According to some people, the formula for success in comedy is to take a bunch of classes and slavishly follow the dictates of a comedy "guru" who takes your money and lays down laws about what to do and what works and doesn't work when moving up the long, long ladder to success. The common wisdom among these "gurus" is that it takes 10 years of dues-paying to make it in comedy.
The truth is, there is no formula. Look at people like Freddie Prinze and Pauly Shore, two people who came at comedy from different directions and made it BIG. Prinz was "discovered" after just a short time playing in clubs and instantly became a star, far outstripping most of his contemporaries. Shore came at it through a show biz family and had a much easier time than most. Not everyone is a Prinze or Shore, but the point is that everyone's story is different. Look at Andy Kaufman. He made it big in comedy while disdaining the term "comic" being applied to him. He referred to himself as a "song-and-dance man", a performance artist. But in the popular perception, he was a comic. These and other comics, notably Steve Martin, who was also something of a performance artist, didn't follow the formula. The best ones don't. They blaze their own trails.
Don't get me wrong. There are a lot of good teachers out there who don't hold their students back, who encourage them to get out there on stage and learn from experience. But it's hard to tell the ducks from the decoys sometimes. Unfortunately, there are a lot of flim-flammers who line their pockets by conning eager young people, too insecure to find their own path, into buying into the 10-years-to-success formula. You can tell them because they will refer to anyone who doesn't have their vast experience as "rank beginners." Unfortunately, some of these people are a pipeline to bookers and agents in the field. Young people are forced to kowtow to these people in order to get to the agents and bookers. It's a nasty business. Turn the other cheek is the watchword when someone who wields a little power speaks.
Fortunately, many of the club owners will give a young comic a break and put him/her in a showcase where agents or bookers can see them. But the flim-flam men have a vested interest in telling their naive students that they are "not ready" for a showcase, so they'd better not get up there and embarrass themselves. It means they can keep them coming back for classes.
With a little more than two years experience, I'm fairly new at comedy; a 70-year-old man who ends each of his sets with: "Remember my name, the next time you see it, it's gonna be right up there at the top of the obituary page." Those are the words I live by these days.My time here is short. I refuse to play the game. I have very little to lose and so I can say and do things that younger people had better not do or say if they know what's good for their careers in comedy.
The average life span of an American male is 73 years. I've got to get my ass in gear. I don't have 10 years to be putzing around. I've read every book, watched every comedy special on TV, and listened to every interview with successful comics that I can get my hands on. There is more material out there than one can absorb in a lifetime. But the thing is, you can get everything you need to know about how to succeed in comedy by reading books about comedy, watching both amateur and veteran performers do their thing. and above all, by getting up on stage and making people laugh.
I don't expect to have a long, long career in comedy and so I'll take the lumps for the dozens of comics I see every night out there in the clubs doing open mics for free, honing their art, and hoping that some day they too will make it in comedy. I don't expect anyone to follow my example. I'm just saying, watch out for the flim-flam man.
