I want to write comedy and do more standup. I really do. Earlier this year, I was inspired by the open mic nights at Poetry Lounge, and gave it a try a few times. I even read some books about it, reached out to a professional standup coach, etc. Oh yeah, a lot of aspiring comedians have a coach. I don't think many people take this journey alone. You must have someone to bounce ideas off of because you can't know what hits until you try it.
It also takes an incredible amount of time and energy. You have no idea. All the famous comedians that you see on TV, on their Netflix or HBO specials - where they make it look totally improvised and seemless - every minute of that content took perhaps hours or weeks to craft from raw material that was collected over months or years based on lived experience, observation, or imagined situations, and had to be transcribed, analyzed, reworked, tested, workshopped, practiced and rehearsed...and it doesn't all work, so it's revised and polished again and again and again.
So, I watch a lot of standup comedy and quasi-standup comedy, like Bo Burnham: Inside (Netflix, 2021) special, which he filmed over the course of a year, all within one room, and it combines music, monologues and other weird shit.
Sometimes, I think I can do this, too. I want to do this. I have a lot of raw material I could draw from. I'm willing to bare my soul at the risk of flopping. I have no shame, but I want to be funny. I want to make painful stories from my life funny, so that people can laugh at them with me.
