Comedy

Today it rained, for the first time this year. A proper deluge, washing fun and joy out of the air and replacing it with damp. I hate the rain. Lucky for me, I'll be in England on Thursday.
Wali Collins, the comic, gave a seminar on stand-up this afternoon. So we sat there in a cockroach-infested basement, waiting for a man to fixed the backed-up toilet, while he gave us the benefit of 19 years experience.

Normally I wouldn't enjoy sitting in a cockroach-infested basement, but the man who came to fix the toilet had a most endearing personality.  And 19 years of experience.

No, really it was an inspiring hour and a half to listen to Wali elucidate his approach to comedy and offer his advice on how to write and perform. He wasn't being overly prescriptive and saying "all comedy must be like THIS" but illustrating one path to the truth. By the end of it I felt pepped up with more drive to go back and eliminate all the fat and dead spots from my material. Who knows what would be left?

One thing that he stressed was the value of being sincere or authentic: performing is a great privilege, so you need to show that you're enjoying it, and to put your whole heart into it. Like anything else, you could fall into a path of memorising the same-old same-old material, and not really engaging with your audience.

Another thing he brought up, that I'm wrestling with, is always writing from your premiss, without the punchline always being clear. Like any other diktat in comedy, there will be some exceptions, but again if you focus too much on what you think the joke should end with, you'll neglect the value of the journey.

But I really, really want a joke about various forms of Ben & Jerry ice cream named after vomitting, and that seems like working backwards in ever more baroque ways from the punchline.

So far I have a flavour full of large lumps, endorsed by a jazz trumpeter, called 'Blowing Chunks' but now I wonder if I should think of others. Or try to figure out how I'd ever get to that being the punchline.