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

February 5, 2009 by vongsundara · 7 Comments 

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.

Filed under: Living, Performing
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