What does doing comedy teach you?
Getting specific about transferable skills
Having written last week about moving away from stand-up, I wanted to take a closer look at what my experiences doing it have taught me. It’s common, when discussing arts pursuits, to claim they lead to ‘transferrable skills’, but let’s get a little more precise about that here; after twenty years performing comedy in various contexts, which skills from it have been applicable to the rest of my life?
Firstly, an important note. Learning to do comedy is not the same as learning to be a funny person. Most people who’ve spent time with comedians will have observed that they are often a notably serious bunch, as befits people who bind up their entire self-worth with the assessment of short periods of speech on highly specific grounds. This does ease off a little further up the comedy ladder as acts overcome their initial status anxieties – but they’re still generally remain a super professional, hyper-focused bunch. You can certainly learn through doing comedy more of the mechanics of eliciting laughter, and tricks to help you do so, but that’s different from cultivating a humorous and amused outlook on life.
The main skill that comedians learn is, it seems obvious, public speaking. As Bill Hicks observed, comedians are the only people you pay to listen to. Of course, public speaking is a manifestation of possessing confidence, although there are plenty of comedians who deploy their own apparent lack of assertiveness to good effect; there is a kind of sly confidence in that too. Above all, comedy is an education in using your voice; it teaches you to exploit cadence, to vary your tone, to gain the audience’s attention by dropping your volume to a whisper, and how to use a microphone. It also teaches you how important the order information is placed in is to the reception of that information, and in my experience sees you sharpen up your communication skills more generally. It also teaches you about linguistic economy, that the inclusion of one word or another makes a difference in the reception of an utterance, even if you’re not quite sure why. And when you find the right order for a delivery you stick to it. It’s not a surprise that several recent comedians have made careers as politicians; they’re used to staying on message.
A further skill comedy teaches you is event management. I often find discussions about ideological diversity in comedy a little specious, as they are usually bereft of the element of class, and a key feature of stand-up comedy, as a poor person’s art, is that the entry barriers are lower than in other art forms. You don’t need a grant, or a press release, or extensive formal training: You just need the backroom of a bar and a free weekday night. (In my experience, Thursdays are best, as people are ready to go out, but not yet to ‘go large’, and comedy fits into that ‘two pints and the bus’ space nicely). All this means that many comedians become proficient in organizing, booking and running events.
I learnt my trade as a stand-up in Berlin, a city with a proudly DIY arts mentality, and we brocaded together a booming comedy scene out of small bars and art spaces in order to get ourselves the stage time we needed. We didn’t wait for the permission from the comedy industry – we made it ourselves. That the capital of the UK is now so expensive for artists to live in certainly limits the opportunity for young comics to do similarly here, but I am confident that wherever there are cheaper rents and spaces available comics will be doing it for themselves. If central London does significantly decline post-pandemic, comedians will pop up in its deserted places like knotweed. Anyway, no-one who has run comedy nights should have qualms about applying for event organizer roles.
Following on from this, comedy makes people entrepreneurial. Discussions about ‘left-wing and right-wing’ comedy further miss the point due to the innate self-employed hustle intrinsic to comedy; whatever their personal politics, a comic has to conduct themselves like an aggressive small businessperson. This means applying to gigs, developing promotional material, and cultivating relationships with promoters. Increasingly, it also means learning to present yourself on social media, particularly with audiovisual content, with the caveat that these days social media can pretty decisively scupper a comedian’s career, or at least determine its trajectory, before it has even really begun. All this leaves comedians well-suited to communication and audience development roles.
There are also more philosophical benefits to doing comedy, and one springs to mind as having been particularly valuable to me: Comedy teaches you to deal with failure. I have many memories of performing comedy at the real sharp end: Doing gigs to homeless people in Berlin only there to keep warm, saying ‘Should I start again?’ after finally getting a laugh and receiving a curt ‘Don’t bother’ from the audience and, as a personal favourite, MCing a room when a woman entered and, looking at me, said, ‘That is the least interesting man I’ve ever seen’, before again walking out. Comedy teaches you to deal with failure in a really raw, almost primordial way, and one that does perhaps decrease your tolerance for the little Mikey Microaggressions and ‘Literal Violence’ Lisas of the social media age. If words are literal violence, many comedians would have ‘cause of death: heckle’ on their death certificate. Of course, the honesty of comedy failure can actually be a hindrance in dealing with other forms of professional disappointment, as comedy offers you such a clear and quantifiable metric to gauge your shortcomings, as opposed to other forms where the rejection may come in the form of an empty bromide (‘We thank you for your submission…’) Relatedly, another benefit of comedy is that it usually allows you to quickly pick yourself up off of the floor and have another go.
Comedy also teaches you that less is more, but we don’t need to go into that.
Finally, and this is I think the core lesson, comedy teaches you to go with the flow. You can prepare your set beautifully, rehearsing until the words are blunt in your mouth, and you will still get less laughs on the night than the audience member on the night who happens to have a funny name. That is a crucial lesson in the contingency and arbitrariness of things, and perhaps it takes the most controlled art form, performed by the biggest control freaks, to impart this lesson – in the same way that any art form ultimately confronts its own limits, the way literature, music and visual arts finally become as much about what words, sounds and images can’t do. And if you become adaptive to these, to borrow a phrase, limits of control, you may well be more prepared to deal with the more unexpected elements of life, and even, where possible, deal better with them.
I could, I’m sure, have learnt these lessons elsewhere, but I learnt them doing comedy. What has your profession taught you?
A lot to digest here, James.
First, comedy is an art form. Essentially, like other art forms, you are touching someone emotionally ... in this case, the "funny bone" trigger. And there are so many types of "funny." There's the laugh-out-loud funny, the bemused funny, the thought-provoking cleverness form, the offensive ("I shouldn't be laughing, but ..." form), etc. Where does, say, Jonathan Swift lie in this taxonomy? The Marx Brothers? Lucille Ball? Bill Hicks? Bill Burr?
2. Linguistic economy. There's gold in this lesson to the comic. In fact, this is something writers of all forms should strive towards. Economy, or "cutting the fat" begets clarity, and clarity is paramount in any kind of communication.
3. Critical thinking ... both on the part of the performer and the audience. Your timing is an essential element in the process. You have a clever twist on a topic, but the distance between your timing and allowing the audience to catch on or catch up is crucial, I'm sure. That moment of silence between your line and the audience response I suppose is the difference between killing and bombing.
4. Failure. Everyone needs to fail before achieving success regardless of what they do.
5. An aside. Can you provide your definition of "fearless?" Because I find a lot of nobility in the comic's courage to take on dangerous topics. To that end, I always admired Patrice O'Neal (R.I.P.)
-- Jim