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My first new stand-up comedy routine in six months almost ready

February 5, 2009 by vongsundara

Today I was able to overcome my short writer’s block from yesterday to put together a really solid stand-up comedy set that I’m really excited to debut. As I mentioned yesterday, I decided to write about my sister, as I feel the best and most balanced comedy version of me to present on stage is the one that is brought out when I hang out with my sister Anne.

Yesterday I tried my best to write but ended up with nothing more than half-page of unusable nonsense. I suppose I should have expected it after not writing for half a year. It took me until about four hours into my writing process today that it finally all clicked.

You see, I have a unique way of writing which doesn’t really follow the usual rules of comedy writing: set-up, punchline, tag, tag, tag. My style doesn’t completely follow classical literary narrative structure either, though I do try to work that in. When I first started writing comedy a couple of years back, I was able to develop a unique style that worked for the way that I think, which tends to be a little differently. Yesterday I completely forgot what the style was.

I started out by trying to speak the words and form my routine off of that. When that failed miserably, I tried more traditional free-form writing. I don’t know why it finally clicked later on, but boy am I happy that it did. I won’t go into detail over how I write (sorry, I have to keep some things secret still).

After getting together a rough draft composed of about ten short lines of text, I then tried sounding out the routine to my roommate and improvised a lot of it. Now I have to go back and write down some of the new ideas that came during the spoken improvisation.

I’ve submitted for time at a bunch of the open mics in town, so hopefully you’ll be seeing this new routine very shortly.

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4457 Responses2009-02-06+03%3A12%3A41vongsundara to “My first new stand-up comedy routine in six months almost ready”

Kyle on June 19th, 2009 8:00 PM

Hey! While procrastinating instead of getting my first 5 minutes of standup done, I accidentally googled across your blog.
I have a question for you. When you were writing your very first standup set, did you go onstage loathing what you wrote, or were you sAtisfied with what you wrote? I’m anxious to get on stage and try my stuff out, but I reAlly wanna do my best.
Anyways, I ramble. When did you know you were reAdy to go?
vongsundara on June 20th, 2009 3:22 AM

I was definitely nervous to be performing my first bit of material. My first performance actually ran almost 15 minutes, believe it or not. I definitely didn't loathe what I wrote. I was more focused on delivering the material as best as I could. I believed in the material I wrote and was more worried about the performance itself.

Just keep in mind for your first performance that it's more important to take in the experience. Your material doesn't have to be perfect at all, just get up there and gain as much experience as you can.
efsdfewa on August 22nd, 2009 5:18 PM

where do u perform on your first time…?
kyle on September 13th, 2009 5:37 PM

good advice. thanks!
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