Week 6 of the writer’s workshop clicked along. Here’s a brief overview:
- from 3-3:30 we did some career development for people who want to more fully design out a paying comedy career (in standup, tv, on writing staffs, etc)
- talked about how to develop standup that works nationally, not get caught up too heavily in doing standup that’s too influenced by the local Austin scene (which leans heavily toward doing standup for other standups, and social justice/issue comedy); how do you prepare to do comedy for the rest of America, not just for Austin?
- we worked on “language-centric” jokes people had brought in from last week’s assignment; it’s hard to get great comedy just from words, but it’s a great pro technique that works in media, business/copywriting, corporate clean work, etc.
- then we switched and worked on rants -- highly emotive, strongly pov’d, long-form, artful, evaluation comedy about something you have a strong opinion about. the trick is to make them last as long as you can, never run out of emotional gas, and use intellectual veers to keep the audience interested. we worked on people’s rants about -- don’t date engineers, why isn’t there Capris Sun for adults, and annoyance that corporations portray themselves as saving the world (aka, Jimmy John’s). Also talked about great ranters -- Lewis Black, Dennis Miller, Bill Burr, Jimmy Shubert (I’ve collected some of Jimmy’s rants -- which I wrote with him -- on my YouTube Channel)
- the assignment for next week is to write a standup-level story -- meaning an extended story that has a beginning, middle, end, but is heavily spiced with standup-up quality laugh points along the way