In times of extreme uncertainty, comedy is needed more than ever. However Many people are wondering how their comedy is going to progress. Maybe it’s something like the quarantine we find ourselves in due to COVID-19, maybe its job loss or an accident. So with all that in mind, here are 10 ways you can keep your comedy sharp during hard times or if you can’t get on stage and perform.
- Watch Or Listen To Stand Up
- Write New Jokes
- Free Write Your Feeling And Ideas
- Revise Current Jokes (Add New Punchlines And Tags)
- Post Jokes Online
- Listen To Podcasts
- Start A Joke Text Group
- Read Books About Comedy
- Read Blogs About Comedy
- Perform And Post Home Sets Online
Watch Or Listen To Stand Up
Now is the time to become a student of comedy Turn on Amazon Prime. VidAngel is the home of Dry Bar Comedy. Any comedy you want, it’s online. Watch comedy shows, watch stand up, watch sketch comedy, take notes, and learn things. Maybe a new premise will jump in your brain or you’ll think of a different punch line or a tag on a current punchline or better set up or whatever.
Use that time to kind of watch stuff and learn. You’re gonna gain so much knowledge and really learn how jokes work. Spend some time watching unknown comedians that have specials. Between Dry Bar, Amazon, Netflix and there are tons of great stand up for hours of viewing and listening enjoyment. There’s probably at least a hundred new specials that people watch for so why not learn and laugh.
Write New Jokes
Number two is speaking of jokes. Write new jokes. You’re sitting at home or wherever and have downtime. What else do you have all day? So when you’re not watching stand up or even if you are watching stand up at the time, write lots of jokes, even if you write one joke a day, then you have one joke every day. No matter how long you are off stage you will have plenty of material to try when you get back on stage. So spend some time writing new jokes.
Free Write Your Feeling And Ideas
Maybe you already have new jokes. What about trying some freewriting? You could write your feelings and ideas, or maybe one or two stories, maybe a spec script of The Simpsons or whatever. Just write a little and try to write something funny. Maybe you want to try singing someone crazy or something weird. Whatever. Get that out through writing. Putting some time and effort into writing will help you to get stuff out there.
Having downtime from work or school is a really great time to be creative and maximize that downtime because some time has been saved by not having your drive to work or school. That is time that could be spent working on jokes, listening to podcasts, etc. It’s a really great time to make use of this extra time if you have it.
Revise Current Jokes (Add New Punchlines And Tags)
Revise current jokes. Now is the time to work on your setups, your punchlines, and your tags. Maybe you’re reversing some of your strong sets and revising some stuff that wasn’t working. Maybe you have had a hard time about something working in your set. Now is a great time to sift out stuff and spend some time revising or rewriting.
Sure it is possible that your performing skills are going to drop but you can use this time to help your writing skills increase. Think of this as an RPG game and you are spending time to level up your creativity and your writing while you are unable to level up your stage presence and performing skills.
Post Jokes Online
Post jokes. The obvious places are Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, or whatever Social Media you’re using. If you have a blog it could be a great idea to post other jokes there, or maybe even record yourself performing your set for Facebook to run and possibly get feedback. Continue making stuff right and jump into working on your jokes. Try to see what people think as it is a good time to try new stuff because there is no better time than the present to try something new.
Listen To Or Create A Podcast
Listen to podcasts. There’s a lot of other great podcasts out there. Listened to a lot of different podcasts. Maybe try a new one like a business or sports podcast. Anything you are interested in there is most likely a podcast about it. If not then maybe you could create your own show.
Maybe there’s something that you’ve always meant to do. Podcast about it and do it right now is the time because there’s nothing holding you back. They had the dark ages into the booth, into the way I start. So maybe this is our millennial dark ages to boost into a renaissance of creativity and new businesses and whatever.
Start A Joke Text Group
People text a lot of people, many like to send joke text. So if you can’t go out but if you have a lot of friends, you can write jokes and text them to each other and get feedback. It would be as simple as texting, “I wrote this joke today. What you guys think?”
Creating jokes and even communicating via text will help with not feeling isolated. The biggest thing that’s going to happen is that other people may feel isolated. If you have your friends or even if you start a group on Twitter or Instagram. Whatever it is, and then share jokes, setups, and punchlines thus creating new material.
Read Books About Comedy
Along with studying stand up, you can also spend time reading books about comedy. There are tons of books out there. If you’ve been consuming clips of the content. You can read comedians’ autobiographies, how-to books and even just funny books. Every book has some gem that you can use to get something out of this and make a better comedy.
Maybe readings, not your thing. Well now is time to fix that. Don’t be negative. This is a good time to be positive, to try to learn the craft and try to be more creative and try to be better off. Even if you don’t want to buy any books, remember that there are so many free resources, too. You could download some books from the library via an app called Libby.
Read Blogs About Comedy
There are so many good blog posts out there. Things that help you with your job writing things are helping with different skills, and just stuff you can read to be entertained. On this site alone there are more than enough posts to read one a week and gain something new. Spend time browsing blogs, not only will you help blog owners but you will learn something.
This could also be a good time to start your own blog and spend time creating funny content to share with others. Short stories, true stories, short scripts, or even silly videos can be shared via blogs.
Perform And Post Home Sets Online
Sure there are some online open mics and even someone organizing a virtual reality open mic. The whole world is online and everybody’s able to share their sets online with their groups and social media platforms. Even Patton Oswalt did stand up from his front yard and shared it with the world. Use the internet as an outlet and get out and do comedy, because I think honestly, this is one of those things where everybody could be growing and doing better because no matter what we all have time to do something to make things better. Make the world laugh. No matter if it’s a short Tik Tok or a five-minute set you record in your front yard. Make comedy and make laughter.
Don’t waste your downtime time. Get better. And even if you don’t write your jokes, I hope you do. Read and reread. You can never get enough knowledge. Nobody can take education and knowledge. They can take your money. They can take your job or can take everything physically but not your knowledge. So use this time to gain more knowledge.
No matter if it is something you read in a business book, see in a movie, stand up special or through a podcast, whatever the time you spend working on stuff off stage could lead to a renaissance for comedy. Now we’re in a golden age of comedy anyways. Don’t waste your downtime, turn your time into comedy gold.