Stand-up comedy

Stand-up comedy is a comedic style in which a comedian performs in front of a live audience, speaking directly to them through a microphone.[1][2][3] The performer is commonly known as a comic, stand-up comic, comedian, comedienne, stand-up comedian, or simply a stand-up.[4] Comedians give the illusion that they are dialoguing, but in actuality, they are monologuing a grouping of humorous stories, jokes and one-liners, typically called a shtick, routine, act, or set.[17] Some stand-up comedians use props, music or magic tricks to enhance their acts.[18] Stand-up comedians perform quasi-autobiographical and fictionalized extensions of their offstage selves.[30]

"Stand-up" and "Stand Up Comedy" redirect here. For the U2 song, see Stand Up Comedy (song). For other uses, see Stand Up (disambiguation).
George Carlin performing his stand-up comedy routine in April 2008

Overview
Comedy Night at Gotham Comedy Club

Some of the main types of humor in stand-up comedy include observational comedy, blue comedy, dark comedy, clean comedy, and cringe comedy. Alternative stand-up comedy deviates from the traditional, mainstream comedy by breaking either joke structure, performing in an untraditional scene, or breaking an audience's expectations; this includes the use of shaggy dog stories and anti-jokes.

Stand-up comedy is often performed in corporate events, comedy clubs, bars and pubs, nightclubs, neo-burlesques, colleges and theatres (audiences will give applause breaks more often in theaters).[31][32] Outside live performance, stand-up is often distributed commercially via television, DVD, CD and the internet.[4][33]

It can take an amateur comedian about 10 years to perfect the technique needed to be a professional comedian;[34][35][36] this is a constant process of learning through failure.[41]

As the name implies, "stand-up" comedians usually perform their material while standing, though this is not mandatory. Similar acts performed while seated can be referred to as "sit-down comedy".

Stand-up comedy show

The audience's feedback at a stand-up performance, even from the moment they enter the venue, is instant and crucial for the comedian's ever-changing act.[47] Audience members, in a comedy setting that doesn't have fixed seating, are seated very close to one another.[48][49][50] Audiences expect a stand-up comedian to provide a constant stream of laughs, calculated at four to six laughs per minute,[55] and a performer is always under pressure to deliver, especially the first two minutes.[62] The late Phyllis Diller holds the record for most laughs per minute, at twelve laughs per minute.[63][64][65]

Opener, feature, headliner

A show begins with an opening act, known as a host, compère (UK), master of ceremonies (MC/emcee), or simply "opener" who, for 10–12 minutes,[66] usually warms up the crowd, interacts with audience members, makes announcements, and then introduces the other performers;[67][68] this is followed by a "middle"/"feature" act that lasts 15–20 minutes but is expected to have "30 minutes of solid material"; the feature act is followed by the headliner, who performs for "an hour."[69][70][71] An opener can also double as a feature for travelling headliners, with the opener performing a 25-minute set.[72][69]

Showcase format

Showcase format has a host/MC with several other acts who perform for roughly equal lengths of time.[73]

One-person show
Main article: Solo performance
See also: Pourquoi story

These one-hour, headlining performances are stylistically dominated by autobiographical storytelling.[74][75][76] One-person, stand-up comedy shows became popular in the 1990s, with no consensus for what separates stand-up acts from the more theatrical, one-person shows.[77][78]

Open mic
Main article: Open mic

Many smaller venues hold open mic events, where anyone can take the stage and perform for the audience. This offers an opportunity for amateur performers to hone their craft and perhaps to break into the profession, or for established professionals to work on their material.[79] Industry scouts will sometimes go to watch open mics.[80] Breaking into the business requires "10 minute[s]" of "A" material. Roadhouses (remote clubs) start booking people for "20 minutes of 'A' material".[70] "A" material means getting a big laugh at least "75% of the time".[81]

Bringer shows

"Bringer shows" are open mics that require amateur performers to bring a specified number of paying guests to receive stage time. Some view this as exploitation, while others disagree.[82][83] The guests usually have to pay a cover charge and there is often a minimum number of drinks that must be ordered. These shows usually have a "showcase" format. Different comedy clubs have different requirements for their bringer shows. Gotham Comedy Club in New York City, for example, usually has ten-person bringers, while Broadway Comedy Club in New York City usually has six-person bringers.[84][85] In the '90s, the New York Comedy Club had pre-shows that were bringer shows; they also had audition scams with an "accelerated pre-show program."[86]

Guest set

This is an unpaid, five-to-ten-minute time slot (during the emcee's time slot of a professional show) that is essentially an audition to get booked for paid gigs.[87]

Stand-up genres

Just as within any art form, stand-up has multiple genres and styles, with their own formats, unwritten rules, and target audience. Some of these include:

  • Observational comedy that focuses on finding humour from aspects of common life.
  • Character comedy where the comedian performs partly or throughout their set as one or more invented characters.
  • Surreal humour often including long, meandering stories or unusual characters
  • Comedy music where a comedian will mostly or significantly use a music instrument or their voice within their set.
  • Insult comedy based on ridiculing the audience or a 'common enemy', deriving humour from those outside of the insult enjoying the joke.
  • Political satire where the political figures, establishment or ideologies are subject of ridicule.
  • Improvised comedy where the bulk of the comedian's material is invented on-stage, often based on information or events in the audience.

The comedian's set

Stand-up joke

Stand-up comedy uses the typical joke structure of canned jokes.[92] A stand-up comedian delivers the joke through the use of timing: the setup and then the punch line.[98] A joke is made of a premise, point of view, and then the reveal.[105] The setup to a joke contains the information needed by the audience in order to understand the punchline.[112] Most of stand-up comedy's jokes are the juxtaposition of two incongruous things.[124] Stand-ups feign sincerity to maintain a close aesthetic distance with the audience (e.g., they frame their stories as having happened "recently").[132] The comedian's delivery of a joke is integral to the process—the pause, intonation, inflection, attitude, energy, and other elements.[138] Comedians often include stylistic and comedic devices, such as tropes, idioms, stop consonants, archetypes, soliloquy, expletive infixation, and wordplay.[139][140][141][142] A paraprosdokian is a popular method of joke structuring by using a surprising punchline that causes the listener to reinterpret the setup.[143][144] Stand-ups will often use the rule of three.[145][146][147][148]

Comedians often include taglines (dependent punchlines that follow another punchline)[149] and toppers (independent afterthoughts that follow a punchline).[150][151] Some sources may use tags, toppers, and afterthoughts as synonyms.[152] A jokoid is a placeholder joke, which will eventually be superseded by a funnier joke.[153] Stock jokes are similar to jokoids (as placeholders) and are hack jokes that are for "specific situations".[154]

A comedian's ideas and jokes will fail nine times out of ten; this may require a comedian to write hundreds of jokes to achieve enough successful ones to fill a set.[159] Stand-ups use second person to address the audience.[160] A stand-up comedian cannot know if their material has succeeded without an audience to give feedback.[166]

The routine
Sara Pascoe performing at the Up the Creek Comedy Club, London

Bits (linked jokes) and chunks (linked bits) are an arrangement of interlinked units from within the set or routine.[175] A stand-up routine is a gestalt that emerges from performing interconnected jokes, bits, and chunks to a live audience.[179] Stand-ups structure jokes, bits, and chunks to end on climactic laughter.[184] A segue is the link between jokes.[185][186][187] A callback is a reference to a previous thing that was experienced by the audience during that set, designed to create an inside joke.[191] Bombing refers to when a comedian has failed to get an intended laugh.[192][193]

There is no consensus among the comedy community as to which is most important for getting laughs: persona, material, or fame.[201] A stand-up defines their craft, in part, by how they convince the audience to laugh and by their development of a persona.[209]

Onstage personality

When a professional stand-up is not being funny, they still possess the characteristics of a performer, such as being interesting, entertaining, engaging, and relatable.[213] Comedians create tensions in the audience that are relieved with laughter.[220]

Modern stand-up relies on narrative.[227] Character is tied to narrative.[234] Persona is not a character but a self-managed version of one's offstage personality that comes from onstage, audience feedback.[243]

Crowd work

When a set is consistently bombing, most comedians will perform "crowd work" by communicating with audience members to save face; much of crowd work is prewritten with added improvisation. [244] Some comedians will use small talk that directs audience members to answer "a question" that the comedian "[has] a topper" for. Other comedians will become more intimate with their questions until they get multiple big laughs, before moving on. [245] The result of crowd work is often an inside joke.

Tight five

A "tight five" is a five-minute stand-up routine that is well-rehearsed and consists of a stand-up comedian's best material that reliably gets laughs.[246] It is often used for auditions or delivered when audience response is minimal.[247][248][249] A tight five is the stepping stone to getting a paid spot.[250][251]

Memory techniques

Comics memorize their jokes through the use of on-stage practice/blocking.[252] Some comedians employ a mnemonic device called the method of loci (memory palace technique) to remember their jokes.[253][254] Some write their jokes over and over, while others have a set list in front of them; for professionals, this may be on cue cards or a stage monitor. [255][256]

Terminology
Punching down
A term sometimes used to describe jokes that are made at the expense of disenfranchised groups or their members. It carries with it the assumption that comedy should be directed at the powerful rather than the afflicted.[257]
Smelling the road
Claiming that one can "smell the road" on a comic is a pejorative phrase for a comedian who has compromised their own originality to get laughs while travelling.[262]
Clapter
Coined by comedian Seth Meyers, a term for when an audience cheers or applauds for a joke that they agree with but that is not funny enough to get a laugh.[263][264][265]
Heckling
In stand-up, a heckler is a person who interrupts a comedian's set. Comedians will often have a repertoire of comebacks for hecklers.[266] Comedians rarely get into physical altercations with hecklers.[267][268]
Hack
A hack is a pejorative term for a comedian with rushed, unoriginal, low-quality, or clichéd material.[276] One proposed amelioration to hackneyed material is an essay by George Orwell called "Politics and the English Language: The Six Rules".[277]
Joke theft
Modern stand-up is predicated upon originality; appropriation and plagiarism are social crimes.[278][279] When someone is accused of stealing a joke, the accused's defense is sometimes cryptomnesia[280] or parallel thinking.[281]
Warm-up comedian
A warm-up comedian (or crowd warmer) warms up cold audiences as the opening act and before the filming of television comedies in front of studio audiences.[282][283]
Chi-chi room
A chi-chi room may be the ritzy room of an establishment, a small nightclub, or a comedy venue with niche performances.[284][285][286][287]
The room
The place where the interaction between the stand-up and the audience occurs.[288] A comedian will read the room by gauging audience interaction.[289] The quality of the room affects how the audience perceives the stand-up's performance.[290]
Killing
When a stand-up does well by making the audience laugh in unison, they are "killing."[291]
Pointing
When the comic puts an inflection on the 'laugh-line' that comes before the audience reaction.[292][293]
Mugging
To facially pose in a way that reveals one’s identity and emotions (i.e., common phrase ham-/mug-/clown for the camera).[294][295][296]

History

Stand-up comedy got its start in the 1840s from the three-act, variety show format of minstrel shows (via blackface performances of the Jim Crow character); Frederick Douglass criticized these shows for profiting from and perpetuating racism.[297][298] Minstrelsy monologists performed second-act, stump-speech monologues from within minstrel shows until 1896, although traces of these racist performances continued to be used until the mid-1900s.[299][300] Stand-up comedy also has roots in various traditions of popular entertainment of the late 19th century, including vaudeville (via minstrel shows, dime museums, concert saloons, freak shows, variety shows, Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus), American burlesque (via Lydia Thompson's feminization of the minstrel show, concert saloons, English music halls, and circus clown antics), and humorist monologues like those delivered by Mark Twain in his first (1866) touring show, Our Fellow Savages of the Sandwich Islands.[301][302][303][304] Unadulterated, vaudeville monologuist run-times were 10-15 minutes.[305]

Festivals
Main article: Comedy festival
Charlotte Gabris at the Montreux Comedy Festival, 2010

Comedy festivals are used by industry professionals to seek out new comedians to hire.[306][307][308]

Stand-up comedy is the focus of four major international festivals: the Edinburgh Festival Fringe in Edinburgh, Scotland; Just for Laughs in Montreal, Quebec, Toronto, Ontario, and Vancouver, British Columbia in Canada; HBO's U.S. Comedy Arts Festival in Aspen, CO, and the Melbourne International Comedy Festival in Melbourne, Australia. [309] A number of other festivals operate around the world, including The Comedy Festival in Las Vegas, the Vancouver Comedy Festival, the New York Comedy Festival, the Boston Comedy and Film Festival, the New York Underground Film Festival, the Sydney Comedy Festival, and the Cat Laughs Comedy Festival in Kilkenny, Ireland. Radio hosts Opie and Anthony also produce a comedy tour called Opie and Anthony's Traveling Virus Comedy Tour, featuring their own co-host, Jim Norton as well as several other stand-up comedians regularly featured on their radio show. There is also a festival in Hong Kong called the HK International Comedy Festival.

Stand-up circuits

Stand-up comedians are selected for bookings on the basis of how clean or dirty their act is, their popularity, and their ability to draw an audience.[310][311][312][313]

Salary

Most comedians have day jobs.[314][315][316] In a comedian's first five years, they will lose money from travelling and performing.[317][318][319][320] Comedians will sometimes be paid for their performances with alcoholic beverages.[321] A stand-up's first comedy job will often be emceeing.[322] While it can take around a decade to make a living at comedy,[319] unknown comedians may achieve great financial success.[323][324]

Hosts and MCs are paid $0-$200, depending on location and the time of week (emcees average $25[325]); showcase spots get $10-$75; features get approximately $300-$600; a headliner with no following gets $150-$1500, depending on many factors; headliners with a following or TV credits can make $1,500-$10,000 per show.[326][327][328][329] The headliner makes "10 times" more money than the feature act.[70] Famous headliners get paid from "door deals," or a percentage of the revenue, based on the number of seats sold; these comics rely on their notoriety to fill seats, which makes them more money than headliners with no following.[330][331] Comics will sell merchandise after their shows; this will make up for other expenses, like traveling.[332]

Mark Normand has stated that a set on Conan pays "a couple grand" for five minutes.[333] In 2012, Comedy Central routinely offered $15,000 for a half-hour special.[334] As of 2015, Comedy Central will pay comedians about $20,000 for a thirty-minute set; an hour, Comedy Central special can be up to $150,000;[335] as of 2018, Netflix will pay comedians $26,000+ for a fifteen-minute set; Netflix pays celebrity-comedians different amounts from one another.[336][337]

The cruise-circuit comedian can make up to $10,000 per week,[338] Cruiseliners have both clean comedy and blue comedy at different times during the day, but opinionated political material is frowned upon.[339] some $85,000 per year; and, a college-circuit comedian can make six figures per year or thousands of dollars per gig.[334][340][341] Christian circuit comedy headliners make $1,500-$2,500 per show.[342] Although one source states that newer comics on the national (L.A.) circuit make $1,250-$2,500 per week, another source claims that this is very inaccurate, and the amount of money one makes is closer to $20 for a spot.[343][344]

Famous comedians may pay lesser comedians thousands of dollars for jokes and hire them on as writers,[345][346] but many famous comedians do not reveal this, as it is considered a taboo to admit purchasing material for stand-up comedy sets.[347] Comedians may knowingly sell plagiarized jokes.[348]

Other media

Many of the earliest vaudeville-era stand-ups gained their greater recognition on radio. They often opened their programs with topical monologues, characterized by ad-libs and discussions about anything from the latest films to a missed birthday. Each program tended to be divided into the opening monologue, musical number, followed by a skit or story routine. A "feud" between Fred Allen and Jack Benny was used as comic material for nearly a decade.

HBO presented comedians uncensored for the first time, beginning with Robert Klein in 1975, and was instrumental in reaching larger audiences. George Carlin was a perennial favorite, who appeared in 14 HBO comedy specials.

Continuing that tradition, most modern stand-up comedians use television or motion pictures to reach a level of success and recognition unattainable in the comedy-club circuit alone.

Late-night talk shows and award show ceremonies are commonly hosted by comedians, delivering monologues similar to stand-up.

Since the mid-2000s, online video-sharing sites such as YouTube have also provided a venue for stand-up comedians, and many comedians' performances can be viewed online.[349]

An Amazon TV show, The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel, depicts the fictional life of a woman comedian, set in the late 1950s. She often interacts with Lenny Bruce.

List of comedians

Other types of stand-up

See also

References
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  13. Stewart Lee (3 July 2013). On Not Writing (Lecture) (YouTube). St Edmund Hall: University of Oxford. Event occurs at 48:54-48:58. Retrieved 13 February 2019. On the whole, you have to give the illusion that it's a dialogue
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  30. [19][20][21][22][23][24][25][26][27][28][29]
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  33. Fearless delivery sets Will Ferrell apart. The Denver Post, 24 June 2005. Accessed on 29 March 2010.
  34. Ajaye, Franklyn (2002). Comic Insights: The Art of Stand-up Comedy. George Wallace. Los Angeles: Silman-James Press. p. 240. ISBN 1-879505-54-1. How did you answer them? 'By being George Wallace, and finding out who you are as a comedian. And that takes between seven and eleven years.'
  35. Ajaye, Franklyn (2002). Comic Insights: The Art of Stand-up Comedy. Jerry Seinfeld. Los Angeles: Silman-James Press. p. 200. ISBN 1-879505-54-1. How long did it take you to figure out your individual comedic essence? 'I'd [Jerry Seinfeld] say ten years.'
  36. Louis C.K., Charlie Rose (7 May 2014). Louis C.K. (Interview) (TV Show). HBO. Event occurs at 3:59-4:03. Retrieved 3 February 2019. A stage presence comes pretty quickly [but] how to write jokes and how to generate material and know it's going to work; [concerning these, the] first ten years are building the [base] skills
  37. Naessens, Edward David (2020). "Busting the Sad Clown Myth: From Cliché to Comic Stage Persona". In Oppliger, Patrice A.; Shouse, Eric (eds.). The Dark Side of Stand-up Comedy. United Kingdom: Springer Nature Switzerland AG: Palgrave Macmillan. p. 227. doi:10.1007/978-3-030-37214-9_11. ISBN 978-3-030-37213-2. Each minute of performance is backed up by countless hour of hit-and-miss writing, editing, road-testing, and practice. While some say they do not actually 'write down' their material ... [in actuality] they run it over consistently in their heads.
  38. Bobby Lee (interviewee) (2017). Dying Laughing (Motion picture). Gravitas Ventures. Event occurs at 1:02:38-1:02:48. Bombing is a necessary event. It's the only way one gets better, but every time it happens, it's very painful.
  39. John Thomson (interviewee) (2017). Dying Laughing (Motion picture). Gravitas Ventures. Event occurs at 1:02:52-1:02:55. You've got to die to get good.
  40. Seabaugh, Julie (18 March 2014). "Hannibal Buress: 'Bombing Can Be Good'". The Village VOICE. Hannibal Buress. VILLAGE VOICE, LLC. Retrieved 4 February 2019. Yeah, bombing can be good ... you grow up and realize it's about continuing to work. It's about making progress.
  41. [37][38][39][40]
  42. Lindfors, Antti (6 May 2019). "Cultivating Participation and the Varieties of Reflexivity in Stand-Up Comedy". University of Turku, Finland. Journal of Linguistic Anthropology. 29 (3): 280. doi:10.1111/jola.12223. Retrieved 26 December 2020. Not only are stand-ups positioned in a communicative context that presupposes on accommodating and managing the attention and viewpoint of one's interlocutors, they are subjected under several overlapping modes of evaluation and typification directed at their 'competence in performance' (Briggs 1988), their relatability, sense of humor, individuality, here-and-now presence, and outer appearance, all of which can be reflexively acknowledged and reappropriated in performance.
  43. Lee, Stewart (2010). How I Escaped My Certain Fate: The Life and Deaths of a Stand-up Comedian. London, UK: faber and faber Ltd. p. 43. ISBN 978-0-571-25481-1. A show begins the moment the audience walk into a venue.
  44. Goffman, Erving (1980) [1959]. The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. New York: Anchor Books: A Division of Random House, Inc. p. 135. ISBN 978-0-385-094023. The wall that cuts the front and back regions off from the outside obviously has a function to play in the performance staged and presented in these regions, but the outside decorations of the building must in part be seen as an aspect of another show
  45. Roberts, Rebecca Emlinger (2000). Tim Allen. "Standup Comedy and the Prerogative of Art". The Massachusetts Review. The Massachusetts Review, Inc. 41 (2): 158, 159. JSTOR 25091646. No laughter? Out then. Tim [Allen]'s willingness to change his act to suit his audience ... The difference between Tim's censoring of material and a poet's censoring is elusive. Tim's goal is to make money, that's one of his desires, but not his primary motivating desire. His drive as a comedian is to make people laugh.
  46. Wuster, Tracy (2006). "Comedy Jokes: Steve Martin and the Limits of Stand-Up Comedy". Studies in American Humor. American Humor Studies Association (14): 25. JSTOR 42573700. Stand-up comedy is a unique form of performance in that the reaction of the audience is an integral part of the success or failure of each individual performance.
  47. [42][43][44][45][46]
  48. Greene, Grace F. (2012). "Rhetoric in Comedy: How Comedians Use Persuasion and How Society Uses Comedians". The Corinthian: The Journal of Student Research at Georgia College. 13 (11): 138. Retrieved 26 January 2021. [E]xpectancy violations theory is not particular to humor; it is a contemporary communication theory that can be applied to rhetorical situations. Expectancy violations theory is heavily based on the studies of personal space and proxemics, or the study of people’s use of space (Griffin, 2009). The key to the expectancy violations theory is the argument that when our expectations are violated, we have the choice of responding negatively or positively. A comic’s goal is to persuade his or her audience to respond positively to a violation of personal space or any other previously set expectation
  49. Thomas, James M. (2015). "Laugh through it: Assembling difference in an American stand-up comedy club". Ethnography. Sage Publications, Ltd. 16 (2): 174. doi:10.1177/1466138114534336. JSTOR 26359086. S2CID 144390090. Tightly arranged seating within the comedy room created physical discomfort for audience members ... Yet audience members often talked about how much they enjoyed 'the feeling of a full house' ... Conversely, when shows were not sold out and audience members had more room to spread out among empty tables and chairs, audience members were less likely to relate their experiences as one of entertainment or enjoyment.
  50. Lindfors, Antti (6 May 2019). "Cultivating Participation and the Varieties of Reflexivity in Stand-Up Comedy". University of Turku, Finland. Journal of Linguistic Anthropology. 29 (3): 277. doi:10.1111/jola.12223. Retrieved 26 December 2020. Corroborating the communal reputation of the genre, stand-up trades on interpersonal resonance or what is called 'involvement' in sociolinguistics (Tannen 2007), where audience will (ideally) 'coauthor' the speech act by ritualized collective laughter (Duranti 1986).
  51. Chris Rock (interviewee) (2017). Dying Laughing (Motion picture). Gravitas Ventures. Event occurs at 11:24-11:31. A lot of comedians just want laugh, laugh, laugh ... every, what is it, 15 seconds they say?
  52. Nevins, Jake (4 October 2017). "Learning laughter: an expert's guide on how to master standup comedy". The Guardian. Retrieved 26 January 2019. Comedy club audiences ... expect upwards of four laughs per minute.
  53. Roye, Steve. "How Many Jokes Are In A Minute Of Stand-up Comedy Material?". Stand-up Comedy Tips. Retrieved 26 January 2019. If a comedian wants to generate headliner laughter levels, they need to average 4-6+ laughs per minute.
  54. Borns, Betsy (1987). Comic Lives: Inside the World of American Stand-up comedy. Simon & Schuster, Inc. pp. 253–254. ISBN 0-671-62620-5. As each comic's usage of material varies (some say they use as few as two jokes a minute, other comics say they need a laugh every fifteen seconds or the act goes 'in the toilet')
  55. [51][52][53][54]
  56. Frances-White, Deborah; Shandur, Marsha (2016). Off the Mic: The World's Best Stand-up Comedians Get Serious About Comedy. Stephen K Amos. NY, New York: Bloomsbury Publishing Plc. p. 209. ISBN 978-1-4725-2638-0. The first two minutes is very important with a stand-up
  57. Pete Lee (2017). I Need You To Kill (Motion picture). Comedy Dynamics. Event occurs at 31:27-31:56. I call the first two minutes, your flash. And that's where you ... go up there and ... hook them with whatever material it is, so that they know exactly what's funny about you and they trust you and they'll come along with you for everything.
  58. MacInnes, Paul (15 August 2004). "How can he show his face?". The Guardian. Karen Koren. Guardian News & Media Limited. Retrieved 22 March 2019. If you don't make them laugh in the first two minutes, you're fucked
  59. Neill, Geoffrey (22 December 2015). Hitting Your Funny Bone: Writing Stand-up Comedy, and Other Things That Make You Swear. San Bernardino, CA. p. Chapter 5. ISBN 9781515180661. If you have a strong first minute ... the minutes that follow will be great, too.
  60. Wilde, Larry (2000) [1968]. "Joey Bishop". Great Comedians Talk About Comedy. Joey Bishop. Mechanicsburg, Pennsylvania: Executive Books. p. 107. ISBN 0-937539-51-1. [Joey Bishop:] As the unknown [comedian], you've got to make a compromise and the compromise is in the first few minutes—to get their attention. You are just a salesman then. Once you've got their attention, you can then do your type of comedy.
  61. See also Captatio benevolentiae
  62. [56][57][58][59][60][61]
  63. Carter, Judy (2001). The Comedy Bible. Quote from Phyllis Diller, 'who is listed in The Guinness Book of World Records as having gotten the most laughs per minute of any comic alive or dead'. New York: Simon & Schuster. p. 181. ISBN 978-0-7432-0125-4. I [Phyllis Diller] actually got twelve laughs in one minute from an audience ... Most comics do setup, payoff, setup, payoff, in other words six jokes per minute. In my case of twelve, one setup got twelve payoffs.
  64. Gorman, Steve (20 August 2012). "Pioneering comedian Phyllis Diller dies at age 95". Reuters. Retrieved 28 March 2020. Diller prided herself on keeping her jokes tightly written and boasted that she held a world record for getting 12 laughs a minute.
  65. King, Susan (22 December 2006). "Diller can still pack a punch line". Los Angeles Times. Retrieved 28 March 2020. [Phyllis Diller] still holds the Guinness Book of World Records for doling out 12 punch lines a minute.
  66. Malone, Michael. "8 Rules to Emceeing a Comedy Show". Malone Comedy. Wav Records. Retrieved 1 February 2019.
  67. Durham, Rob (2011). Don't Wear Shorts on Stage: the stand-up guide to comedy. Middletown, DE. pp. 67–68. ISBN 9781468004847.
  68. Rutter, Jason (1997). "6.3 Compere's Introduction" (PDF). Stand-up as Interaction: Performance and Audience in Comedy Venues. Department of Sociology. CORE (PhD). University of Salford: Institute for Social Research. pp. 149–150. Retrieved 31 August 2020. In comedy venues, proceedings are managed and organised throughout the performance by a compere who acts as an anchor for the evening's events in the venue. Comperes are more than just an announcer who brings on the acts. They provide continuity between acts who often have divergent styles and or different performance skills; they perform routines between acts using their own material; they pass comment on the performers; they share details of the evening itinerary, they may run a joke competition for the audience, and they encourage the audience's participation. In short, the compere acts to frame a series of performances into a single event.
  69. Seizer, Susan (2011). "On the Uses of Obscenity in Live Stand-Up Comedy". Anthropological Quarterly. The George Washington University Institute for Ethnographic Research. 84 (1): 215–216. doi:10.1353/anq.2011.0001. JSTOR 41237487. S2CID 144137009. On this [road comedy] circuit, shows generally consist of three to four comics: Headliner, Feature act, Opener and/or Emcee (i.e., Master of Ceremonies). The Headliner does roughly an hour of original material. The Feature act does 25-30 minutes. The Opener has a ten minute slot, and the Emcee squeezes in a joke or two between acts (if the Opener is not also acting as the Emcee) ... transitioning between ranks is usually a matter of years of practice at each stage.
  70. Rosenfield, Stephen (2018). Mastering Stand-Up: The Complete Guide to Becoming a Successful Comedian. Chicago, Illinois: Chicago Review Press. p. 195. ISBN 978-1-61373-692-0.
  71. Ron White (2018). Ron White: If you Quit Listening, I'll Shut Up (Motion Picture). Event occurs at 39:21-39:41. Retrieved 15 April 2020. [T]raditionally in American comedy clubs, there's three acts: there's an opening act ... a feature act ... and [then] a headliner
  72. Martin, Steve (2007). Born Standing Up: A Comic's Life. New York: Scribner. pp. 136, 139. ISBN 978-1-4165-5364-9. One week, I opened for a show ... I was now capable of doing two different twenty-five-minute sets per evening
  73. Shydner, Ritch; Schiff, Mark, eds. (2006). "A Little Comedy From The Audience: Vic Henley". I Killed: True Stories of the Road From America's Top Comics. Vic Henley (First Paperback ed.). New York: Three Rivers Press. p. 222. ISBN 978-0-307-38229-0. Archived from the original on 1 May 2012. Retrieved 15 April 2020. The Comedy Store in London ... [is] a showcase format, with a host and five comics doing sets, with ... [a] guest thrown in from time to time.
  74. Carter, Judy (2001). The Comedy Bible. Quote by Mark Travis. New York: Simon & Schuster. p. 213. ISBN 978-0-7432-0125-4. A one-person show has a story line. While a stand-up comic focuses on getting an immediate reaction from the audience after every joke, a person doing a solo show takes the audience on a journey.
  75. Carter, Judy (2001). The Comedy Bible. Quote by Christopher Titus. New York: Simon & Schuster. p. 216. ISBN 978-0-7432-0125-4. A one-person show is not just an hour of stand-up. It has to be dramatic and funny.
  76. Lindfors, Antti (6 May 2019). "Cultivating Participation and the Varieties of Reflexivity in Stand-Up Comedy". University of Turku, Finland. Journal of Linguistic Anthropology. 29 (3): 286. doi:10.1111/jola.12223. Retrieved 27 December 2020. personal narratives in oral face-to-face settings afford for gesturally visualizing one's experience in the space shared by performer and audience. Intricate in their chronotopic details and indexical orientations, such enactments depend on the narrator's ability to manage the relations and communicate movements between various spatiotemporal frames—i.e., narrated and speech events with their associated participant structures—and speaker roles—i.e., narrator, interlocutor, and character (Haviland 2004, 15; Kendon 1997; Koven 2002; Lindfors 2018; Silverstein 2005; Wortham 2001)
  77. Fox, Jesse David (28 February 2017). "Mike Birbiglia's New One-Man Show: Stories About Jokes; Jokes About Stories". Vulture: Devouring Culture. NEW YORK MEDIA LLC. Retrieved 28 March 2020. Though there have been one-person shows for ages, the first comedian to do a one-person show in a big way was Lily Tomlin ... However, it wasn't until the '90s, correlating with the rise of storytelling, that the stand-up one-person show really blew up ... for the shows that consisted of thematically stringing funny stories together, it was always hard to decide what exactly made them one-man shows and not stand-up acts.
  78. Sjöbohm, Juan (2008). Stand-up comedy around the world: Americanisation and the role of globalised media (PDF) (Thesis). Malmö University Electronic Publishing. Retrieved 4 January 2021. A theatrical genre that is closely related to stand-up comedy is the one-man show, although the latter may or may not make use of humour or imply an interaction with the audience. In a sense, every stand-up comedy show is a one-man show, but not every one-man show is a stand-up comedy show.
  79. Oswalt, Patton (14 June 2014). "A Closed Letter to Myself About Thievery, Heckling and Rape Jokes". Patton Oswalt. Patton Oswalt. Retrieved 3 February 2019. Open mikes are where, as a comedian [like Daniel Tosh and his controversy], you're supposed to be allowed to fuck up.
  80. Schaefer, Sara (16 March 2012). "Advice to a Young Comedian (& Myself)". Sara Schaefer. Retrieved 1 February 2019. the next day, my friend who was also on the show [in a theatre above a porn shop across from the Port Authority], told me a scout from casting at Fox was in the audience and they wanted to meet with him.
  81. Rosenfield, Stephen (2018). Mastering Stand-Up: The Complete Guide to Becoming a Successful Comedian. Chicago, Illinois: Chicago Review Press. p. 197. ISBN 978-1-61373-692-0.
  82. Dunican, Angus (10 September 2012). "What do 'bringer' shows REALLY bring to the circuit?". Chortle. Retrieved 28 January 2019. it gets tarred with the brush of new-act exploitation and lumped in with less scrupulous nights and the insidious blight of pay-to-play ... [but] I, personally, have found it to be a very nice room.
  83. Kelly-Clyne, Luke (20 September 2018). "I Want Out How to Leave the Boring Job You Don't Like and Start Your Comedy Career". Vulture: Devouring Culture. NEW YORK MEDIA LLC. In order to get stage time at [bringer shows] ... you [have to] bring ... 5 to 15 friends, each of whom must show up and agree to buy at least two drinks ... Some people think bringers are a scam, and they kind of are. They're a cash grab for club owners
  84. Richardson, Jim (11 December 2013). "Evil "Bringer Shows" & "Pay-to-Play Shows" Are even worse Than the already discredited Open Mic system". Jim Richardson's Organized Comedy. Retrieved 28 January 2019. Some clubs require 10 bringers/show. If you show up with 9 people, you will not get on and your friends will not get their money back.
  85. Strauss, Neil (24 January 1999). "My Brief, Weird Life as a Stand-Up Comic". The New York Times. Retrieved 2 February 2019. Clubs like Caroline's will ask for 15 people.
  86. Strauss, Neil (24 January 1999). "My Brief, Weird Life as a Stand-Up Comic". The New York Times. Retrieved 2 February 2019.
  87. Durham, Rob (2011). Don't Wear Shorts on Stage: the stand-up guide to comedy. Middletown, DE. p. 63. ISBN 9781468004847.
  88. Salvatore Attardo, ed. (2014). Encyclopedia of Humor Studies. SAGE Publications, Inc. p. 417. ISBN 978-1-4129-9909-0. A canned joke is a generally short narrative ending in a punchline ... [that] the speaker has memorized.
  89. Rutter, Jason (1997). "Stand-up as interaction: Performance and Audience in Comedy Venues" (PDF). Department of Sociology. CORE. University of Saford: Institute for Social Research. pp. 188–189. Retrieved 8 March 2019.
  90. Davis, Andrew (2014) [2011]. Baggy Pants Comedy: Burlesque and the Oral Tradition. Palgrave Studies in Theatre and Performance History. Palgrave Macmillan. p. 79. ISBN 978-1-137-37872-9. A joke can be said to be a formula in that it, too, is a 'prefabricated utterance'—one specifically designed to elicit laughter from a listener or an audience. Jokes are tied to certain 'themes'—subject matters that have proven humorous potential. Some use of these themes are timeless; others go in and out of style.
  91. Greene, Grace F. (2012). "Rhetoric in Comedy: How Comedians Use Persuasion and How Society Uses Comedians". The Corinthian: The Journal of Student Research at Georgia College. 13 (11): 140–141. Retrieved 26 January 2021. Sarah Silverman, a popular female stand-up, said in regards to the delivery of material, 'It's not really off the top of our [stand-up comics] heads' (2010) ... As Sankey (1998) says, what 'separates the men and women from the boys and girls is the ability to deliver a joke for the six-hundredth time and still make it look fresh and dewy' (p. 11).
  92. [88][89][90][91]
  93. Greene, Grace F. (2012). "Rhetoric in Comedy: How Comedians Use Persuasion and How Society Uses Comedians". The Corinthian: The Journal of Student Research at Georgia College. 13 (11): 140. Retrieved 26 January 2021. [W]hat makes a comedian funny is much more his or her ability to tell a joke than the ability to actually write one[.]
  94. Wilde, Larry (2000) [1968]. "Phyllis Diller". Great Comedians Talk About Comedy. Phyllis Diller. Mechanicsburg, Pennsylvania: Executive Books. p. 216. ISBN 0-937539-51-1. [Phyllis Diller:] I teach them [my joke editors] that a one-liner or a gag is not the same as a joke. A gag or a one-liner is a set-up, pause, pay-off. That's the simplest form.
  95. Dean, Greg (2000). Step by Step to Stand-up Comedy. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann. p. 1. ISBN 0-325-00179-0.
  96. Carter, Judy (2001). The Comedy Bible. Quote from Johnny Carson, quoted from The Great Comedians, by Larry Wilde (1972). New York: Simon & Schuster. p. 162. ISBN 978-0-7432-0125-4. Your delivery can save you if the material isn't up to par.
  97. See also Kairos
  98. [93][94][95][96][97]
  99. Mendrinos, James (2004). The Complete Idiot's Guide to Writing Comedy. NY, New York: ALPHA: A member of Penguin Group (USA) Inc. p. 46. ISBN 1-59257-231-6. [T]he Universal Joke Formula: Premise + Point of View + Twist = Joke
  100. Vorhaus, John (1994). The Comic Toolbox: How to Be Funny Even If You're Not. Los Angeles: Silman-James Press. p. 104. ISBN 1-879505-21-5. we can craft a joke just by creating and then defeating that specific expectation ... introduction, validation, violation
  101. Brodie, Ian (2008). "Stand-up Comedy as a Genre of Intimacy". Ethnologies. Cape Breton University. 30 (2): 163. doi:10.7202/019950ar. Retrieved 15 September 2020. What makes a joke a joke, in other words, is that the listener (and the collector) can make it wholly independent from a specific performer and treat it as an isolatable or discrete unit. It is not based in personal but in collective worldview. Were one to incorporate wholesale someone else's joke into one's own repertoire, one would still need common ground with the original teller in order to effect a similar interpretation and reaction. The greater the manipulation required for the listener to abstract it, or the more inextricably the specific performer weaves it into their repertoire, the less one can successfully transfer it across repertoires.
  102. Wilde, Larry (2000) [1968]. "Johnny Carson". Great Comedians Talk About Comedy. Johnny Carson. Mechanicsburg, Pennsylvania: Executive Books. p. 169. ISBN 0-937539-51-1. [Johnny] Carson: ... You can take a very common situation and your point of view or your attitude toward it and what you see in it may be completely different from what somebody else sees in it. They will comment on it one way, you may take a completely different approach to it, and this is where the humor comes out—your specific look at something the audience hasn't thought of.
  103. Pham, Hannah (27 January 2020). "Intellectual Property in Stand-Up Comedy: When #FuckFuckJerry Is Not Enough". Jolt Digest. Harvard Journal of Law and Technology. Retrieved 19 August 2020. The key to a joke is not the idea, but the 'complex, creative choices about expression.'
  104. See also Logos
  105. [99][100][101][102][103][104]
  106. Glick, Douglas J. (2007). "Some performative techniques of stand-up comedy: An exercise in the textuality of temporalization". Department of Anthropology. Language & Communication. 27 (3): 293. doi:10.1016/j.langcom.2007.01.003. Retrieved 29 December 2020. One way to try and ensure a successfully humorous grounding is for the comedian to 'set up' the relevant background knowledge for the audience within the performance itself and further teach them, or at least guide them, in how to use it.
  107. Rosenfield, Stephen (2018). Mastering Stand-Up: The Complete Guide to Becoming a Successful Comedian. Chicago, Illinois: Chicago Review Press. p. 126. ISBN 978-1-61373-692-0. The setup is the essential information the audience needs in order to get the punchline
  108. Murray, Logan (25 June 2010). Be A Great Stand-Up (2nd ed.). London, Great Britain: The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc. p. 14. ISBN 978-1-444-10726-5. A joke ... must have all the information implicit in the setup, so ... the punchline ... makes sense.
  109. Jeff McBride, Harrison Tweed. "Episode 48 The Setup". Let's Talk About Sets (Podcast). Geoffrey Asmus. Event occurs at 12:45-13:05. Retrieved 29 August 2019. It's the first half of the joke ... It's the first part ... I've seen it said that it's the part that gives all the information you need, so that people understand the joke, but I would take it a step a little bit to the side of that ... [the setup] is whatever is needed to make the joke work.
  110. Neill, Geoffrey (22 December 2015). Hitting Your Funny Bone: Writing Stand-up Comedy, and Other Things That Make You Swear. San Bernardino, CA. p. Chapter 4. ISBN 9781515180661. A setup is the information a person needs to get the joke.
  111. Martin, Rod A. (2007) [2006]. The Psychology of Humor: An Integrative Approach. Department of Psychology: University of Western Ontario (Interactive Online Book). Ontario, Canada: Burlington, MA : Elsevier Academic Press. p. 2. ISBN 978-0123725646. Retrieved 18 February 2019 – via Internet Archive. a joke is a context-free and self-contained unit of humor that carries within itself all the information needed for it to be understood and enjoyed.
  112. [106][107][108][109][110][111]
  113. Greene, Grace F. (2012). "Rhetoric in Comedy: How Comedians Use Persuasion and How Society Uses Comedians". The Corinthian: The Journal of Student Research at Georgia College. 13 (11): 137. Retrieved 26 January 2021. Unlike superiority theory, incongruity theory seems to cover almost all cases of humor, not just those in which feelings of triumph are present (Smuts, 2009). Incongruity theory works much like Judee Burgoon's expectancy violations theory. Much as the name of Burgoon's theory suggests, expectancy violations theory deals with what happens to our communication when what we think will happen does not (Littlejohn & Foss, 2009) ... Incongruity theory is also described through the experience of finding surprising connections between ideas (Monro, 1988) ... 'Everyone has that thought. Comedians learn to grab it' (Foxworthy, 2010).
  114. Mendrinos, James (2004). The Complete Idiot's Guide to Writing Comedy. Bret Watson. NY, New York: ALPHA: A member of Penguin Group (USA) Inc. p. 51. ISBN 1-59257-231-6. It seems like 99% of comedy comes from juxtaposing two things that don't seem to go together
  115. Corley, Jerry. "The Most Powerful Tool for Your Joke Writing". standupcomedyclinic. Retrieved 27 January 2019. You turn it into a juxtaposition of two ideas and create jokes.
  116. Martin, Rod A. (2007) [2006]. The Psychology of Humor: An Integrative Approach. Department of Psychology: University of Western Ontario (Interactive Online Book). Ontario, Canada: Burlington, MA : Elsevier Academic Press. p. 85. ISBN 978-0123725646. Retrieved 18 February 2019 – via Internet Archive.
  117. Rutter, Jason (1997). "Stand-up as interaction: Performance and Audience in Comedy Venues" (PDF). Department of Sociology. CORE. University of Saford: Institute for Social Research. p. 17. Retrieved 8 March 2019. Incongruity has been and remains the most influential approach to the study of humour even though superiority predates it by approximately two thousand years.
  118. Luu, Chi (12 June 2019). "The Dubious Art of the Dad Joke". JSTOR. ITHAKA. Retrieved 15 June 2019. At its core, humor seems to be all about incongruity.
  119. Keisalo, Marianna (2016). "'Picking People to Hate': Reversible Reversals in Stand-Up Comedy" (PDF). Suomen Antropologi: Journal of the Finnish Anthropological Society. 41 (4): 64. Retrieved 29 December 2020. Comedy can be said to constitute and be constituted by a series of reversals, which set up mutually defined opposites and relate them to each other.
  120. Lindfors, Antti (October 2017). "Twin Constellations: Parallelism and Stance in Stand-Up Comedy" (PDF). Oral Tradition. 31 (2): 562. doi:10.1353/ort.2017.0021. hdl:10355/65394. S2CID 165334261. Retrieved 29 December 2020. The concept of 'stance' is invoked in both analyses. Stance-taking, which can be marked verbally as well as by body posture, facial expression, and gesture (Matoesian 2005:168), is elemental in how we…assign value to objects of interest. By assuming stances we also position ourselves with regard to the 'stance objects,' align or realign with other subjects, and simultaneously invoke or mobilize presupposed systems of sociocultural value (Du Bois 2007:139, 143, 169).
  121. Davis, Andrew (2014) [2011]. Baggy Pants Comedy: Burlesque and the Oral Tradition. Palgrave Studies in Theatre and Performance History. Palgrave Macmillan. p. 192. ISBN 978-1-137-37872-9. The basis of comedic burlesque is an incongruity between style and subject, which juxtaposes high and low.
  122. Page, Brett (March 2004) [1915]. Writing for Vaudeville (10 ed.). Project Gutenberg. The Element of Incongruity. 'The essence of all humor,' it has been said, 'is incongruity,' and in the monologue there is no one thing that brings better laugh-results than the incongruous.
  123. See also Antithesis
  124. [113][114][115][116][117][118][119][120][121][122][123]
  125. Seizer, Susan (2011). Richard Schechner (1981:41). "On the Uses of Obscenity in Live Stand-Up Comedy". Anthropological Quarterly. The George Washington University Institute for Ethnographic Research. 84 (1): 214–215. doi:10.1353/anq.2011.0001. JSTOR 41237487. S2CID 144137009. Richard Schechner captures the theatrical crux of the matter well when he writes: '[T]he technical mastery of performing is knowing how to do certain things, achieve levels of skills, pull off tricks. But no matter how phony the show, an audience responds to sincerity, and there is as much sincerity involved in tricking as there is in so-called truth-telling. To perform excellently is to master whatever the craft is: telling the truth, telling lies.'
  126. Smith, Daniel R. (2018). "Part III: Critical[:] 5 The Critique of Comic Reason: The sociological inquiries of paranoids, detectives and comedians". COMEDY AND CRITIQUE: Stand-up comedy and the professional Ethos of laughter. Bristol Shorts Research. UK: Bristol University Press. p. 141. ISBN 978-1-5292-0015-7. The question of plausibility in comedic analysis of social realities, as in 'how social bonds and normality are preserved', rests upon the perceived verisimilitude of persona.
  127. Raga, Suzanne (27 October 2016). "11 Wisecracking Secrets of Stand-Up Comedians". Mental Floss. Minute Media. Retrieved 22 March 2019. [C]omedians will often say that something happened to them recently when it really happened years ago—or may have never happened at all.
  128. Naessens, Edward David (2020). "Busting the Sad Clown Myth: From Cliché to Comic Stage Persona". In Oppliger, Patrice A.; Shouse, Eric (eds.). The Dark Side of Stand-up Comedy. United Kingdom: Springer Nature Switzerland AG: Palgrave Macmillan. p. 240. doi:10.1007/978-3-030-37214-9_11. ISBN 978-3-030-37213-2. The primary purpose of comedy is laughter and mirth. All else is, therefore, secondary—including factual truth.
  129. Goffman, Erving (1980) [1959]. The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. New York: Anchor Books: A Division of Random House, Inc. p. 49. ISBN 978-0-385-094023. [P]erformers tend to foster the impression that their current performance of their routine and their relationship to their current audience have something special and unique about them.
  130. Brodie, Ian (2014). "Intimate Other". A Vulgar Art: A New Approach to Stand-up Comedy. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi. p. 143. ISBN 978-1-62846-182-4. 'Verisimilitude' is ... expressly subjective but implies a recognizable truthfulness therein. The comedian is judged relevant by the audience in part by the accuracy of the worldview presented: it needs to be credible. Even though they are trying for laughter, comedians often honestly render representations of a particular moment and place in time.
  131. Bergson, Henri (1912) [1900]. Laughter: an Essay on the Meaning of the Comic. Translated by Brereton, Cloudesley; Rothwell, Fred. The Macmillan Company. The reasonings at which we laugh ... counterfeit true reasoning just sufficiently to deceive a mind dropping off to sleep. There is still an element of logic in them ... but it is a logic lacking in tension and, for that very reason, affording us relief from intellectual effort.
  132. [125][126][127][128][129][130][131]
  133. George Carlin, Charlie Rose (26 March 1996). George Carlin (Interview) (TV Show). HBO. Event occurs at 7:29-7:37. Retrieved 1 February 2019.
  134. Naessens, Edward David (2020). "Busting the Sad Clown Myth: From Cliché to Comic Stage Persona". In Oppliger, Patrice A.; Shouse, Eric (eds.). The Dark Side of Stand-up Comedy. United Kingdom: Springer Nature Switzerland AG: Palgrave Macmillan. p. 229. doi:10.1007/978-3-030-37214-9_11. ISBN 978-3-030-37213-2. The CSP [comic stage persona] incorporates elements including gestures, looks, vocal inflections, and all manner of attitudes, dispositions, and non-verbal communications.
  135. Mears, Kathryn; Eric, Shouse; Patrice A., Oppliger (2020). "An Incongruous Blend of Tragedy and Comedy: How Maria Bamford Lightens the Dark Side of Mental Illness". In Oppliger, Patrice A.; Shouse, Eric (eds.). The Dark Side of Stand-up Comedy. United Kingdom: Springer Nature Switzerland AG: Palgrave Macmillan. p. 185. doi:10.1007/978-3-030-37214-9_9. ISBN 978-3-030-37213-2. Rutter (1997) described the use of 'intonation' as a 'striking and omnipresent characteristic' of stand-up comedy, noting how comedians utilize change of pitch 'to signpost the completion of jokes and create an invitation to laugh'
  136. Blumer, Herbert (1998) [1969]. "Attitudes and the Social Act". Symbolic Interactionism: Perspective and Method. Berkeley and Los Angeles, CA: University of California Press. p. 98. ISBN 978-0-520-05676-3. in this common usage, the term [attitude] refers less to what a person will do and more to what sort of a state he is in ... thus [we] catch something of his feelings, his sensitivities, and his point of view.
  137. See also Actio
  138. [133][134][135][136][137]
  139. Lindfors, Antti (October 2017). "Twin Constellations: Parallelism and Stance in Stand-Up Comedy" (PDF). Oral Tradition. 31 (2): 563. doi:10.1353/ort.2017.0021. hdl:10355/65394. S2CID 165334261. Retrieved 29 December 2020. [Poetic meter/rhythm] is palpably recognizable in stand-up, typically constituted and marked by pauses, expletives, prosody (accent, intonation), and other paralinguistic features rather than by strict metric (syllabic, phonetic, and so forth) rules per se. Superficially stylized as conversational, an ostensibly free flow of discourse, stand-up as discursive production is to a high degree structurally constrained rhythmically and interactionally, proceeding through sequential chunks of discourse (ideally) partitioned by laughter.
  140. Helitzer, Mel; Shatz, Mark (2005). Comedy Writing secrets: the best-selling book on how to think funny, write funny, act funny, and get paid for it (2nd ed.). Cincinnati, Ohio: Writer's Digest Books. p. 63. ISBN 978-1-58297-357-9.
  141. Borns, Betsy (1987). Comic Lives: Inside the World of American Stand-up comedy. Simon & Schuster, Inc. p. 249. ISBN 0-671-62620-5. Seinfeld adds, 'any k sound is good—it's a very strong letter that impinges on people.'
  142. Mintz, Lawrence E. (1977). "The 'New Wave' of Standup Comedians: An Introduction". Department of American Studies. American Humor. University of Maryland. 4 (2, 'Special Issue: Standup'): 2. JSTOR 42594580. The history of standup comedy in America reveals some interesting continuities and changes ... the Wise Fool, our most important comic archetype, is always around
  143. Leighton, H. Vernon (2020). "A Theory of Humor (Abridged) and the Comic Mechanisms of John Kennedy Toole's A Confederacy of Dunces". In Marsh, Leslie (ed.). Theology and Geometry: Essays on John Kennedy Toole's A Confederacy of Dunces (Politics, Literature, & Film). United Kingdom: Lexington Books (published 29 January 2020). pp. 2–4. ISBN 978-1-4985-8547-7. Retrieved 27 March 2020. it is useful to examine the famous paraprosdokian, 'I've had a perfectly wonderful evening, but this wasn't it.' ... Within the cognitive incongruity aspect of humor ... Comedians often rely on shared knowledge with the audience to provide the second interpretation toward which the joke will pivot ... As the paraprosdokian above illustrates, in some humor events, the brain begins tentatively to assign the event of one interpretation but then is forced in surprise to reassign the event to a second interpretation.
  144. Brodie, Ian (2014). "Stand-Up Comedy Recordings". A Vulgar Art: A New Approach to Stand-up Comedy. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi. p. 213. ISBN 978-1-62846-182-4. One of the seemingly self-evident features of humor and comedy is that there is an element of surprise: a situation is set up and there is an outcome that is unanticipated, although it 'makes sense' in retrospect.
  145. Simon Amstell, Eddie Izzard (2011). The Art of Stand-Up (TV). United Kingdom: BBC: One. Simon Amstell states, 'I transcribed a couple of the tapes just to figure out what he [Eddie Izzard] was doing cause it just seemed so (pause) It wasn't like setup-punch. I would sort of underline words ... is that the rule of three? I don't know what that is.' Eddie Izzard states, 'it should be—establish, reaffirm, and then you kill it on the third ... you can keep reaffirming before you twist.
  146. Hannibal Buress, Marcus Raboy (2014). Live from Chicago (Audio). COMEDY CENTRAL. They have a parades department. New Orleans police department has a parades department. There's homicide, there's narcotics, and there's parades. There's other departments too, but you know, rule of three, for comedy.
  147. Helitzer, Mel; Shatz, Mark (2005). Comedy Writing secrets: the best-selling book on how to think funny, write funny, act funny, and get paid for it (2nd ed.). Cincinnati, Ohio: Writer's Digest Books. p. 151. ISBN 978-1-58297-357-9. [Three is the] cadence [that makes] it the most important number in comedy.
  148. Murray, Logan (25 June 2010). Be A Great Stand-Up (2nd ed.). London, Great Britain: The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc. pp. 123–124. ISBN 978-1-444-10726-5.
  149. Durham, Rob (2011). Don't Wear Shorts on Stage: the stand-up guide to comedy. Middletown, DE. p. 38. ISBN 9781468004847. Taglines are ... very short [jokes that are] ... delivered right as the original laughter from the punchline is dying down.
  150. Mendrinos, James (2004). The Complete Idiot's Guide to Writing Comedy. Bret Watson. NY, New York: ALPHA: A member of Penguin Group (USA) Inc. p. 93. ISBN 1-59257-231-6.
  151. Dean, Greg (2000). Step by Step to Stand-up Comedy. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann. p. 61. ISBN 0-325-00179-0.
  152. Andrew (24 September 2010). "Writing for stand up part 3: Refining Jokes". thenakedspeaker: a public speaking blog. WordPress. Retrieved 28 January 2019.
  153. Vorhaus, John (1994). The Comic Toolbox: How to Be Funny Even If You're Not. Los Angeles: Silman-James Press. p. 106. ISBN 1-879505-21-5. A jokoid fills the place on the page where a genuinely funny joke will eventually go
  154. Durham, Rob (2011). Don't Wear Shorts on Stage: the stand-up guide to comedy. Middletown, DE. p. 36. ISBN 9781468004847. Stock jokes are jokes that a comic has ... that are pretty much hack jokes used for specific situations ... they should only be used in certain situations until you can think of something better.
  155. Vorhaus, John (1994). The Comic Toolbox: How to Be Funny Even If You're Not. Los Angeles: Silman-James Press. pp. 12–13. ISBN 1-879505-21-5. For every ten jokes you tell, nine will be trash ... you'll need hundreds and hundreds of failed jokes to build a decent body of work.
  156. Louis C.K., Charlie Rose (7 May 2014). Louis C.K. (Interview) (TV Show). HBO. Event occurs at 2:20-2:38. Retrieved 3 February 2019. failure is the road to being a great comic ... failure is not succeeding in the moment
  157. Helitzer, Mel; Shatz, Mark (2005). Comedy Writing secrets: the best-selling book on how to think funny, write funny, act funny, and get paid for it (2nd ed.). Cincinnati, Ohio: Writer's Digest Books. p. 109. ISBN 978-1-58297-357-9. For every ten jokes written, only one might be acceptable
  158. Naessens, Edward David (2020). "Busting the Sad Clown Myth: From Cliché to Comic Stage Persona". In Oppliger, Patrice A.; Shouse, Eric (eds.). The Dark Side of Stand-up Comedy. United Kingdom: Springer Nature Switzerland AG: Palgrave Macmillan. p. 244. doi:10.1007/978-3-030-37214-9_11. ISBN 978-3-030-37213-2. The development of comic material from idea to fully formed gag involves an onerous process of writing, road-testing, and rewriting (Zinoman, 2012).
  159. [155][156][157][158]
  160. Tsang, Wai King; Wong, Matilda (2004). "Constructing a shared 'Hong Kong identity' in comic discourses". Discourse & Society. Sage Publications, Ltd. 15 (6): 777. doi:10.1177/0957926504046504. JSTOR 42888651. S2CID 145745392. Retrieved 16 September 2020. 'I,' 'my,' 'me' as the comedian versus 'you' as the audience directly engages the audience in a dialogue.
  161. Kornelis, Chris (25 August 2020). "Stand-Up Comics Find It Isn't Funny Writing Without an Audience". The Wall Street Journal. Retrieved 14 September 2020. How does a comedian know if something is funny? The audience tells [the stand-up comedian through a call and response with laughter].
  162. Smith, Daniel R. (2018). "Part II: Synthetic[:] 3 Representation: Stand-up: representing whom?". COMEDY AND CRITIQUE: Stand-up comedy and the professional Ethos of laughter. Bristol Shorts Research. UK: Bristol University Press. p. 79. ISBN 978-1-5292-0015-7. [S]tand-up represents a three part relation in the aesthetic completion of the comedic exchange: attempted joke, laughter, confirmed joke.
  163. Smith, Daniel R. (2018). "Part I: Analytical[:] 2 The Professionalisation of Stand-Up Comedy: Coda". COMEDY AND CRITIQUE: Stand-up comedy and the professional Ethos of laughter. Bristol Shorts Research. UK: Bristol University Press. p. 74. ISBN 978-1-5292-0015-7. Stand-up is the art of self relating to self in the presence of others.
  164. Lindfors, Antti (6 May 2019). "Cultivating Participation and the Varieties of Reflexivity in Stand-Up Comedy". University of Turku, Finland. Journal of Linguistic Anthropology. 29 (3): 277. doi:10.1111/jola.12223. Retrieved 26 December 2020. Corroborating the communal reputation of the genre, stand-up trades on interpersonal resonance or what is called 'involvement' in sociolinguistics (Tannen 2007), where audience will (ideally) 'coauthor' the speech act by ritualized collective laughter (Duranti 1986).
  165. Quirk, Sophie (November 2011). "Containing the Audience: The 'Room' in Stand-Up Comedy" (PDF). University of Kent, UK. Participations: Journal of Audience & Reception Studies. 8 (2): 220. Retrieved 27 December 2020. It is the audience's cooperation which allows the act to succeed and they retain the right to undermine the interaction by withdrawing that cooperation
  166. [161][162][163][164][165]
  167. Brodie, Ian (2014). "Stand-Up Comedy and a Folkloristic Approach". A Vulgar Art: A New Approach to Stand-up Comedy. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi. p. 26. ISBN 978-1-62846-182-4. Each unit, 'chunk,' or 'bit' is inexorably linked with the others in the routine
  168. Davis, Andrew (2014) [2011]. Baggy Pants Comedy: Burlesque and the Oral Tradition. Palgrave Studies in Theatre and Performance History. Palgrave Macmillan. pp. 2, 7, 75. ISBN 978-1-137-37872-9. Comedy on the burlesque stage was built around a three- to ten-minute comedy scene called a 'bit.' ... The term 'bit' referred to everything from a one-joke blackout to a complex scene that involved the entire cast ... Bits were extremely malleable and most developed out of earlier ones. They were constantly being taken apart and recombined in different ways ... A bit might be as simple as a shrug of the shoulders or as complicated as a routine.
  169. Brodie, Ian (2008). "Stand-up Comedy as a Genre of Intimacy". Ethnologies. Cape Breton University. 30 (2): 163. doi:10.7202/019950ar. Retrieved 15 September 2020. Stand-up comedians do not…tell jokes in the sense of a series of discrete units, with an explicit set-up which culminates in a punch line. Instead, they interweave material into a routine, which may run from five minutes to over two hours. Each unit, or 'bit,' is inexorably linked with the others in the routine, the performance venue, composition of the audience, the perceived relationship between the teller and the audience, the technological medium (beyond amplification) in which it is being transmitted, and the personality of the comedian herself.
  170. Greene, Grace F. (2012). "Rhetoric in Comedy: How Comedians Use Persuasion and How Society Uses Comedians". The Corinthian: The Journal of Student Research at Georgia College. 13 (11): 138. Retrieved 26 January 2021. When stand-up comics begin to tell their audiences a story or 'bit,' as it is technically named, they are proposing some kind of intellectual challenge with which the audience must keep up. When the bit has ended, the audience experiences relief in the knowledge that they have successfully solved the challenge.
  171. Waithe, Elsa. "How to Write a 5-Minute Comedy Set". Gold Comedy. Retrieved 27 January 2019.
  172. Craig Anton (28 January 2010). I Am Comic (film). IFC Films. Event occurs at 3:42-4:53. a bit, 3 or 4 jokes in and around one central theme or idea ... [and then] 10-15 minutes, we call that a chunk
  173. Borns, Betsy (1987). Comic Lives: Inside the World of American Stand-up comedy. Abby Stein. Simon & Schuster, Inc. p. 248. ISBN 0-671-62620-5. A 'bit,' Reiser explains, 'is a group of words used to incorporate a premise and all variations thereof'
  174. Page, Brett (March 2004) [1915]. Writing for Vaudeville (10 ed.). Project Gutenberg. Routine—the entire monologue; but more often used to suggest its arrangement and construction. A monologue with its gags and points arranged in a certain order is one routine; a different routine is used when the gags or points are arranged in a different order. Thus routine means arrangement. The word is also used to describe the arrangement of other stage offerings—for instance, a dance: the same steps arranged in a different order make a new 'dance routine.'
  175. [167][168][169][170][171][172][173][174]
  176. Lindfors, Antti (6 May 2019). "Cultivating Participation and the Varieties of Reflexivity in Stand-Up Comedy". University of Turku, Finland. Journal of Linguistic Anthropology. 29 (3): 281. doi:10.1111/jola.12223. Retrieved 26 December 2020. In particular, such [emotional] distancing is an effect of scriptedness and intense reiteration, for stand-up routines are always practiced and rehearsed in subsequent performances (true to the genre, this fact is also frequently troped upon by comics themselves onstage).
  177. Lindfors, Antti (October 2017). "Twin Constellations: Parallelism and Stance in Stand-Up Comedy" (PDF). Oral Tradition. 31 (2): 563. doi:10.1353/ort.2017.0021. hdl:10355/65394. S2CID 165334261. Retrieved 29 December 2020. As Fleming and Lempert (2014:488) explain, 'as it draws attention to message form over larger stretches of discourse, parallelism can also, at a higher order, help put the whole event-inprogress in sharp relief, like a gestalt erupting from the background of 'ordinary' communication.'
  178. Goffman, Erving (1980) [1959]. The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. New York: Anchor Books: A Division of Random House, Inc. p. 16. ISBN 978-0-385-094023. The pre-established pattern of action which is unfolded during a performance and which may be presented or played through on other occasions may be called a 'part' or 'routine.'
  179. [164][176][177][178]
  180. Greene, Grace F. (2012). "Rhetoric in Comedy: How Comedians Use Persuasion and How Society Uses Comedians". The Corinthian: The Journal of Student Research at Georgia College. 13 (11): 141. Retrieved 26 January 2021. Like speeches, sets of jokes work better if there is a strong conclusion
  181. Wilde, Larry (2000) [1968]. "Phyllis Diller". Great Comedians Talk About Comedy. Quote from Phyllis Diller. Mechanicsburg, Pennsylvania: Executive Books. p. 216. ISBN 0-937539-51-1. [Phyllis Diller:] set-up, pay-off ... The funny word must be at the end of the sentence.
  182. Woodward, Jenny (20 December 2012). "Jerry Seinfeld: How to Write a Joke" (video). The New York Times. Quote from Jerry Seinfeld. Retrieved 1 February 2019. If you have a long bit, the biggest laugh has to be at the end. It has to be. It can't be in the middle or the beginning.
  183. Helitzer, Mel; Shatz, Mark (2005). Comedy Writing secrets: the best-selling book on how to think funny, write funny, act funny, and get paid for it (2nd ed.). Cincinnati, Ohio: Writer's Digest Books. p. 245. ISBN 978-1-58297-357-9. Since the setup has already been established, the second, third, and fourth jokes are short, shorter, shortest.
  184. [180][181][182][183]
  185. Dean, Greg (2000). Step by Step to Stand-up Comedy. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann. p. 187. ISBN 0-325-00179-0.
  186. Frances-White, Deborah; Shandur, Marsha (2016). Off the Mic: The World's Best Stand-up Comedians Get Serious About Comedy. NY, New York: Bloomsbury Publishing Plc. pp. 111–112. ISBN 978-1-4725-2638-0.
  187. Greene, Grace F. (2012). "Rhetoric in Comedy: How Comedians Use Persuasion and How Society Uses Comedians". The Corinthian: The Journal of Student Research at Georgia College. 13 (11): 141. Retrieved 26 January 2021. If all the jokes do not correlate, a comedian needs to be able to incorporate flawless transitions into his or her routine, even if these transitions are based off of audience responses.
  188. Frances-White, Deborah; Shandur, Marsha (2016). Off the Mic: The World's Best Stand-up Comedians Get Serious About Comedy. NY, New York: Bloomsbury Publishing Plc. pp. 112–114, 118. ISBN 978-1-4725-2638-0.
  189. Durham, Rob (2011). Don't Wear Shorts on Stage: the stand-up guide to comedy. Middletown, DE. p. 53. ISBN 9781468004847.
  190. See also Accumulatio
  191. [185][188][189][190]
  192. Antoine, Katja (2016). "'Pushing the Edge' of Race and Gender Hegemonies through Stand-up Comedy: Performing Slavery as Anti-racist Critique". Etnofoor. Stichting Etnofoor. 28 (1): 50–51. JSTOR 43823941. Retrieved 15 September 2020. A performance that 'bombs' is one where the comic is unable to connect and make the audience laugh….When a comedian’s performed material engages the audience in repeated and sustained big laughter, the comic is said to 'kill'.
  193. Dean, Greg (2000). Step by Step to Stand-up Comedy. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann. p. 190. ISBN 0-325-00179-0.
  194. Borns, Betsy (1987). Comic Lives: Inside the World of American Stand-up comedy. Abby Stein. Simon & Schuster, Inc. p. 252. ISBN 0-671-62620-5. [P]ersonality is far more important than material
  195. Ajaye, Franklyn (2002). Comic Insights: The Art of Stand-up Comedy. Budd Friedman. Los Angeles: Silman-James Press. p. 261. ISBN 1-879505-54-1. [W]hat's more important, material or delivery? I had to say it's the material.
  196. Budd Friedman (28 January 2010). I Am Comic (film). IFC Films. Event occurs at 31:25-31:34. when the material is good, you can overlook anything
  197. Alleyne, Richard (6 May 2011). "Why comedians get laughs for even their worst jokes". The Telegraph. Retrieved 22 March 2019. We argue that using the name of someone who people consider funny generates an expectancy of humour when hearing a joke.
  198. Wilde, Larry (2000) [1968]. "Johnny Carson". Great Comedians Talk About Comedy. Johnny Carson. Mechanicsburg, Pennsylvania: Executive Books. p. 165. ISBN 0-937539-51-1. [Johnny Carson:] You can take the funniest man in the world who is unknown and put him in front of an audience that has not yet accepted him because they don't know him ... it makes a big difference in the reaction he's gonna get. I'm accepted now much more than I was five years ago, because I've had tremendous exposure on television
  199. Wilde, Larry (2000) [1968]. "Woody Allen". Great Comedians Talk About Comedy. Woody Allen. Mechanicsburg, Pennsylvania: Executive Books. p. 20. ISBN 0-937539-51-1. [Woody Allen:] It isn't the jokes that do it ... It's the individual himself. When I first started ... the same jokes I did at that time that got nothing for me [in terms of laughter], now will get roars, and not because I am more known. It's the funny-character emergence that does it. You can take the worst material in the world and give it to W.C. Fields or Groucho Marx and there's just something that will come out funny. I'm not saying you won't get laughs, but the audience doesn't go away with anything [that leaves a lasting impression].
  200. Ajaye, Franklyn (2002). Comic Insights: The Art of Stand-up Comedy. Irvin Arthur. Los Angeles: Silman-James Press. p. 274. ISBN 1-879505-54-1. I [Irvin Arthur] firmly believe that it's the persona first, and then the material.
  201. [194][195][196][197][198][199][200]
  202. Greene, Grace F. (2012). "Rhetoric in Comedy: How Comedians Use Persuasion and How Society Uses Comedians". The Corinthian: The Journal of Student Research at Georgia College. 13 (11): 134. Retrieved 26 January 2021. Andrea Greenbaum (1999), in the International Journal of Humor Research, says that 'stand-up comedy is an inherently rhetorical discourse; it strives not only to entertain, but to persuade, and stand-up comics can only be successful in their craft when they can convince an audience to look at the world through their comic vision' ... Stand-up comedy is not about simply convincing an audience that you are funny, although that is necessary; it is also about teaching the audience that there is a different way to think about things
  203. Noland, Carey Marie; Hoppmann, Michael (2020). "Stop! You're Killing Me: Food Addiction and Comedy". In Oppliger, Patrice A.; Shouse, Eric (eds.). The Dark Side of Stand-up Comedy. United Kingdom: Springer Nature Switzerland AG: Palgrave Macmillan. p. 137. doi:10.1007/978-3-030-37214-9_7. ISBN 978-3-030-37213-2. To become successful[,] comedians must possess…the ability to estimate correctly audience reactions to deviant speech and behavior.
  204. Mears, Kathryn; Eric, Shouse; Patrice A., Oppliger (2020). "An Incongruous Blend of Tragedy and Comedy: How Maria Bamford Lightens the Dark Side of Mental Illness". In Oppliger, Patrice A.; Shouse, Eric (eds.). The Dark Side of Stand-up Comedy. United Kingdom: Springer Nature Switzerland AG: Palgrave Macmillan. p. 181. doi:10.1007/978-3-030-37214-9_9. ISBN 978-3-030-37213-2. Although comics rarely use the term 'manipulation,' when Eyre describes [Maria] Bamford as a 'strong performer,' he means that she possesses the ability to manipulate an audience. Comedians typically refer to this manipulation 'in terms such as 'craft,' 'skill,' and 'technique
  205. Lindfors, Antti (6 May 2019). "Cultivating Participation and the Varieties of Reflexivity in Stand-Up Comedy". University of Turku, Finland. Journal of Linguistic Anthropology. 29 (3): 281. doi:10.1111/jola.12223. Retrieved 26 December 2020. The process of individuation is frequently captured by stand-up comics in genre specific terms of crafting or 'finding' one's stage persona ... Ultimately an outcome of numerous performative reiterations, fashioning of typifiable stage persona is generally regarded as the number one goal for aspiring stand-ups, emphasized on courses and manuals of the genre.
  206. Antoine, Katja (2016). "'Pushing the Edge' of Race and Gender Hegemonies through Stand-up Comedy: Performing Slavery as Anti-racist Critique". Etnofoor. Stichting Etnofoor. 28 (1): 38. JSTOR 43823941. Retrieved 14 September 2020. pushing the audience still involves finding an affective edge, 'reading the energy' in the room, and sensing how much the particular group of people present can handle with regards to obscenity, hostility, etcetera ... When a comedy set works, that is, when the audience responds to a comic's jokes with repeated out-loud laughter, the affective dynamic between the comic on stage and the audience has a rhythm or pulse to it that feels like a loop, a circular flow. It's an energy flow from the comedian to the audience, where the audience returns that flow of energy in the form of laughter. The laughter, in turn, feeds the comic's next outpouring of energy. Ideally, with each loop, the overall energy in the room rises and ends at a euphoric pitch ... the comic's job is to ride that wave of energy.
  207. Naessens, Edward David (2020). "Busting the Sad Clown Myth: From Cliché to Comic Stage Persona". In Oppliger, Patrice A.; Shouse, Eric (eds.). The Dark Side of Stand-up Comedy. United Kingdom: Springer Nature Switzerland AG: Palgrave Macmillan. p. 231. doi:10.1007/978-3-030-37214-9_11. ISBN 978-3-030-37213-2. When a competent comedian tells a 'truth' onstage, the laugh is the priority, not the truth. Art favors verisimilitude, not authenticity. The only essential goal of comedy is to elicit laughter by exploiting the cognitive entities that make up a comedy audience.
  208. Fulford, Larry (2020). "The Complete and Utter Loss of Time". In Oppliger, Patrice A.; Shouse, Eric (eds.). The Dark Side of Stand-up Comedy. United Kingdom: Springer Nature Switzerland AG: Palgrave Macmillan. p. 311. doi:10.1007/978-3-030-37214-9_16. ISBN 978-3-030-37213-2. What distinguishes the skillset of the professional from that of the amateur is an understanding of audiences
  209. [202][203][204][205][206][207][208]
  210. Legaspi, Althea (13 March 2019). "Watch Will Smith Do Stand-Up Comedy, Get Advice From Dave Chappelle". Rolling Stone. Quote from Dave Chappelle. Retrieved 15 September 2020. [C]onfidence is key…The reason you should be confident is primarily because you’re Will Smith…I’ve been watching you for years; you’re actually a funny dude. I’ve spoken to you before, you’re a great conversationalist…What else do you really need?… Number Two, pick the right shit to talk about…[Number three] You are one of those comedians who think you have to be funny all the time. You don’t. But, you have to be interesting all the time.
  211. Mirman, Eugene (2019). It Started As A Joke (Motion picture). Kumail Nanjiani (onscreen), John Hodgman (onscreen). Gravitas Ventures, LLC. Event occurs at 41:38-42:35. [Nanjiani:] What I learned, coming to [the] New York [Alternative comedy scene], and watching people like Eugene [Mirman] and John [Hodgman], was that their comedy wasn’t…any sort of specific thing, there was no…cadence to it, there were no…types of things you talk about, you could kind of do anything: you could talk about your day…you could kind of do anything, and as long as it was interesting or entertaining…I think it has to be at least entertaining—[Hodgman:] It has to be. It has to be entertaining. It has to be funny…[Nanjiani:] It has to be engaging, and that’s comedy.
  212. Greene, Grace F. (2012). "Rhetoric in Comedy: How Comedians Use Persuasion and How Society Uses Comedians". The Corinthian: The Journal of Student Research at Georgia College. 13 (11): 141. Retrieved 26 January 2021. Something else to be recognized in the field of stand-up comedy is that a comedian needs to be able to command the attention of his or her audience ... Due to the mainly humorous nature of the content a comedian will be delivering, this control has to be taken gently, almost without the audience realizing it. A comedian's audience should feel as if they are part of the sketch [a.k.a. routine], not just responding to it [as though it were a monologue].
  213. [210][211][42][212]
  214. Greene, Grace F. (2012). "Rhetoric in Comedy: How Comedians Use Persuasion and How Society Uses Comedians". The Corinthian: The Journal of Student Research at Georgia College. 13 (11): 137–138. Retrieved 26 January 2021. The relief theory of humor describes laughter as a release of excess energy (Smuts, 2009). The relief theory, according to Sigmund Freud, is based on the argument that there are three distinct sources of laughter: joking, humor, and the comic ... they all share the commonality of energy being dispelled from the body through the act of laughter ... The shortcoming of the relief theory is in its inability to distinguish humorous laughter from non-humorous laughter (Smuts, 2009). That is to say, the relief theory only says that an audience will laugh; it does not specify whether it will be because something is comical or because the audience is relieved.
  215. Oliver Double (2011). Alan Yentob (ed.). The Art of Stand-Up (TV). United Kingdom: BBC: One. Event occurs at 47:23-47:48. The classic theorist would be Freud. Tendentious jokes ... a difficult or edgy subject is going to create a certain tension in the audience, and having created the tension, if your punchline is funny, the laugh is bigger.
  216. Strauss, Neil (24 January 1999). "My Brief, Weird Life as a Stand-Up Comic". The New York Times. Retrieved 2 February 2019. A good standup creates a tension in the room, which the audience wants to break with laughter. If you can do this, any punch line will work as a release valve.
  217. Vorhaus, John (1994). The Comic Toolbox: How to Be Funny Even If You're Not. Los Angeles: Silman-James Press. p. 53. ISBN 1-879505-21-5. Every time you start a joke, you create some tension ... If the joke works, then all that stored is released at the punchline in the form of laughter.
  218. Cohen, Roger; Richards, Ryan. "When the Truth Hurts, Tell a Joke: Why America Needs Its Comedians". Humanity in Action. Humanity In Action Inc. Retrieved 26 February 2019.
  219. Sarah Silverman (30 May 2017). Sarah Silverman: A Speck of Dust (film). Event occurs at 17:26-17:34. I would call that a relief laugh ... like release laugh.
  220. [214][215][216][217][218][219]
  221. Brodie, Ian (2014). "Stand-Up Comedy and a Folkloristic Approach". A Vulgar Art: A New Approach to Stand-up Comedy. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi. pp. 23–24. ISBN 978-1-62846-182-4. [T]he stand-up comedian speaks more often in the first person than in the third person ... [f]irst-person narratives have an explicit connection between the narrator and the protagonist: the convention is that they are one and the same. The narrator is the narrative's referent, and events refer to his or her history or worldview ... the stand-up's 'truth' requires the contrast of the fictive and, possibly, fanciful: something akin to tall tales.
  222. Oliar, Dotan; Sprigman, Christopher (2008). "There's No Free Laugh (Anymore): The Emergence of Intellectual Property Norms and the Transformation of Stand-Up Comedy". Virginia Law Review. 94 (8): 1852. JSTOR 25470605. Retrieved 16 September 2020. Modern stand-up reflects greater emphasis, relative to the vaudeville and post-vaudeville periods, on comedic narrative; that is, on longer, thematically linked routines that displace the former reliance on discrete jokes. The narrative content is linked, moreover, to the individual comedian's point of view, manifested as a comedic character which bears particular traits and remains fixed throughout the performance (although it may shift over the course of a comedian's career).
  223. Smith, Daniel R. (2018). "Part I: Analytical[:] 1 The Art of Stand-up Comedy: From ritual to theatre? Stand-up comedy's anthropological antecedents". COMEDY AND CRITIQUE: Stand-up comedy and the professional Ethos of laughter. Bristol Shorts Research. UK: Bristol University Press. p. 22. ISBN 978-1-5292-0015-7. [Antiquated comedic archetypes] lack that which is essential to the nature of personhood in modern, western society: interiority, point-of-view, empathy, individual character, the ability for ego-identification ... accountability ... [and more c]rucially ... 'the ability to tell a story' and simultaneously be a character in the story while being the storyteller ( ... the central narrative feature of all stand-up comedy).
  224. Lindfors, Antti (6 May 2019). "Cultivating Participation and the Varieties of Reflexivity in Stand-Up Comedy". Journal of Linguistic Anthropology. 29 (3): 277. doi:10.1111/jola.12223. Retrieved 26 December 2020. [S]tand-ups often aim for the allegorical, designated by folklore and narrative scholar Amy Shuman (2005, 73) as the trope for balancing the personal with the shared and enabling narrators such as stand-up comics ‘to speak as if from personal experience but always in reference to the purportedly comparable experiences’ of one’s interlocutors
  225. Lindfors, Antti (October 2017). "Twin Constellations: Parallelism and Stance in Stand-Up Comedy" (PDF). Oral Tradition. 31 (2): 562. doi:10.1353/ort.2017.0021. hdl:10355/65394. S2CID 165334261. Retrieved 29 December 2020. Recalling the AngloAmerican narratological distinction between showing and telling (Booth 1969), stand-up could be construed as a mixture of mimetic, dramatic comedy constituted by play-acted enactments, and narrative, oratorical comedy (a distinction that echoes the Platonic dichotomy between mimesis and diegesis).
  226. See also Pathos
  227. [221][76][222][223][224][225][226]
  228. Bergson, Henri (1912) [1900]. Laughter: an Essay on the Meaning of the Comic. Translated by Brereton, Cloudesley; Rothwell, Fred. The Macmillan Company. the comedy of situation is akin to the comedy of character ... [t]o penetrate too far into the personality, to couple the outer effect with causes that are too deep-seated, would mean to endanger, and in the end to sacrifice all that was laughable in the effect ... character [is] ... invisible to its actual owner, for the comic ever partakes of the unconscious, but visible to everybody else, so that it may call forth general laughter
  229. Brodie, Ian (2014). "The Social Identity". A Vulgar Art: A New Approach to Stand-up Comedy. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi. p. 88. ISBN 978-1-62846-182-4. Stand-up comedians are characters in their own narrative, of their own making. They profess to have had certain experiences and express certain opinions not merely in front of but to an audience.
  230. Borns, Betsy (1987). Comic Lives: Inside the World of American Stand-up comedy. Simon & Schuster, Inc. p. 91. ISBN 0-671-62620-5. Every stand-up goes onstage as a character to some extent. Some may adopt a persona that's very similar to their own personality, but it's still a separate entity—a person telling jokes as opposed to telling the truth, which no 'real' person does. Even observational comics, who base their material in reality, use the truth not as an end but as a foundation on which to build jokes by taking the truth to its farthest [sic] extreme.
  231. Wuster, Tracy (2006). "Comedy Jokes: Steve Martin and the Limits of Stand-Up Comedy". Studies in American Humor. American Humor Studies Association (14): 25–26. JSTOR 42573700. Central to this process is the creation of a comic 'character' who establishes and maintains the tone of interaction between performer and audience. This character is similar to, if not the same as, what [Steve] Martin calls the comedian's 'personality' ... This personality is not a direct reflection of the comedian's true self, but a character that is shaped and developed in order to create a comedic dynamic in which individual jokes work.
  232. Lindfors, Antti (6 May 2019). "Cultivating Participation and the Varieties of Reflexivity in Stand-Up Comedy". University of Turku, Finland. Journal of Linguistic Anthropology. 29 (3): 279, 282. doi:10.1111/jola.12223. Retrieved 26 December 2020. Notwithstanding how 'truthfully' the persona that is presented onstage might be understood as reflecting aspects of the comedian's self offstage, the subjectifying mode of footing here refers to the practice of stylizing a coherent self with supposedly token (personal) experiences, (unique) insights, and (individual) character ... Indeed, it might be described as one of the tensions comically staged by stand-up that being a recognizable 'character' or persona necessarily implies two things at once: that one is both a unique personality but also somehow typical, or at least an 'intersection' of abstract typical traits (also Fishelov 1990).
  233. See also Ethos
  234. [228][229][230][231][232][233]
  235. Smith, Daniel R. (2018). "Part II: Synthetic[:] Persona: The abject ontology of comic persona". COMEDY AND CRITIQUE: Stand-up comedy and the professional Ethos of laughter. Bristol Shorts Research. UK: Bristol University Press. p. 110. ISBN 978-1-5292-0015-7. 'Persona' is used to describe and attribute distinctive aspects of personality, character, and point-of-view to a comedian’s routines. It is a unique character attribute but it is not fictional; often it is an exaggerated version of their 'real life' self. It is an intrapersonal view of self: oneself seen from the position of another [the audience].
  236. Lindfors, Antti (6 May 2019). "Cultivating Participation and the Varieties of Reflexivity in Stand-Up Comedy". University of Turku, Finland. Journal of Linguistic Anthropology. 29 (3): 277. doi:10.1111/jola.12223. Retrieved 26 December 2020. this persona is typically understood having an indexical (also described by Charles S. Peirce as 'real' or 'existential') connection and relation with one's self and social person offstage (CP 2.287; CP 2.243; cited in Nakassis 2018, 282). That is, stage persona is not perceived by stand-ups as a distinct character but as a public or 'heightened' social role one has developed for this specific purpose
  237. Shouse, Eric (2020). "Person, Persona, and Act: The Dark and Light Sides of George Carlin, Richard Pryor, and Robin Williams". In Oppliger, Patrice A.; Shouse, Eric (eds.). The Dark Side of Stand-up Comedy. United Kingdom: Springer Nature Switzerland AG: Palgrave Macmillan. p. 31. doi:10.1007/978-3-030-37214-9_2. ISBN 978-3-030-37213-2. A persona not only helps to make a comedian's jokes funnier but also simultaneously reveals his or her personality and worldview.
  238. Lindfors, Antti (6 May 2019). "Cultivating Participation and the Varieties of Reflexivity in Stand-Up Comedy". University of Turku, Finland. Journal of Linguistic Anthropology. 29 (3): 281. doi:10.1111/jola.12223. Retrieved 29 December 2020. The process of individuation is frequently captured by stand-up comics in genre specific terms of crafting or 'finding' one's stage persona, or as phrased by Joni Koivuniemi, presenting one’s 'world': 'When they [the audience] know how you behave in your world, you don’t need to explain everything. You turn into a cartoon that one can count on.' (See also Silvio 2010, 430–431.) Ultimately an outcome of numerous performative reiterations, fashioning of typifiable stage persona is generally regarded as the number one goal for aspiring stand-ups, emphasized on courses and manuals of the genre. The process itself can be either very much instinctive, as Robert Pettersson describes it. Or it can be the result of purposive deliberation, as when Antti Haapala describes his stage persona as being 'very close to himself,' but with 'all the negativity stripped off and replaced with positive energy,' adding further that this persona develops as 'one develops himself.'
  239. Smith, Daniel R. (2018). "Part I: Analytical[:] 1 The Art of Stand-up Comedy: Intra-personality, or the modernism of the stand-up comedian: Negation of the boundary between art and reality". COMEDY AND CRITIQUE: Stand-up comedy and the professional Ethos of laughter. Bristol Shorts Research. UK: Bristol University Press. p. 39. ISBN 978-1-5292-0015-7. [C]omic personas are unlike theatrical personae. They are not masks for stage but increasingly, for modern stand-up comedians, drawn from their own biographies and personalities. But they, still, are not direct performances of personalities; they remain either heightened versions of self, or exaggerations of parts…[and] is a form of autobiographical lyric poetry ... autobiography in stand-up is far from an escaping of tropes, it is an embracing of them; the self becomes the basis for tropes
  240. Stuart Goldsmith (5 March 2014). "The Comedian's Comedian with Stuart Goldsmith: 67 – GARY DELANEY (LIVE)". The Comedian's Comedian (Podcast). Stuart Goldsmith. Event occurs at 5:00-5:38. Retrieved 3 February 2019. You start off, and you want to be like your heroes ... you start out under the naive belief that you get to choose your style ... [but] your style of comedy chooses you ... it's a misnomer when people say you need to think about your persona ... its all bollocks about persona and timing. I didn't set out to be a one-liner comic, but I was shit at everything else.
  241. Brodie, Ian (2014). "The Performance of Self". A Vulgar Art: A New Approach to Stand-up Comedy. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi. p. 102. ISBN 978-1-62846-182-4. This persona is enacted on stage, developed over time ... The comic persona is the stand-up comedian’s projection of a character who is, simultaneously, meant to be identical to his or her 'real' self.
  242. See also Alter ego
  243. [134][235][236][237][238][239][240][241][242]
  244. Rosenfield, Stephen (2018). Mastering Stand-Up: The Complete Guide to Becoming a Successful Comedian. Chicago, Illinois: Chicago Review Press. pp. 66–72. ISBN 978-1-61373-692-0.
  245. Goldsmith, Stuart. "125 – DARA Ó BRIAIN". The Comedian's Comedian with Stuart Goldsmith. Retrieved 29 January 2019. don't stop [your crowd work with a single audience member] until you've got [approximately] 4 big laughs.
  246. Borns, Betsy (1987). Comic Lives: Inside the World of American Stand-up comedy. Simon & Schuster, Inc. p. 168. ISBN 0-671-62620-5. After deciding to become a stand-up ... Cathy Ladman worked to develop 'five decent minutes'
  247. Maxwell, Dobie (December 2013). "A Tight Five ..." Comedy of Chicago. Retrieved 25 March 2019.
  248. Waithe, Elsa (2017-11-06). "How to Write a 5-Minute Comedy Set". Gold Comedy. Gold Comedy. Retrieved 25 March 2019. 'tight five' —five minutes of solid go-to jokes that show who you are and reliably get laughs.
  249. Roye, Steve (26 February 2019). "Your First 5 Minutes Of Stand-up Comedy Material". Real First Steps. Retrieved 25 March 2019. A tight 5 minutes of stand-up comedy material generates an average 4-6+ collective audience laughs each performing minute.
  250. Rosenfield, Stephen (2018). Mastering Stand-Up: The Complete Guide to Becoming a Successful Comedian. Chicago, Illinois: Chicago Review Press. p. 195. ISBN 978-1-61373-692-0. If you have an all 'A' [material] 5-minute set, you'll get paid nothing.
  251. Borns, Betsy (1987). Comic Lives: Inside the World of American Stand-up comedy. Simon & Schuster, Inc. p. 169. ISBN 0-671-62620-5. Fran Capo [states that] ... an audition is usually five minutes.
  252. Richardson, Jim (29 December 2013). "The physical brain prefers concrete over abstract activities: How to Easily Memorize Your Jokes". Jim Richardson's Organized Comedy. Retrieved 28 January 2019.
  253. Morgan, Nick (5 March 2015). "The Public Speaking Secrets Of Comedians". Forbes. Forbes Media LLC. Retrieved 22 March 2019. To avoid going blank on stage, use the Memory Palace.
  254. Frances-White, Deborah; Shandur, Marsha (2016). Off the Mic: The World's Best Stand-up Comedians Get Serious About Comedy. Gary Delaney. NY, New York: Bloomsbury Publishing Plc. p. 124. ISBN 978-1-4725-2638-0. I'm currently using memory palaces or I think the loci method
  255. Frances-White, Deborah; Shandur, Marsha (2016). Off the Mic: The World's Best Stand-up Comedians Get Serious About Comedy. Hannibal Buress. NY, New York: Bloomsbury Publishing Plc. p. 121. ISBN 978-1-4725-2638-0. I will put a set list on the stage monitor
  256. Rosenfield, Stephen (2018). Mastering Stand-Up: The Complete Guide to Becoming a Successful Comedian. Chicago, Illinois: Chicago Review Press. pp. 176–178. ISBN 978-1-61373-692-0.
  257. Cohen, Sascha. "a brief history of punch-down comedy". Mask. Maskmag. Retrieved 6 February 2019.
  258. Kris Tinkle, Pete Holmes, W. Kamau Bell (30 April 2014). I Am Road Comic (Motion Picture). Comedy Dynamics. Event occurs at 38:16-38:38.
  259. Chad Daniels, Louis Lee (2017). I Need You To Kill (Motion Picture). Comedy Dynamics. Event occurs at 1:07:26-1:08:18.
  260. Borns, Betsy (1987). Comic Lives: Inside the World of American Stand-up comedy. Simon & Schuster, Inc. p. 69. ISBN 0-671-62620-5. George Calfa, who feels that he's been forced to downplay the degree of real creativity in his act in order to pander to road crowds and bookers
  261. Seizer, Susan (2011). "On the Uses of Obscenity in Live Stand-Up Comedy". Anthropological Quarterly. The George Washington University Institute for Ethnographic Research. 84 (1): 211–212. doi:10.1353/anq.2011.0001. JSTOR 41237487. S2CID 144137009. [I]n a bar, dirty language is not out of place at all ... Audiences attending live stand-up in such night spots expect to hear speech onstage that would be otherwise, and elsewhere, unmentionable ... The easy way for a comic to meet such expectations—and here I employ a phrase commonly used in the business itself—is to tell 'dick jokes.' The phrase refers metonymically to a whole category of sex jokes in which 'dirty' words are used to refer directly to 'dirty' body parts ... as well as to acts and sexual functions ... Among insiders, comics who tell dick jokes are considered hacks, and the laughs they raise cheap. The self-respecting road comic tries to come up with original material that not only audiences but also their peers—those with whom they work and those who book their work—will appreciate
  262. [258][259][260][261]
  263. Sacks, Mike (2014). Poking a Dead Frog: Conversations with Today's Top Comedy Writers. NY, NY: Penguin Books. p. 3. ISBN 978-0-14-312378-1.
  264. West, Kelly (2008). "30 Rock's Tina Fey Clarifies Her Remark About The Daily Show". CINEMA BLEND. gateway blend: ENTERTIANMENT. Retrieved 18 February 2019.
  265. Brodie, Ian (2014). "The Performance of Self". A Vulgar Art: A New Approach to Stand-up Comedy. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi. p. 124. ISBN 978-1-62846-182-4. Applause is a validation for something other than the humorous: it validates that what has been said is 'true' and ought to be affirmed as such.
  266. Frances-White, Deborah; Shandur, Marsha (2016). Off the Mic: The World's Best Stand-up Comedians Get Serious About Comedy. Jim Jefferies. NY, New York: Bloomsbury Publishing Plc. pp. 230–231. ISBN 978-1-4725-2638-0. I have a list of three or four [comebacks] ... and the rest will be off the cuff
  267. Shouse, Eric (2020). "Shit Talking and Ass Kicking: Heckling, Physical Violence and Realistic Death Threats in Stand-Up Comedy". In Oppliger, Patrice A.; Shouse, Eric (eds.). The Dark Side of Stand-up Comedy. United Kingdom: Springer Nature Switzerland AG: Palgrave Macmillan. p. 265. doi:10.1007/978-3-030-37214-9_12. ISBN 978-3-030-37213-2. physical violence is rare in stand-up
  268. Kettle, James (24 August 2010). "When heckling goes bad". The Guardian. Guardian News & Media Limited. Retrieved 13 February 2019.
  269. Oliar, Dotan; Sprigman, Christopher (2008). "There's No Free Laugh (Anymore): The Emergence of Intellectual Property Norms and the Transformation of Stand-Up Comedy". Virginia Law Review. 94 (8): 1853. JSTOR 25470605. Retrieved 16 September 2020. Comedians who rely ... on generic joke telling, rather than comic monologue, are derided as 'hacks.' Originality is prized—indeed, it is arguably the first criterion by which comedians judge other comedians—and stealing is condemned.
  270. Kindler, Andy (2007) [1991]. "The Hack's Handbook: A Starter Kit" (PDF). Harvard University: National Lampoon. Retrieved 8 February 2019.
  271. Koester, Megan (23 April 2013). "How Not to Be a Stand-Up Comedian". Vice. VICE MEDIA LLC. Retrieved 8 February 2019.
  272. Schwenson, Dave (2005). COMEDY FAQS AND ANSWERS: HOW THE STAND-UP BIZ REALLY WORKS. New York, NY: ALLWORTH PRESS. p. 68. ISBN 1-58115-411-9.
  273. Stas Bekman: stas (at) stason.org. "The Complete Guide To Hack Stand-Up Comedy". Stason.org. Retrieved 12 March 2019.
  274. Jeff McBride, Harrison Tweed. "Episode 48 The Setup". Let's Talk About Sets (Podcast). Event occurs at 8:35-8:49. Retrieved 29 August 2019. One definition of hack is that you [the stand-up comedian] are thinking about what the audience wants instead of what you think is funny ... as opposed to being the artist that comes up with something new.
  275. Seizer, Susan (2011). "On the Uses of Obscenity in Live Stand-Up Comedy". Anthropological Quarterly. The George Washington University Institute for Ethnographic Research. 84 (1): 211. doi:10.1353/anq.2011.0001. JSTOR 41237487. S2CID 144137009. 'Hacks' are those who opt for 'dick jokes,' using bad words in ways that continue to exploit their referential meanings
  276. [269][270][271][272][273][274][275]
  277. Murray, Logan (25 June 2010). Be A Great Stand-Up (2nd ed.). London, Great Britain: The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc. p. 92. ISBN 978-1-444-10726-5.
  278. Borns, Betsy (1987). Comic Lives: Inside the World of American Stand-up comedy. Simon & Schuster, Inc. p. 179. ISBN 0-671-62620-5. Staying onstage longer than their allotted time is, along with joke stealing, one of the most grievous offense a stand-up can commit.
  279. Oliar, Dotan; Sprigman, Christopher (2008). "There's No Free Laugh (Anymore): The Emergence of Intellectual Property Norms and the Transformation of Stand-Up Comedy". Virginia Law Review. 94 (8): 1830. JSTOR 25470605. Retrieved 16 September 2020. [T]he spirit of modern stand-up comedy…is focused on originality.
  280. Voss, Erik (4 November 2010). "Is There Ever a Justification for Joke Stealing?". Vulture: Devouring Culture. NEW YORK MEDIA LLC. Retrieved 12 March 2019.
  281. Borns, Betsy (1987). Comic Lives: Inside the World of American Stand-up comedy. Abby Stein. Simon & Schuster, Inc. p. 242. ISBN 0-671-62620-5. [T]here are also cases of simple coincidence and, often in the case of observational material, parallel thinking.
  282. Antoine, Katja (2016). "'Pushing the Edge' of Race and Gender Hegemonies through Stand-up Comedy: Performing Slavery as Anti-racist Critique". Etnofoor. Stichting Etnofoor. 28 (1): 41. JSTOR 43823941. Retrieved 15 September 2020. The first comic on stage carries the burden of 'building the energy in the room'. The comedians who follow in the line-up have to sustain it. Should someone fail at doing this and leave the audience 'cold', the next comic has to 'bring the energy back up' ... Ideally [the comedians] arrive at a venue when the show starts in order to 'read' the audience. Reading the audience is a visual practice (What are the demographics?[)]…and an affective practice (How are they responding to the comic on stage?[)]…At the very least, comics will show up a few acts ahead of their own for that purpose. They have to know the energy of the room in order to work the crowd right.
  283. Antoine, Katja (2016). "'Pushing the Edge' of Race and Gender Hegemonies through Stand-up Comedy: Performing Slavery as Anti-racist Critique". Etnofoor. Stichting Etnofoor. 28 (1): 45. JSTOR 43823941. Retrieved 15 September 2020. The immediate feedback and sensing of energy that is available in a show room is absent with a television audience. With the lack of immediate response, performers lose the opportunity to turn the show around if a bit falls flat
  284. Wilde, Larry (2000) [1968]. "Shelley Berman". Great Comedians Talk About Comedy. Shelley Berman. Mechanicsburg, Pennsylvania: Executive Books. p. 86. ISBN 0-937539-51-1. Larry Wilde: There is an economic and cultural distinction between the people who frequent the off-beat, so called chi-chi rooms like the Hungry I (San Francisco), Mr. Kelly's (Chicago), and the Blue Angel (New York), than those who go to the Copacabana (New York), the American Hotel (New York), or the Fontainebleau Hotel (Miami Beach) ... [Shelley Berman:] ... Listen those chi-chi rooms are just as commercial as any room ... There's no such thing as a chi-chi room. A night club is a night club. Just because it is small, they call it a chi-chi room, or because they bring certain oddball forms of entertainment ... Wilde: Then what they will laugh at in a club in Pennsylvania, they should laugh at in a chi-chi room and vice-versa
  285. "Night Club - Vaude Reviews". The Billboard. 3 May 1952. Retrieved 9 August 2020. Chi-chi room in the hotel, which is a standard for showbiz names
  286. "Night Club - Vaude Reviews". The Billboard. 3 March 1951. Retrieved 9 August 2020. The two acts on the bill are tailored for this chi-chi room.
  287. "Night Club - Vaude Reviews". The Billboard. 10 October 1953. Retrieved 9 August 2020. A chi-chi room, separated from the club, has the superb Jose Meles and Billy Taylor
  288. Quirk, Sophie (November 2011). "Containing the Audience: The 'Room' in Stand-Up Comedy" (PDF). University of Kent, UK. Participations: Journal of Audience & Reception Studies. 8 (2): 220. Retrieved 27 December 2020. The term 'room' means more than just the physical space in which the performance takes place; it is the term used to summarise a combination of factors which include the nature of the space, the way that space is set up, the character of the audience and more.
  289. Lindfors, Antti (6 May 2019). "Cultivating Participation and the Varieties of Reflexivity in Stand-Up Comedy". University of Turku, Finland. Journal of Linguistic Anthropology. 29 (3): 283. doi:10.1111/jola.12223. Retrieved 27 December 2020. In the heat of real-time performance ... comics can 'read the room' through jokes that are optimal for gauging their interlocutors' intellectual, moral, emotional, or other boundaries and preferences, e.g., through lowbrow, strategically ambiguous, or perhaps seemingly offensive bits.
  290. Quirk, Sophie (November 2011). "Containing the Audience: The 'Room' in Stand-Up Comedy" (PDF). University of Kent, UK. Participations: Journal of Audience & Reception Studies. 8 (2): 236. Retrieved 27 December 2020. A good room can implicitly invite the 'right kind' of audience, and tell that audience how to behave and how to respond to the comedian's material. It can orchestrate the physical arrangement of the audience within the space, such that the performer is faced with minimal competition for audience attention. It can work on the audience's confidence, allowing each audience member to feel part of a homogenised group and creating acoustics which allow each laugh to fuel the next. The room can also send the message that the event is exciting; a success of which the audience are part. A good gig is not founded on the hope that a comedian can battle through any circumstance, but is rather a matter of creating, proactively, that fine balance between numerous factors which will allow for the best possible interaction.
  291. Marchese, David (23 September 2016). "Norm Macdonald Unloads on Modern Comedy, SNL, Fallon's Critics, Hillary, and Trump". Vulture: Devouring Culture. Quote by Norm Macdonald. Retrieved 27 December 2020. On TV, every single joke kills. That's not what happens with stand-up. You have to earn every laugh. Another thing is that there's no room for interpretation in stand-up ... with stand-up, it's all about getting that noise — getting that laugh. And it has to come for everyone at the same time. Everyone has to think the same thing at the same time.
  292. Page, Brett (March 2004) [1915]. Writing for Vaudeville (10 ed.). Project Gutenberg. A gag is the vaudeville term for any joke or pun ... A point is the laugh-line of a gag, or the funny observation of a monologue.
  293. Davis, Andrew (2014) [2011]. Baggy Pants Comedy: Burlesque and the Oral Tradition. Palgrave Studies in Theatre and Performance History. Palgrave Macmillan. p. 71. ISBN 978-1-137-37872-9. [I]n the 1930s comics made a distinction between timing and 'pointing.' 'Pointing a joke,' Morton Minsky wrote, 'means emphasizing the right word by giving a certain inflection so that it becomes funny'
  294. Mears, Kathryn; Eric, Shouse; Patrice A., Oppliger (2020). "An Incongruous Blend of Tragedy and Comedy: How Maria Bamford Lightens the Dark Side of Mental Illness". In Oppliger, Patrice A.; Shouse, Eric (eds.). The Dark Side of Stand-up Comedy. United Kingdom: Springer Nature Switzerland AG: Palgrave Macmillan. p. 185. doi:10.1007/978-3-030-37214-9_9. ISBN 978-3-030-37213-2. 'mugging,' a term used by stand-up comics as 'an elegant shorthand for expressing who you are and what you feel' (Allen, 2002, p. 30).
  295. Page, Brett (March 2004) [1915]. Writing for Vaudeville (10 ed.). Project Gutenberg. MUGGING.—A contortion of the features to win laughter, irrespective of its consistency with the lines or actions.
  296. Davis, Andrew (2014) [2011]. Baggy Pants Comedy: Burlesque and the Oral Tradition. Palgrave Studies in Theatre and Performance History. Palgrave Macmillan. pp. 84–85. ISBN 978-1-137-37872-9. Willie Howard…[stated that ']Mugging…you must trick it with an absurd facial expression[']
  297. Kippola, Karl M. (August 2012). "Conclusion: Affirming White Masculinity by Deriding the Other". Acts of Manhood: The Performance of Masculinity on the American Stage, 1828-1865. Palgrave Studies in Theatre and Performance History. New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan. pp. 176–77. doi:10.1057/9781137068774. ISBN 978-1-349-34304-1. Thomas D. Rice (1808-1860) originated the Jim Crow character, inspiring the minstrel show, which evolved into one of the most popular forms of variety entertainment through the end of the century and into the first distinctly American form of theatrical entertainment ... In the 1840s and 50s, the Virginia and Christy Minstrels built upon Rice’s success, formalizing a three-act structure of music and humor, variety entertainment, and scenes from plantation life (or burlesques of popular plays). Appealing across class lines, the minstrel show employed archetypal characters, created derogatory and fictitious pictures of African American males, and provided a lens through which whites viewed blacks ... Frederick Douglass described the purveyors of minstrel entertainment as 'filthy scum of white society, who have stolen from us a complexion denied to them by nature, in which to make money, and pander to the corrupt taste of their white fellow citizens.' Minstrelsy relied on the promise of presenting 'real' Southern life.
  298. Parker, Bethany (12 September 2008). "Probing Question: What are the roots of stand-up comedy?". Research. PennState News. University Park, Pennsylvania: The Pennsylvania State University. Retrieved 24 February 2019. American stand-up comedy has its beginnings in the minstrel shows of the early 1800s
  299. "Forms of Variety Theater". American Variety Stage: Vaudeville and Popular Entertainment: 1870-1920. Library of Congress (exhibit). Retrieved 24 January 2021. [T]he minstrel show was the most popular form of public amusement in the United States from the 1840s through the 1870s. It virtually ended, in its original form, by 1896, although vestiges lasted well into the twentieth century. Much humor in later comedy forms originated in minstrelsy and adapted itself to new topics and circumstances. The minstrel show also provided American burlesque and other variety forms with a prototypical three-part format. The minstrel show began with a 'walk around' with a verbal exchange between the 'end' men and the interlocutor. An 'olio,' or variety section, followed. Finally, a one-act skit completed the show.
  300. Oliar, Dotan; Sprigman, Christopher (2008). "There's No Free Laugh (Anymore): The Emergence of Intellectual Property Norms and the Transformation of Stand-Up Comedy". Virginia Law Review. 94 (8): 1843. JSTOR 25470605. Retrieved 16 September 2020. Stand-up’s early roots can also be traced back to minstrel, a variety show format based in racial stereotypes which was widely performed in America between the 1840s and the 1940s. Minstrel acts would script dedicated ad-lib moments for direct actor-audience communication: these spots often were used for telling quick jokes.
  301. Lee, Judith Yaross (2006). "Mark Twain as a Stand-up Comedian". The Mark Twain Annual. Penn State University Press. 4 (4): 5. JSTOR 41582220. [Mark Twain] toured his first lecture, usually known as 'Our Fellow Savages of the Sandwich Islands,' for 100 performances beginning in 1866
  302. Dudden, Arthur Power, ed. (1987). "The Importance of Mark Twain". American Humor. New York: Oxford University Press. pp. 47–48. ISBN 0-19-504212-3. [Mark Twain] is a reference figure for ... what we want to perceive to be the American character. As a public speaker and lecturer, indeed, the mature Mark Twain was very possibly our last performing humorist who presented himself as a 'general' personage—neither an easterner nor exactly a westerner, the embodiment ... of national regionalism, all parts equal, none predominating. This 'generic' persona, so different from Will Roger's lariat-twirling actor, is equally remote from the ethnic shtick of Woody Allen and Richard Pryor or the urban neurosis of Joan Rivers and David Brenner. He has no direct, obvious successors, only his impersonators; the humor of our contemporary nightclubs is fragmented and typecast. The foe of humbug, explicitly rebelling against outworn Romantic forms and themes, he detested high airs and smug complacency—putting him in the progression that has led to the stand-up insults of W.C. Fields as well as Lenny Bruce ... Among other feats, he contrived his public persona so as to convey the impression of (feigned) laziness, lack of erudition, easy success ... Mark Twain endures because he is greater than any of his possible classifications—crackerbarrel philosopher, literary comedian ... vernacular humorist, after-dinner speaker
  303. Zoglin, Richard. "Stand-up comedy". Encyclopædia Britannica. Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc. Retrieved 8 March 2019.
  304. "Forms of Variety Theater". American Variety Stage: Vaudeville and Popular Entertainment: 1870-1920. Library of Congress (exhibit). Retrieved 24 January 2021. The popular burlesque show of the 1870s though the 1920s referred to a raucous, somewhat bawdy style of variety theater. It was inspired by Lydia Thompson and her troupe, the British Blondes, who first appeared in the United States in the 1860s, and also by early 'leg' shows such as 'The Black Crook' (1866). Its form, humor, and aesthetic traditions were largely derived from the minstrel show. One of the first burlesque troupes was the Rentz-Santley Novelty and Burlesque Company, created in 1870 by M.B. Leavitt, who had earlier feminized the minstrel show with her group Madame Rentz's Female Minstrels. Burlesque rapidly adapted the minstrel show's tripartite structure: part one was composed of songs and dances rendered by a female company, interspersed with low comedy from male comedians. Part two was an 'olio' of short specialties in which the women did not appear. The show's finish was a grand finale. The popular burlesque show of this period eventually evolved into the strip tease which became the dominant ingredient of burlesque by the 1930s.
  305. Page, Brett (March 2004) [1915]. Writing for Vaudeville (10 ed.). Project Gutenberg. The pure vaudeville monologue, which was defined as a humorous talk spoken by one person, possesses unity of character, is not combined with any other entertainment form, is marked by compression [word economy], follows a definite form of construction, and usually requires from ten to fifteen minutes for delivery. Humor is its most notable characteristic; unity of the character delivering it, or of its 'hero,' is its second most important requirement. Each point, or gag, is so compressed that to take away or add even one word would spoil its effect; each is expressed so vividly that the action seems to take place before the eyes of the audience. Finally, every point leads out of the preceding point so naturally, and blends into the following point so inevitably, that the entire monologue is a smooth and perfect whole.
  306. Frances-White, Deborah; Shandur, Marsha (2016). Off the Mic: The World's Best Stand-up Comedians Get Serious About Comedy. Jim Jefferies. NY, New York: Bloomsbury Publishing Plc. p. 176. ISBN 978-1-4725-2638-0. Go to festivals, because that's where you get noticed by the media ... [and] gauge [yourself against] everybody else.
  307. Ajaye, Franklyn (2002). Comic Insights: The Art of Stand-up Comedy. Buddy Mora. Los Angeles: Silman-James Press. p. 280. ISBN 1-879505-54-1. I [Buddy Morra] go to the Montreal and Aspen comedy festivals, but I haven't seen much that's knocked me out.
  308. Mendrinos, James (2004). The Idiot's Complete Guide To Comedy Writing. 375 Hudson Street, New York, NY 10014: Alpha: A member of Penguin Group (USA) Inc. p. 199. ISBN 1-59257-231-6. Jim McCue, the founder of The Boston International Comedy and Movie Festival, spoke about the role of the festival in the industry: 'A festival is a great way to get attention for someone who might not have the connections other people do. This festival is constantly looking for under-appreciated talent. Hopefully, we can do our part and let people see the next generation of comedy genius.'CS1 maint: location (link)
  309. Brown, Georgia (16 March 2007). "Five top comedy festivals around the world". The Guardian. Guardian News & Media Limited. Retrieved 8 March 2019.
  310. Seizer, Susan (2011). "On the Uses of Obscenity in Live Stand-Up Comedy". Anthropological Quarterly. The George Washington University Institute for Ethnographic Research. 84 (1): 212. doi:10.1353/anq.2011.0001. JSTOR 41237487. S2CID 144137009. In the stand-up business, 'dirty' and 'clean' are treated as polar opposites. Swearing is the difference between the two, and bookings are based on the distinction. Club owners, event sponsors, and media executives let comics know, usually through bookers or agents, whether they will hire someone who works blue or whether they are interested in those who will refrain from uttering obscenities.
  311. Shouse, Eric (2020). "Shit Talking and Ass Kicking: Heckling, Physical Violence and Realistic Death Threats in Stand-Up Comedy". In Oppliger, Patrice A.; Shouse, Eric (eds.). The Dark Side of Stand-up Comedy. United Kingdom: Springer Nature Switzerland AG: Palgrave Macmillan. p. 253. doi:10.1007/978-3-030-37214-9_12. ISBN 978-3-030-37213-2. Profanity is commonplace in contemporary stand-up comedy (so much so that 'clean comedy' is a marketable commodity).
  312. Quirk, Sophie (November 2011). "Containing the Audience: The 'Room' in Stand-Up Comedy" (PDF). University of Kent, UK. Participations: Journal of Audience & Reception Studies. 8 (2): 221. Retrieved 27 December 2020. Across the UK, there are hundreds of small, informal gigs that run on enthusiasm, for little or no financial profit. It is in these that most comedians get their start. They learn their craft and gradually work their way up through larger audiences and more prestigious venues. The lucky minority come to a point where they can tour their own show, their fame perhaps fuelled by appearances on television. The very few become famous enough to graduate to the arena gigs or produce a best-selling DVD. Importantly, it is the live circuit of small-to-medium gigs which fuels the upper echelons of the comedy industry, training and nurturing the talent that big business will adopt. In this sense, those small-to-medium rooms are fundamental to all levels of stand-up production.
  313. Brodie, Ian (2014). "Stand-Up Comedy Broadcasts". A Vulgar Art: A New Approach to Stand-up Comedy. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi. p. 162. ISBN 978-1-62846-182-4. Obscenity and other risky material are not inherently part of stand-up comedy, but their avoidance can require a self-censoring and circumnavigation of certain topics that might not be present in conversation among intimates ... [t]ogether the performer and the audience negotiate what is appropriate and what is inappropriate.
  314. Guglielmi, Jodi (24 June 2013). "12 jobs comedians had before they were famous: Kevin Hart, Jon Stewart, Louis C.K. and more!". LaughSpin. LaughSpin. Archived from the original on 6 September 2013. Retrieved 8 March 2019.
  315. Lintott, Sheila (2020). "Stand-up Comedy and Mental Health: Critiquing the Troubled Stand-Up Stereotype". In Oppliger, Patrice A.; Shouse, Eric (eds.). The Dark Side of Stand-up Comedy. United Kingdom: Springer Nature Switzerland AG: Palgrave Macmillan. pp. 201–202. doi:10.1007/978-3-030-37214-9_10. ISBN 978-3-030-37213-2. [T]he concept of the 'professional' [stand-up comedian] is vague at best, making it quite difficult to say with any certainty whether a given comedian is professional. Should it be ... only those making their living primarily through stand-up comedy? Why not include stand-ups who earn their living otherwise, but regularly perform stand-up for supplementary income? Indeed, why not include stand-ups who make relatively little through stand-up, in some cases, nothing, but spend most of their evenings performing and their free-time writing stand-up? It’s overly simplistic to decide who counts as a stand-up comedian based on income, time devoted to writing or performing, number of performances, or talent.
  316. Bergson, Henri (1912) [1900]. Laughter: an Essay on the Meaning of the Comic. Translated by Brereton, Cloudesley; Rothwell, Fred. The Macmillan Company. the comic whose varieties might be calculated beforehand. This we shall call the professional comic
  317. Lindsay Goldwert (18 April 2016). "Mark Normand: Funny for Money 002". SPENT (Podcast). Event occurs at 4:14-4:40. I didn't start getting anywhere until ... five years in, financially ... even then, it was month to month [in New York City].
  318. Buck, Jerry (9 December 1987). "Comedian has last laugh". Observer Reporter (AP TV Writer). Yakov Smirnoff. Retrieved 8 April 2019. It took four or five years before I [Yakov Smirnoff] could make a living as a comedian.
  319. Ajaye, Franklyn (2002). Comic Insights: The Art of Stand-up Comedy. Jay Leno. Silman-James Press. pp. 124–125. ISBN 1-879505-54-1. I've [Jay Leno] always told comedians that if you can do this for seven years, I mean physically make it to the stage for seven years, you'll always make a living ... You start to get paid at the end of the fourth or fifth year—I mean paid in terms of here's $500 dollars for one night, not $15 or $20 for a set.
  320. Shydner, Ritch; Schiff, Mark, eds. (2006). "My Ride is Here: Ant". I Killed: True Stories of the Road From America's Top Comics. Ant (comedian) (First Paperback ed.). New York: Three Rivers Press. p. 10. ISBN 978-0-307-38229-0. Archived from the original on 1 May 2012. Retrieved 31 March 2020. Early in a comic's career, you get calls from ... bookers ... I would never again take a gig where it cost me more to get there than the pay, but back then I just needed stage time.
  321. Koester, Megan (26 June 2014). "How to Be a Touring Stand-Up Comic". VICE. VICE MEDIA LLC. Retrieved 18 February 2019.
  322. Durham, Rob (2011). Don't Wear Shorts on Stage: the stand-up guide to comedy. Middletown, DE. p. 12. ISBN 9781468004847. The first paying position a comic can land is to emcee or host a show.
  323. Borns, Betsy (1987). Comic Lives: Inside the World of American Stand-up comedy. Chris Dipetta. Simon & Schuster, Inc. p. 67. ISBN 0-671-62620-5. People like Leno and Wright can make ten thousand dollars a show now—that's not shocking. What's shocking is that I'm a virtually unknown comic and I make about one hundred twenty-five thousand dollars a year.
  324. Seizer, Susan (2011). Stewart Huff. "On the Uses of Obscenity in Live Stand-Up Comedy". Anthropological Quarterly. The George Washington University Institute for Ethnographic Research. 84 (1): 212–213. doi:10.1353/anq.2011.0001. JSTOR 41237487. S2CID 144137009. One of his main bookers nags him [the comedian] about losing the [foul] language, promising him so many more gigs ... and higher-paying ones at that, as these different kinds of gigs include corporate affairs, cruise ships, and Christian rallies.
  325. Durham, Rob (2011). Don't Wear Shorts on Stage: the stand-up guide to comedy. Middletown, DE. p. 79. ISBN 9781468004847. An emcee will make usually from $10-$35 a show. It's usually $25.
  326. Ron White (2018). Ron White: If you Quit Listening, I'll Shut Up (Motion Picture). Event occurs at 39:21-39:41. Retrieved 29 March 2020. I was the feature act at The Punchline Comedy Club in Sacramento, California. And ... traditionally in American comedy clubs, there's three acts: there's an opening act that makes between a hundred and two hundred [dollars] a week for nine shows, there's a feature act ... makes between four and five hundred bucks a week for nine shows, and a headliner, who can make absolutely anything depending on who they are.
  327. Strauss, Duncan (3 November 1988). "Comedy: The Clubbing of America: The rise of comedy club chains". Rolling Stone. Retrieved 10 September 2019. At the better chains, middle acts earn a weekly salary of $600 and up; headliners, anywhere from $2000 to $10,000, plus air fare and lodging – usually at the club's 'comedy condo' in town ... The chief variable is drawing power, based on accumulated TV and movie credits.
  328. Hofstetter, Steve (2 July 2015). "What to Expect when You're Expecting ... to be Paid at a Club". Comedy Hints: Helping Comedians Help Themselves. Retrieved 8 February 2019.
  329. O'Brien, Jane (21 October 2015). "No laughing matter: The secrets behind comedy success". BBC News. BBC. Retrieved 22 March 2019. If it's somebody starting off in the business it could be $1,500 a show. For somebody who's had some TV credits you could go from $4,500 to $7,500.
  330. Durham, Rob (2011). Don't Wear Shorts on Stage: the stand-up guide to comedy. Middletown, DE. p. 87. ISBN 9781468004847. the famous comics have what's called a "door deal" and get paid based on the amount of people in the crowd.
  331. Borns, Betsy (1987). Comic Lives: Inside the World of American Stand-up comedy. Rick Messina. Simon & Schuster, Inc. p. 68. ISBN 0-671-62620-5. It depends on the TV exposure of the comic, whether the comic draws and if he can command a higher ticket price.
  332. Breidbart, Shaun Eli (2018-07-09). "13 Things a Stand-Up Comedian Won't Tell You". Reader's Digest. Trusted Media Brands, Inc. Retrieved 22 March 2019. Those T-shirts and CDs we sell are what we make our real money on ... And when we do book a paying gig? We spend most of the money on transportation to get there.
  333. Goldwert, Lindsay (16 October 2016). "Comedians explain the improbable economics of stand-up". QUARTZ. Quartz Media, Inc. Retrieved 26 January 2019.
  334. Zinoman, Jason; Megan, Angelo (2012-11-02). "Clever, How They Earn That Laugh". The New York Times. Retrieved 2019-01-26.
  335. mattoo, Priyanka (22 September 2015). "What Comedy Pays". Vulture: Devouring Culture. NEW YORK MEDIA LLC. Retrieved 7 February 2019.
  336. Simons, Seth (24 January 2018). "How Much Does Netflix Pay for 15 Minutes of Stand-Up?". PASTE. Retrieved 3 February 2019.
  337. Abramovitch, Seth (15 June 2018). "'I Sold the Same Special Twice!' How Netflix Is Driving an L.A. Comedy Gold Rush". The Hollywood Reporter. Retrieved 25 March 2019. Netflix is wooing superstar comics with eight-figure deals, including Dave Chappelle (a reported $60 million), Louis C.K. ($26 million), Amy Schumer ($20 million) and Jim Gaffigan ($10 million).
  338. Bauer-Wolf, Jeremy (30 August 2018). "College Comedy: Provocative Yet ... PC?". Inside Higher Ed. Retrieved 10 February 2019.
  339. Golden, Fran (11 September 2014). "The best cruise lines for comedy". Great Falls Tribune. Retrieved 11 February 2019.
  340. Holm, Heather (26 March 2009). "'Quick-witted' Burress set for laughs". Daily Eastern News: Tell the truth and don't be afraid. The Daily Eastern News. Retrieved 8 February 2019. Hannibal Burress was the most popular comedian in Caponera's (2009) price range of $2,000.
  341. Flanagan, Caitlin (September 2015). "That's Not Funny! Today's college students can't seem to take a joke". The Atlantic. Retrieved 26 January 2019. Keith is one of the kings of the college circuit. A few years ago, he was the most-booked college comic, playing 120 campuses. He charges $2,300 for a single performance.
  342. Leon, Harmon (1 July 2015). "God's Comics: Inside the World of Christian Stand-Up". VICE. VICE MEDIA LLC. Retrieved 18 February 2019. Headliners can reap $1,500 to $2,500 per church comedy show
  343. Abramovitch, Seth (15 June 2018). "'I Sold the Same Special Twice!' How Netflix Is Driving an L.A. Comedy Gold Rush". The Hollywood Reporter. Retrieved 25 March 2019. A newer comic on the national circuit can earn anywhere from $1,250 to $2,500 per week, according to one prominent touring agent; more established names can pull in anywhere from $10,000 to $100,000 in the same period.
  344. Caffir, Justin (20 June 2018). "Comedians Reveal What the L.A. Stand-up Scene Actually Pays". Vulture: Devouring Culture. NEW YORK MEDIA LLC. Retrieved 25 March 2019. it's very hard to make that amount even on the road ... To mislead someone with a figure that is beyond an exaggeration and just ridiculous.
  345. Durham, Rob (2011). Don't Wear Shorts on Stage: the stand-up guide to comedy. Middletown, DE. p. 36. ISBN 9781468004847. Bigger name comics have been known to pay thousands for jokes and hire writers ... After a famous comic has an HBO Special, they almost always hire writers to help them pump out more material.
  346. Borns, Betsy (1987). Comic Lives: Inside the World of American Stand-up comedy. Barry Sand. Simon & Schuster, Inc. pp. 239–240. ISBN 0-671-62620-5. Comics need material badly, especially once they get to be in demand—they've got to keep coming up with the stuff ... Often, once a comic becomes successful, his requirements for material begin to exceed his ability to create it—particularly in the case of TV spots, which 'eat' it instantly.
  347. Hesse, Josiah (25 September 2014). "Should All Standup Comics Write Their Own Jokes?". Vulture: Devouring Culture. NEW YORK MEDIA LLC. Retrieved 10 March 2019.
  348. Borns, Betsy (1987). Comic Lives: Inside the World of American Stand-up comedy. Rita Rudner. Simon & Schuster, Inc. p. 241. ISBN 0-671-62620-5. [T]hat's another thing people do—write down jokes they see on TV, then sell them to other comics who don't realize what they're doing.
  349. "Watch Stand Up Comedians on YouTube". Daniel Scocco. Dailybits.com. 2008-09-23. Retrieved 2008-09-27.
  350. Barry, Dave (1992). Dave Barry Does Japan. New York: Ballantine Books. p. 129. ISBN 0-449-90810-0.
  351. Goffman, Erving (1980) [1959]. The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. New York: Anchor Books: A Division of Random House, Inc. pp. 119, 121. ISBN 978-0-385-094023. Backstage ... back region tends to be defined as ... all places out of range of 'live' microphones ... One of the most interesting times to observe impression management is the moment when a performer leaves the back region and enters the place where the audience is to be found ... for at these moments one can detect a wonderful putting on and taking off of character.
  352. Brodie, Ian (2014). "Stand-Up Comedy and a Folkloristic Approach". A Vulgar Art: A New Approach to Stand-up Comedy. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi. p. 32. ISBN 978-1-62846-182-4. All writers on stand-up comedy, without exception, specifically emphasize that a stand-up comedian is on a stage talking with an audience. Stand-up comedy is neither a series of narratives nor a series of jokes: it is a form of small talk

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