Stand-up comedy is hard. It’s hard to be funny. If you’re not familiar, stand-up comedy involves one comedian, by themselves on a stage in front of an audience. I am a part of a comedy practice course at UF where we learn how to perform stand-up, and write sketches and jokes. I had never done stand-up before, but there is always a first for everything. It’s hard to make a whole room of people like you and think you’re funny. And I did it.
There is a lot more preparation involved than I expected
Stand-up comedians write all of their jokes and rehearse, and rehearse. Everything is on purpose. If there’s a heckler, there are jokes written for the heckler. Barely anything is improvised. I honestly thought comedians just wrote down topics and randomly talked about them for five minutes. I had no idea what I was doing. We had a guest speaker from New York City come down and help us to refine our bits; he made us all write them down. This really helped my voice shine. I thought it would be harder to write, but it was all personal and all about the origin story of my unique name, so I had many things to talk about. I have a lot of respect for joke writers and stand-up comedians. Writing new material for multiple shows and stand-up performances must be so draining. I can only hope to be funny enough to come up with fresh material often.
Waiting to go up was just as scary as performing
Our teacher split our class into two groups and I was the closer for the first group. Half of me was happy to be the closer, but the other half didn’t like having to wait. I had my set memorized. I ran it every day leading up to the performance. I have been doing theater since I was young, so I’m used to memorizing. Memorizing something is a lot easier when you write it yourself. Waiting in line all I could think about was forgetting my set. It was my biggest fear. I was more afraid of forgetting lines than not being thought of as funny. I actually did forget a line while performing, but no one really noticed. I was so nervous, I questioned if anyone would laugh. People laughed, but not as much as others did when I practiced. It’s a totally different situation when you perform for people who know you versus people who don’t know you. My set was a little bit more relatable to my friends since my main topic was about my name. And they all know me and my struggle with my name. But a laugh is a laugh, and I’ll take it.
Stand-up is the most valuable thing I’ve ever done
Did I mention stand-up is scary? You are putting yourself out there for others to laugh at you. I have performed as characters and have performed different monologues, but this is totally different. It’s all about you. It’s personal. People are laughing at your personal struggles. Then you question yourself. Am I doing this right? Am I pleasing enough people? Will they laugh if I say it like this or like that? And every audience is different. Luckily, I had friends out there supporting me.
If you told me that I would be performing stand-up at UF, I would tell you that you’re lying. I would normally never put myself out there like that. But I did. I hope to write more stand-up. It was fun and now I know what to expect and what I need to work on. If you want to watch my experience, feel free to watch!