Act 4 — Discover your comedy DNA · Week 28 of 52
Your contradictions
What's the gap between who you claim to be and who you are?
Mine your own hypocrisy for a week.
The five moves
Same rhythm, every week.
1 — Study
Self-deprecating and confessional comics.
Watch on purpose. Specific comedians, specific reason.
2 — Deconstruct
Find 10 jokes built on a comic admitting a hypocrisy.
Isolate one mechanism. Name it before you use it.
3 — Write
List your ten contradictions. Write a premise for each.
10–25 premises minimum. Quantity buys quality.
4 — Perform
Perform the one that makes you most uncomfortable.
Somewhere live. The classroom is useful; the audience is the laboratory.
5 — Review
Did the audience like you more or less? (It's almost always more.)
Watch the tape. Log what the room did, not what you felt.
The Comedy Genome
Tag what made you laugh.
Tag every joke you studied this week. After a few months the pattern stops being an opinion and becomes your comedy DNA.
Your twin asks
Eleven questions, every week.
- What made you laugh this week?
- What did the audience laugh at?
- Where did you lose them?
- Which jokes feel most like you?
- What are you afraid to say?
- What's the funniest version of this?
- What would Pryor do with this?
- What would Carlin attack?
- What would Hedberg remove?
- What would Rock repeat?
- What would Bamford make uncomfortably specific?