Act 5 — Storytelling · Week 34 of 52
Start late
How much of your beginning is throat-clearing?
Delete the first 30 seconds of everything you tell.
Understatement & timing
Nate Bargatze
The five moves
Same rhythm, every week.
1 — Study
Openings of ten filmed stories.
Watch on purpose. Specific comedians, specific reason.
2 — Deconstruct
Find the first sentence that actually matters in each.
Isolate one mechanism. Name it before you use it.
3 — Write
Rewrite five of your stories starting one beat before the trouble.
10–25 premises minimum. Quantity buys quality.
4 — Perform
Tell one with no context whatsoever.
Somewhere live. The classroom is useful; the audience is the laboratory.
5 — Review
Did the room get lost, or lean in?
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?