Act 5 — Storytelling · Week 36 of 52
Characters in stories
Does every person in your story have behaviour, worldview and voice?
Populate one story with people the audience can picture.
The five moves
Same rhythm, every week.
1 — Study
One story that features at least four distinct people.
Watch on purpose. Specific comedians, specific reason.
2 — Deconstruct
Write each character's one defining behaviour.
Isolate one mechanism. Name it before you use it.
3 — Write
Rebuild your best story giving each person a tell.
10–25 premises minimum. Quantity buys quality.
4 — Perform
Perform it playing all of them.
Somewhere live. The classroom is useful; the audience is the laboratory.
5 — Review
Could a listener tell them apart with their eyes closed?
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?