Ali Wong is Wrong About 1 Thing
If you’ve been to my introduction to Stand Up workshop, (aka Stand Up for Scaredy Cats,) you know that Ali Wong is my favorite comic. Sometimes I even “hear” her voice in my head when I think up my sets.
You can imagine how excited I was to get her book, Dear Girls for Christmas. Very quickly I was happily reading and lol’ing about her adventures and ideas until I got to the paragraph that reached out of the pages and slapped me:
“If you disregard my advice and pursue stand-up, please at least do not ever take one of those “(stand up comedy) courses.
The audiences for those stand-up comedy shows are family and friends of the students in the class…Those classes are a sham because they’re too safe and nobody will respect you if they ever learn you took them. Stand up is not supposed to be warm and fuzzy or welcoming. If it was, everyone would do it.”
Dear Girls p55-56
And I get it—it takes dozens of open mics of bombing to be able to win over audiences that are not your demographic. It takes years to hone your jokes and your comic voice and to get to know the scene and even then, you may never have the warm giggling glow of love that comes when an audience is filled with your friends and family.
So, it’s true.
DO NOT JUDGE YOUR FUTURE CAREER SUCCESS BY A GRADUATION SHOW.
If you want to be a professional comic, you have a long road ahead of you. So why not at least start with a set that you have experienced success with. You’re going to need a positive memory to shore you up against the tides of negativity you will face in the future.
And what if being a professional stand up comedian with a Netflix special and movie deal wasn’t your goal?
What if you just wanted to try something new? Something that would expand your vision of yourself and your stage presence?
WHAT IF YOU WANTED TO EXERCISE A LITTLE BIT OF MICROPHONE MUSCLE SO THAT YOU CAN DO WHAT YOU’RE REALLY HERE TO DO—GIVE WEDDING TOASTS, GIVE KEYNOTE SPEECHES, ASK STRANGERS OUT ON DATES!
After a six-week stand up workshop, a few people have decided that comedy is their future and they’re doing the weekly open mic battle. And some of them are going on into other forms of theater. And others just like knowing that they’ve done it and enjoy remembering performing their 5-minute set and feeling what it’s like to be heard and appreciated, if nothing else, for their bravery.
Ali Wong is right. Her daughters shouldn’t sign up for a stand up class. But I can tell you that there are a lot of people who are happy that they did. If one of them might be you, comment here or message me and let’s talk about finding your 5-minute set.