I'm trying something kind of new with comedy this week; I'm sitting down and writing. I have the worst habits when it comes to writing, or I would if I actually wrote. I'm not saying others write for me, what I am saying is that when an idea pops in my head, I write it down, but I hardly ever "just" write. I brainstorm when driving and when at clubs, but when I'm at home I get distracted. Between episodes of Futurama and chores around the house, I get a little too distracted to write regularly.
New jokes are amazing. As a comic there is nothing more exciting and more scary than a new joke. They're like rollercoasters; it could be a lot of fun, but there's a chance you could be thrown from the car and horribly mangled or killed. Sometimes a joke won't work; it could be the wording, it could just be the joke or it could be the audience. Sometimes, one word can make or break a joke, sometimes it's how you stress certain parts, sometimes it's delivery. Some jokes that aren't "written funny" can be delivered in a way that works. Sometimes a joke just isn't funny, I remember some stuff I wrote in Minneapolis about driver's education classes, it never got great (any) laughs, even now I don't think they could be salvaged.
There is a bad side to new jokes, too. Getting new jokes means dropping old ones. And for me, that sucks because when you're only doing 5 minutes a week (if that) it gets hard to change up and "rotate" your jokes. I'm not saying I have a great voluminous library of jokes, but it gets hard to make sure that certain jokes don't go untold for too long. The solution is to go on stage as much as possible, and try to expand that 5 minutes into 10 or 15 or 20. The problem with that is apparently not all stage time is good time. I use to think it was, and at that point of the game, I think I was right. But now that I've gotten more "comfortable" on stage, I need to work on voicing my jokes. One of the guys at Westport quoted James Johann for me, "You do [crappy] clubs you become a [crappy] comic". I used to do a room called the Red Sea, which was terribly fun at the time, and it was a great chance for me to work on the wording of my jokes and memorize set orders and stuff like that; but the audience wasn't always, well, an audience. If I were to do the Red Sea nowadays, I am afraid that that-kind of vibe would alter how I deliver my set, and if done on a regular-enough basis, that 'change' might become the norm for how I work onstage.
I've read and reread this entry a half a dozen times to make sure it makes sence, and that I'm not completely full of it... (I usually have a disclaimer about how I don't know what I am talking about, I just say what makes sense to me)... The only thing I can come up with is; writing is fundamental to comedy; stage experience is essential to stand-up. Being a good writer allows one to arrange jokes in a communicable fashion, but having stage experience allows one to write in their "voice" and to deliver material that fits that person. The two appaerntly go hand in hand. There are way too many variables to keep track of in comedy, I guess the people who are best of it either keep control of said variables or don't consciously bother with them. The mere fact that so many variables exist makes comedy a science, but the creative way comedians handle comedy and crowds make them artists.
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Oh yeah, I wasn't on stage last night... The crowd seemed kidd of big, and I probably would have had fun... I'm working on turning smoe of my existing jokes into a poem; it may not be as funny as the jokes, but it's a fun excercise.