Notes On: Ari Shaffir Stand Up Advice

    Ari Shaffir Stand Up Advice

   [Disclaimer: I don’t inherently agree with everything Ari has to say; nor do I endorse reading these notes over listening to the video. Go listen to the video, get the entire picture, and use this as refresher material whenever you feel necessary.]

·         Everyone gets famous or hits it big through their own different ways. Look at Reggie Watts – completely outside.

·         You really don’t need a manager.

·         An agent just gets you auditions (writing, personl, etc.).

·         A manager deals with you overall. I.e. if you’ve got an idea for a show, they’ll do their help.

·         Having a manager doesn’t necessarily makes you better. There are a lot of crappy managers.

·         Just the idea of needing one to have one – that’s not necessary.

·         Most of the work you’re going to get, you’ll get yourself.

·         Your manager’s never going to do anything – if you’ve got an idea for a show, you actually have to have done something with it. You have to have written stuff, and so on.

·         You need to be able to do the amount of time you’re booked for.

·         Writing tip – you should know 200-300% more than what you’re talking about.

·         At the beginning, you should build material for the sake of building material. To enjoy it.

·         Continue building material.

·         Once you have a joke that doesn’t apply to you any more – get rid of it.

·         Write a lot.

·         Nobody writes like open micers.

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

Psychoses, Stigma, and Facebook.

[Site redacted: I don't want to provide views or ad revenue to the test. It was one of the Facebook quiz sites that seem to be popular with 12-16 year olds and the 40+]

This is probably the most disrespectful test I've seen on Facebook.

1. The term "Psycho" is incredibly pejorative and insensitive to anyone who has ever had symptoms of psychosis.

2. Schizophrenia, schizophreniform disorder, major depressive disorder, bipolar disorder, schizoaffective disorder, brief psychotic disorder, delusional disorder, chronic hallucinatory psychosis, schiotypal disorder, paranoid personality disorder, schizoid personality disorder, borderline personality disorder, PTSD, induced delusional disorder, OCD and certain dissociative disorders (I.e. DID) have all been linked, in some cases, to psychoses. That's more than 12.

Blog Title

"To be, or not to be, that is the question. Whether 'tis nobler in the mind to suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, or to take arms against a sea of troubles."


"Alas, poor Yorick! I knew him, Horatio; a fellow of infinite jest, of most excellent fancy."


As an individual with bipolar disorder, and particularly more extreme depressive episodes, suicide has been a topic I have pondered substantially.


Maybe it's only fitting, then, that, just as Hamlet faced his own ideas about mortality to the skull of Yorick, and as David Foster Wallace wrote about suicide in his book "Infinite Jest", I can allow readers to see ideas about suicide also, alongside psychoses, hypomania, and plethora of other stuff.


In a similar vein, just as Yorick was a jester, I'm a comedian.

Also my name is Jesse.

There. That's the title of my blog explained. The book, Hamlet's reference to suicide, Yorick was a jester, and my name is Jesse. It's a four way pun.

It's also incredibly pretentious.

Pun-tentious.

- Jesse