How To Stand-Up Comedy: Margaret Cho in I’m The One That I Want, Review and Analysis

March 16, 2009 by vongsundara · Leave a Comment 

I’ll be examining the ins and outs of stand-up comedy in my new series of articles titled How To Stand-Up Comedy (and yes, I’m aware the title is grammatically incorrect).

For this opening article, I decided to dissect Margaret Cho’s first feature, I’m The One That I Want, to try and gauge what it is that makes Margaret Cho so damn successful and applying those elements to my own comedy.

I first saw I’m The One That I Want during its initial run through independent theatres across North America. I was instantly drawn to Margaret Cho’s brand of humour, as I was a huge fan of her network television show, All-American Girl. If you haven’t already seen “I’m The One That I Want,” then you need to go down to your local video store and rent it immediately. If it’s not at the major video stores then try the video store in the gay village, I guarantee they’ll have a copy.

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Dangers and rewards of taking a break from Toronto comedy shows

February 4, 2009 by vongsundara · 1 Comment 

Today was the first full day I’ve spent writing comedy in the past six months, and boy was it rough going. For all my hard work, I ended up with half a page of mostly unusable material. There may be a few reasons for this, though.

The first being that I decided to write about my sister and my life back in Winnipeg. I may actually have to shelve all my Winnipeg material for a while until I spend some good hard time in Winnipeg and get reacquainted with how life used to be for me.

The second reason could be that I’ve forgotten how to write. Now, I definitely don’t want to over-analyse it, as that could lead down to an even bigger mental roadblock, but I think six months is definitely enough time to forget some very important fundamentals of writing, especially comedy writing, especially when I was using techniques unique to myself since I combined my knowledge of comedy with my previous knowledge of classical narrative structure. It’s difficult to find that combination again after so long. So basically all the dangers I was worried about have come true. There are, however, some positive effects that I’m hoping will kick in shortly.

A part of my writing that I did purposely want to purge from my comedic style was my bitter viewpoint from my Calgary days. When I tried to write after moving to Toronto, I found my jokes were still too bitter, and it wasn’t the direction I wanted my comedy to take. This is a huge part of the reason why I wanted to absorb myself in Toronto life before writing any further. Considering that I couldn’t put anything on to paper at all, I would say that I have successfully purged my old viewpoints.

So here I am, starting with basically a blank slate. It’s both scary and exciting to think where my comedy will go from here. Don’t get me wrong, I am extremely proud of the writing I have accomplished in my year in Calgary, but now I’m in a totally different space emotionally. I’m going to workshop my material some more, but I should be ready to debut my new material in the next couple of weeks or so.

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Transfer of knowledge can take longer than expected in comedy

December 27, 2008 by vongsundara · Leave a Comment 

I’m learning to work in smaller chunks lately. I have a huge project right now in that I’m attempting to write a one-hour-long one-man show. The first step in doing this is to organize all of my notes, all 45 pages worth.

My writing style is to doodle down little notes whenever I feel inspired and then come back and collect those thoughts and flesh them out later. I think this method works in that I’m never having to sit down and try to come up with jokes from scratch. The unfortunate part is that I hae a huge backlog of material to go back and flesh out (or maybe that’s a good thing).

To write my one-hour show, I have to reorganize the material into different sections such as Work Life, Family Life, Gay Life and so on. This helps me write stories for each of the different parts of my life. The unfortunate part is that the job of transferring my random notes into an organized book has taken me almost half a year.

The task of organizing 45 pages of notes was so daunting that I spent much of that time procrastinating. Now, if I can’t even transfer notes, how am I supposed to actually write one hour’s worth of material? It finally came to me today: I have to write in smaller chunks.

Instead of looking at the full hour, I’ve got to write little five-minute chunks that can be later spliced together. I’ll have to then build some narrative structure in later. This will be somewhat difficult as it is reverse to how I normally write. I generally have a narrative skeleton that I then add the meat to as I go along.

I hope this works. I’m really excited today, though, because I am on page 35 of 45. I really, really hope I can finally get this huge monkey off my back so I can move forward with my writing.

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Business humour is difficult to grasp compared to stand-up comedy

December 23, 2008 by vongsundara · Leave a Comment 

So I’ve been in quite a few meetings lately for my day job, and I’m noticing that I’m having difficulty loosening up. In my comedy and around my friends, I’m quite loose, but in the world of Toronto business, I’m seen as quite business-like and somewhat boring too.

At first I thought it was just a case of me getting more comfortable, but now I think there’s an actual divide in humour. The humour I bring to stage is not exactly appropriate for office chatter, and the “business” humour is so far removed from what I find funny that I have difficulty relating.

A co-worker of mine today said it came down to just being more fake. I don’t completely agree. Sure, I certainly laugh along with whatever’s being said, which I suppose is being fake a bit, but I don’t think the business people making the jokes are being fake. I think they genuinely find what they’re saying to be funny.

There’s not much I can do except hope that the humour eventually rubs off on me. Humour is a good way to be disarming and to relate to people quickly. Hopefully I can learn this new style of humour before too long.

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