Attitude, the life-blood of comedy
Without it even the best jokes will struggle to have an impact
I’m working on a few new articles, in the meantime here’s a banger from last year - enjoy!
Attitude part 1: Your personality
Attitude means simply the way in which you express yourself. It comes in two parts. The first part is your overall attitude, your persona or personality. Think about how you would describe yourself, or more accurately how others would describe you without describing your physical appearance. Are you relaxed, anxious, bubbly, aggressive, cool, needy… etc. Of course your personality can be more than one thing.
I often get described as deadpan, a bit low energy. But I’m also extremely insecure and want everyone to like me.
Attitude is the life blood of a comedy routine, without it even the best jokes will struggle to have an impact. Imagine your favourite comedians if they just said their material matter of factly, without any energy.
You can have a big attitude and still be low-energy & shy. Having a big attitude doesn’t necessarily mean jumping all over the stage and yelling, in fact many comedians use this as a substitute for having good material. Having a big attitude just means knowing exactly the best way to tell your jokes. It’s knowing who you are on that stage and how your audience sees you. It doesn’t have to be tangible, it can be a feeling - and it will develop over time.
A very low-energy comedian might walk slowly on stage, look around the audience silently nodding, then after a few seconds say “hey”. They might get a big laugh because it takes a lot of confidence to be so low energy at the top of your set, and now we know exactly who this person is in just one word.
A very anxious comedian might be like “Alright that’s enough, stop it! You’re embarrassing me! Shhhh!” as an authentic reaction to a room full of strangers applauding them for something they haven’t done yet. The key here is authenticity. The audience can tell the comedian's actions are aligning with their authentic persona as demonstrated by this Daniel Simonsen video above where he gets huge laughs from just saying “hey”.
Authenticity schmauthenticity
Your stage persona is a heightened version of your off-stage persona. Think about yourself telling a particularly cool anecdote to a group of friends, the way you embellish certain parts of the story for added comic effect and/or impact, that’s part of your stage persona, at least the beginning of it. How would other people describe your personality? Are you more bubbly? Low-energy? Dry? Stoned? Loud? Do you tend to have big reactions to things? Do you need a lot of attention, or are you completely “chill”? You might be a total mystery to yourself, and that isn’t terrible. It means your comedic personality is there to be discovered - and that’s exciting! Even if you consider yourself to be exceedingly boring with no discernible personality - that’s an amazing persona. Charismatic can be so annoying sometimes. Like we get it, you had a lot of friends at school!
Glue
Nobody on the surface is unique, any Buzzfeed quiz will tell you that. But if you examine your life in lots of detail, you will come up with something nobody else would. Your on-stage persona should be authentic, but should also be exaggerated so you can “play to the back of the room”. It’s you when you’ve had just the right amount to drink. And if you don’t drink - just the right amount of glue.
When you're performing material to a group, you should look for the parts where people laugh where you didn’t expect them to. Those are probably the places where you are being the most “you”.
Attitude part 2: How do you feel about a subject?
The second part of attitude is how you feel about the subject you are talking about. This can be a myriad of emotions, most of which are in this wheel below by Kaitlin Robb. It could be that how you feel about a subject changes throughout you talking about, you might start off mad as hell, but then as you unravel your own thinking you might feel optimistic and a little defeated.
This wheel is a great start, but if you can add detail to your specific feeling that’s even better.
What is important in comedy is that the audience knows exactly how you feel about a subject, especially if it’s a controversial subject. If you’re a queer person like me, then I might have a bunch of great jokes making fun of lesbians, but it still has to be clear to the audience that I’m not actually homophobic, and I’m just making fun of (mostly) myself.
I’m a lesbian with low self-esteem, that’s why I bought a flaccid dildo. When you press a button it says “It’s not you baby, I’m just tired”, but you can tell it is you.
If you press another button it puts Great British Bake-off on the TV. Did I say dildo? I meant TV remote. I really should wash it. Beause I masturbate with it. Has anyone seen the remote? yes, it’s inside my vagina. I don’t like this joke.
Use real emotions
You should always use real emotions as the basis for your writing. Look for topics that make you feel something. The audience can always tell when you are faking it. Sure you might be a tremendous actor, but what’s the point in tricking people into thinking vandalism makes you really angry, when in fact you don’t really care about it - and in fact care deeply about your partners sleep-farts. Real emotions make it easy to write because you don’t have to invent anything, it’s already there. One of the biggest problems with comedy is when people are pretentious. People have a microphone and an audience so they think, I can reinvent myself! I can finally be this woke warrior, who is great in bed. People can smell bullshit a mile off, and again, even if you are a tremendous actor and can convince people, you’re now just giving yourself a lot of inventing to do. Discover, don’t invent.
Once you have your great idea that’s full of emotion, THEN you can bullshit and get weird. Then you can explore the subject for all it’s worth until it’s a lifeless husk that’s blown away by a slight breeze, or a partner’s fart.
As with all joke writing, once you start a premise using real authentic emotions, that's when stuff can get weird and wonderful. Here are some of my favourite attitude exercises:
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Dear Caroline,
Great piece!
I love this: "Nobody on the surface is unique, any Buzzfeed quiz will tell you that. But if you examine your life in lots of detail, you will come up with something nobody else would."
Thank you for sharing as always!
Love
Myq