Act 7 — Become the comedian · Week 50 of 52
Build your 15
Is this an arc, or fifteen minutes of stacked jokes?
Make fifteen minutes feel like it's going somewhere.
The five moves
Same rhythm, every week.
1 — Study
Fifteen-minute festival sets.
Watch on purpose. Specific comedians, specific reason.
2 — Deconstruct
Map where the set changes gear.
Isolate one mechanism. Name it before you use it.
3 — Write
Order your fifteen for movement, not just laugh size.
10–25 premises minimum. Quantity buys quality.
4 — Perform
Perform the full fifteen.
Somewhere live. The classroom is useful; the audience is the laboratory.
5 — Review
Where did the room's attention dip? Reorder, don't rewrite.
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?