Every audience has experienced this one time or another: The comedian who told a long story, thought it was funny, and it ended with a room quieter than the one-minute silence on Rememberance Day.
Storytelling is one of the oldest art forms. A good story can move us, make us cry or laugh or both; yet it is not easy to translate a story to comedy where it’s about the laughs. Thus, the emphasis of this essay is on comedic storytelling for the new comedians with some suggestions and what to avoid. Please keep in mind this is not “the authoritative way to do comedy stories” – comedy is not Newtonian physics. The veteran comedians interviewed here were generous enough to share their experience; while I will write from a new comic’s point of view.
Stand-up comedian and writer for Rove Live, Gerard McCulloch, has a cautionary reminder about stories: “Sometimes, the stories just aren’t good enough. Just because you’re calling yourself a comedian doesn’t mean that the audience is obliged to find everything you say funny.” Though not all good comedians are of the laugh-per-minute kind; Gerard continues… “Generally, I’ve found that Melbourne audiences are very generous with the length of time that they will persevere with a routine that’s going nowhere. And even if they don’t like you, they’ll very rarely boo you off – they’ll sit there in silence and give you a polite clap at the end. This leads to the trap that I’ve seen too many newbies fall into: assuming that because they clapped at the end, you did well… If you’re getting silence, you’re not being funny..”
The first challenge of stories is managing expectations, as the anticipation for the quality of the punchline will be proportional to the time spent quietly listening. Comedy listening is not like reading a novel – while I have the patience to read Tolstoy’s War and Peace; if I feel the comedian is not going to deliver a spectacular punchline, I will tune out after 2 minutes of a story to Nowhereville.
Justin Kennedy, of Channel 31 The Breakfast Show; with a recent well-reviewed 2007 Melbourne Comedy Festival show, observed, “You have to sell the story. For an audience member, a story is an investment in time, concentration and imagination (as opposed to a ‘joke’, which gets to the payoff quickly so you don’t have to stop texting and focus on the one thing for too long) so you need to make them feel confident that that investment is in safe hands.”
For the typical young comic doing 5-minute open mic set; it is hard to build an audience’s confidence in the short space of time. A possible strategy to test that story is to start and end only with your better short jokes – and then test a short version of that story with minimal details in the middle. If the story bombs, the routine won’t be a total write-off.
A personal example was how I told a story of how a bunch of college kids were slinging racist taunts at me – which is not funny in itself. The joke was not well-received in the original edition because I told it with too much detail. Does anyone really need to know this happened when I was in Northcote on a Friday afternoon waiting to cross the street to buy some whitegoods? Or that the kids were from __ college? Not at all. My mistake was that I forgot to ask myself “Where’s the funny?” I found that the joke is in my reaction to the taunts, not in the details. Once the irrelevant parts were removed, it has saved the story from the not-funny heap and turned it into an old reliable.
There are several other suggestions to keep a comedy story moving along. Gerard suggests, “The story might be amusing, but you’re doing stand-up, so tell it like a joke. Keep it pacy, don’t let the audience get ahead of you – keep the twists a surprise, and deliver them with purpose.”
And lastly, a memorable funny story is often the one with a lot of heart; it allows an audience to relate to the comedian on a deep human level. As Justin says, “Keep it relatable. Some of my favourite storytellers reveal themselves in their tales, being honest about their foibles, fears and passions. They allow you to see some of yourself in them and also in the people around you who are sharing this experience as well. If your audience can’t understand your position, why should they care?”
Thanks to Gerard McCulloch and Justin Kennedy