Monday 22 September 2014

Notes On: Ralphie May's 100 Min Stand Up Advice Video.

If you're interested, this is the video. I would implore you to watch the video. You'll learn so much more for realising why these points are what they are, as opposed to just what they are. 
If you don't have time for an hour and forty minutes of tips though, this is the run down.


Ralphie May Tips



• Write every day
• If I spend 2 hours watching crap a day, that’s 730 hours in a year. That’s 730 hours you could have spent writing.
• If you want to do it, for the first 90 days, do 3 to 4 gigs a day every night of the week.
• You start to kind of get it after 8 years (I’d arguably say that in The UK, it’s impossible to do that even at a pro level, let alone as a new comer.)
• Have thick skin.
• Observe things that haven’t been observed before
• Q: Are you taking acting classes?
• Sometimes the best thing you can get out of a class (or a gig) is association with other comedians.
• Nobody’s ever been launched from a coffee shop. You get launched from comedy clubs. (not 100% sure if that’s true for the UK either)
• He got his 5, 8, 15, and 20 and consistently honed each – adding punchlines where there weren’t any. He got so good that they couldn’t ignore him.
• Young comics are too verbose. Go out and write your entire set, and take out every unnecessary word.
• Your number 1 joke is you closer. Second best joke is you opener. Express who you are in your first thirty seconds. People will like you or dislike you within less than thirty seconds.
• Smile when you’re telling a joke.
• Young comics are afraid of silence. Silence is great. It’s a great cheat.
• Right before the punch line, you pause, and the audience will hear that pause, and laugh, and then you hit them with the punchline.
• When you can’t write new material, work with what you got.
• A joke is never finished.
• If you don’t have a character, like you’re just you, know what you’re gonna wear. Hats are distractive. They cut off half your face. People get a lot of comedy from their eyes. Also cuts off all the crinkles you get in your story. A clean face denotes suspension of disbelief. A lot of female comics pull their hair back because it makes their act more believable.
• Don’t drink at the clubs. Don’t get high at the clubs. Don’t get drunk or high before your show.
• Promoters will like you more if they don’t have to give you an extra £10-£15 on beer. If you’re being paid £50 to do a show, you cost £50. If you’re being paid £50 to do a show and drink, they’re paying more, and they’ll remember you “costing” more.
• Don’t have sex with the staff. Ever.
• Everybody else is there to have a good time – the other people are there to do their job. If you’re in a corporate world, you don’t screw your secretary.
• (Story about a guy who made some mistakes with someone low down in the business, she ended up more or less running comedy in the city – he had to drop out of comedy for a few years.)
• You want those people to be your friends. Even if you think it’s a no strings attached/ whatever, it comes back to haunt you. When the staff is talking about how much they liked the comics, none of them are talking about you.
• If you have a relationship, and it’s not really fucking solid, comedy will take it away from you.
• Comedy is brutal on relationships, health, physique, everything.
• Ralphie May almost got dropped from a show because he was 650Lbs. The only way he could stay, he figured, is if he gets a standing ovation every show. He did.
• Apparently, if you go to a club, end up randomly doing a set because you were hanging out and there was a drop out, it happens all the time that an executive, or their secretary, or whatever, are in the audience. They’ll remember you.
• Ralphie May says he also does radio every chance he gets, and does the best jokes he has every time. He bombards them with jokes.
• Here’s why: a lot of comics are worried that if they do their best jokes, the people in the audience won’t laugh because they’ve heard your best jokes already.
• Who cares about the 300 people coming to the show, when the 300,000 are all gonna come and buy your jokes.
• Ralphie made a tonne of connections by selling weed, because he made himself indispensable and readily available, and he always did stuff for free.
• If you’re expecting money in comedy, you’re an idiot. Get out.
• Every one of you could be taking a commercial advert class, and do commercials. You get a couple of nationals, or whatever, and that moves you on. If you’re doing comedy in LA, get a job. And do the shows. (There’s a guy in the UK who got big in part due to being a very quirky character for a phone advert, I think.)
• Speak to comics at gigs, they will get you gigs.
• A lot of comics get mad at swearing / cussing. Once you learn to write dirty, you can never write clean. It never translates. Learn to write clean, because then you can write dirty. If you get a TV gig, what’re you going to do? Do your blowjob piece and move into anal? You have to have clean material.
• When you’re doing a show for comedy central, do you want half your act bleeped out?
• Do you want to lose 400,000 units because Walmart won’t sell your DVDs? (They don’t do dirty.)
• Do you want to get excluded from the (apparently massive) college circuit because you’re dirty?
• Don’t rip off other comics. Don’t rip off ideas or premises. When it comes back to you, it will be hell.
• The inference that you’re stealing material is enough to kill your career. In this business, you’re guilty when accused, and it’s your job to prove yourself innocent.
• Painters don’t paint so that other painters can say “wow that’s a good painting”.
• Try not to save the world. People don’t like being spoken down to. Be funny.
• When you write topical comedy, the jokes are great, but then they fall off. If you write topical, write the quintessential jokes on that material. Become the quintessential bit on that topic, because no other comic will touch it if it’s done perfectly.
• Every joke can be expanded on – e.g., have you done the opposite? If you’re pro something, answer the con too, it gets the people disagreeing with you on side.
Young comics look down and say “ah” too much.
• Don’t bring your notes on stage. Be a professional. Memorise your jokes. ** • Always deliver your punch to the centre of the room. Look stage left and stage right during the set up, so that by the time the punch comes, they’re all channeling their attention at you.
• Sheep go at two speeds: graze and stampede.
• Everyone’s got balls when they’re in a crowd. When you single them out…
• Ralphie May doesn’t do anything about his kids, because Cosby’s already done it all. Unless it’s about his specific kids, he can’t. George Carlin already did air ports, so when he did it, he did it as the fat guy.
• If you’re portraying a character, and you’re not willing to put the real words into the voice of that person, then you’re not going to be believable to that audience.
• Finding the bit where you don’t need to say anything to get the laugh.
• Sometimes you’re not going to do great. Even at his level.
• You’ve got to live, and you’ve got to have balls. Because you are going to fail.
• You learn more from bombing than you do from killing. You can never kill until you’ve bombed.
• You think grabbing the mic and starting to talk, and move the mic whilst you’re talking was taught?
• You have to learn that stuff.
• Every bird flies. Every now and then, a bird hits a window. They live through it, ruffle their feathers, get up, and carry on.
• If you have friends and work with them and you bust your ass, you’ll get somewhere.
• Don’t market yourself until you’ve got something to market.
• Taking acting classes definitely helped. Getting comfortable on stage helped, and being able to act out a joke as a second thought, definitely helps.
• If you bomb, you don’t have to scrap your bit. You have to work on it till it does work.
• Build up 3 6 minute sets, and have them as interchangeable, and work on them, and eventually that’s a twenty.
• Salesmen and politicians don’t have beards. It makes you look like you’re not telling the truth.
• If you’re playing a shy, nervous character – if you do that with a beard? Really creepy.
• (In reference to racist material) – if you tell the truth, no matter how bad it is, you’ll get a laugh.
• The stuff he talks about, it’s not from malice. A lot of white comics might get punched in the mouth for his material. But they don’t believe it. They don’t live it.
• Open yourself up to every audience. There’s funny to be found in it. It doesn’t matter if you’re in a room full of Hasidic Jews. Find the funny in it.
• You can make any joke clean, and make any joke dirty.
• “What do you want to be known as? A fat comedian, or a comedian who happens to be fat?”
• He dropped a tonne of stuff about being fat, and went right back to opening.
• Find your own success. There are so many paths to the top of the mountain.
Success isn’t defined by being on TV or making millions. Maybe it’s just making a living or having an outlet.
• He talks about how you can make $1200 a week by setting up 4 comedy nights and so on. Definitely does not translate to The UK.
• Ralphie May averages about 14 laughs a minute.
• Get everybody’s names correct. It’s disrespectful to you and to them to forget. There are people everywhere who will make your career in 5 to 10 years. Don’t give yourself any reason to fail.
• If the bar wants you to market drinks or X, Y, or Z, do it.
• Apparently British comedians are 20 years behind, and we’re all still doing set up punch jokes. I’d arguably say that’s not true. The British comedy scene is ever growing, we’re home (still) to the Edinburgh Fringe, and there’s a tonne of non-cable prime-time TV shows featuring stand ups.
• People can’t laugh when they’re inhaling – don’t shock ‘em that bad.
And that’s it. I wouldn’t say I agree with all of it, but most of it is great stuff. He’s not a public figure who has dominion on what comedy is and isn’t, and a lot of his talk about the industry could be argued separately, but if you take the things you disagree on with a pinch of salt, you could get somewhere.

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