Originality

Now I know that the blog has been silent recently, but with a day job, a night job, and stand up…finding the time to write is very difficult.  For the four or five of you that this effects I am sorry that I have not been here to entertain you.  But I hope to have a slightly more regular schedule once we wrap up the Women in Comedy Festival this weekend.

I give you a short piece that I had written in my head as a just in case for the last open mic I did.  I can’t exactly explain why I wrote this, but those who know the situation will only have a deeper understanding of this.  I hope it’s entertaining/informative for others as well.

Originality:

I like to consider myself a student of comedy.  The amount of comedy I have listened to numbers in the several hundreds of hours.  The amount I’ve watched via video, DVD, or the internet equals that.  It has always frightened me when I got into comedy to think that maybe some of my ideas and premises would be lifted too closely from all of the masters of the art I had taken the time to listen and watch over the years.  There are certain works of comedy that I could recite almost verbatim and in fact I once as a lark mentioned to some friends of mine that I could probably go on tour as the worlds first ‘tribute comic’ I had some of these routines so cold.  But that is theft, pure and simple, theft. 

As I got deeper and deeper into comedy I realized that all of my past work could be used in a different way.  I could use it to know what paths to avoid.  That I could take my knowledge of other acts and use it as inspiration, not lifting anything from another comedian, but as I listen I get ideas about different bits that I can do.  That I can feel proud to stand on a stage and say that I came up with this.  This is an original comedy bit.  I can be proud because I didn’t take someone’s mannerisms or ideas and try to pass them off as my own.  I do comedy because I want people to hear me and my thoughts on a subject, not something that a much more famous comedian once said that is now filtered through someone else who might change a name here or there or a word or two and call it their own.  I do this because I want my material to make people laugh.  I do it to be original.

I go far beyond the call of duty to make sure that each bit remains original.  I have recently run into a comedian who I am proud to call a friend who had a bit that was very similar to mine.  The first thing I did was check in with him to see if he thought it was too close.  He didn’t, but if he had I would have dropped the bit.  I’m not trying to sound preachy here, but I believe that the most important part of being a stand-up comedian is the not the delivery style, writing style, or anything other than staying original and doing only material that you came up with.

This is it for my soapbox.  Back to some funny stuff next post.