Courage of Comedy

About a month and a half ago, I started teaching a stand up comedy class to a small but hearty group of students. It's been a really interesting experience. I had taken a class exactly like the one I am teaching many years ago in Eugene, Oregon. As with many folks who try to do stand up, I had been a class clown, was always the funny one at the jobs I worked at, etc. People who fit those descriptions often have other people telling them, "You should do stand up." More often than not, we blow that off. But I had acted before, and had often thought of doing comedy. So when I got to Eugene and saw the class listed in the "community education" catalogue, I decided it was time. And I was so glad I did.

Seinfeld has a joke about how people fear public speaking more than they fear dying. When you think about it, stand up comedy is just public speaking but with the intended purpose of attempting to make your audience laugh. So when I entered the class I was teaching and saw the 5 students (that's right, I said 5), looking back at me, I thought, "What brave, brave souls.

The class is structured as a ten week course with the first half focusing on writing and developing material and the last half focusing on learning to deliver that material. We just started the delivery part and it was really fun to see fear part coming out and being defeated. Of course, this is the first stage: standing and talking. Right now, they are only worried because they are standing in front of our little class and speaking. The next stage will be trying out their material, and the fear will be NOT about the public speaking part, but about the success or failure of art they created. They will rework it and reshape it and soon they will have a level of confidence in the material they have created. Then the fear becomes about both parts. Their confidence for their material will start to fade as they consider that their fellow students have seen them rework it, so perhaps the laughter is based on the "improvement" of that material and not the material itself. And although they will have become comfortable speaking in front of the small class, they will start to think about a larger group of friends and family and total strangers that will watch them perform as a comic in public for the very first time.

My hope, is that by reminding them that because the intended purpose of this endeavour is shared laughter, they are in a much friendly environment than they think they are, they should find comfort. My hope is that the hard work on both their material and their performances will pay off, and they will discover a special kind of courage, the courage of comedy.