian do 10 minutes on their name, and by minute five I was like: please joke about something else I see these punchlines coming), and I think that’s a me-problem and not a people-problem because everyone else was eating it up. That said… I think I’m cutting my standup premises short by only doing 30-60 seconds on each one. Maybe the sweet spot is 2-3 minutes and I just run out of jokes. Maybe it’s 5 minutes and I’m lazy. I DON’T KNOW BUT I KNOW IT’S HAUNTING ME AHHHH
  

• The St. Patty’s Day Sketch & Improv show now has a live show link. I wrote one sketch and will be doing some improv in this. Weeeee.
  

• Is there something you’d like me to write about here? Tell me. I’m not the world’s greatest anything but if you’re reading this you’re my audience.
  

  Something I’d like to write about is how game can actually make you a way better narrative writer. The trouble is, I don’t really know any narrative writers in comedy, so who’s the audience for that? It’s me. Is it only me? Sigh.
  

• I want to be on a house sketch team at Sea Tea, I want to be on the first house sketch team at Sea Tea, I want to teach sketch, I miss sketch, I love sketch, this post made me think about sketch, sketch sketch sketch sketch sketch.