Act 5 — Storytelling · Week 40 of 52
The 10-minute story
Can you hold a room for ten minutes on one story?
Earn ten minutes of attention with one true story.
Escalation & the turn
Bill Burr
The five moves
Same rhythm, every week.
1 — Study
Three ten-minute pieces.
Watch on purpose. Specific comedians, specific reason.
2 — Deconstruct
Map laugh spacing across all ten minutes.
Isolate one mechanism. Name it before you use it.
3 — Write
Build your one killer ten-minute story.
10–25 premises minimum. Quantity buys quality.
4 — Perform
Perform it in full, twice, in different rooms.
Somewhere live. The classroom is useful; the audience is the laboratory.
5 — Review
Compare the two tapes. Keep what worked both nights.
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?