I Can’t Think Of A Title For This One!

Tags: amateur comedians, Saskatoon, stand-up comedy, The Stand-Up Diaries, trevor dean

Summer is a busy time for everyone.  You can tell in the readership numbers for my blog, and in the fact I haven’t been able to get a hold of my comedy coach to discuss my next move forward.  Time away from the stage isn’t a bad thing right now.  No, the threats of physical violence towards me will not stop me from pursuing comedy!

As some of you may have read in previously posted comments, I do have potential to succeed.  The level of success I attain is solely up to me.  Plus I am not the type of person to put in all that work and spend the amount of money I did just to throw in the towel and give up.  I recently discovered an equation that really opened my eyes.

Do you remember my comeback video that some of you have seen on YouTube?  It was approximately seven minutes long and I was the only performer that night who got consistent laughs from start to finish on each joke.  I then remembered back to the several hours I spent with the comedy coach to craft new material and realized the following:

it took over 7 hours to put together a solid 7 minutes of material.  in other words, that averages out to one minute for every hour

To me that was a real eye opener.  It’s just one small component to the 10,000 hour rule.  You know the one, where it studies suggest for you to be an expert or really good at your chosen profession you must dedicate at least 10,000 hours of practice to it.

I was combing through my written material thus far and asked myself what would be easier for me to do going forward?  I could use the writing techniques I’ve learned and apply them to the over 150 pieces of material I’ve written, or I can just start from scratch using my comeback material as a starting point.

I’ve decided to scrap my material, all of it.  It’s like my ex, I was thankful for the experience, and it had its moments, but for simplicity’s sake it is easier for me to just start all over again.  For me to go back through all my material and figure out where I could make the jokes funnier, while it could be done, it would take way too long.  I will keep those jokes around though, only as a reminder of how not to write jokes that could resonate with the audience.  While it has been a couple months since my last coaching session, I still have a decent grasp of the basics to joke writing and how to set a joke up properly.

But now the real work begins, because I have to start writing.  Wish me luck.  It may be a while until I am back on stage.  Until then, I should be able to come up with lots of new material.

I shall keep you all posted……..