Are Comedy Workshops Useless?
Sunday, November 06, 2011
If you listen to most established comedians talk about comedy workshops, they'll usually be kind of derisive. Most, if not all, of the most successful comedians have never been to one. It's not hard to imagine why they would mock comedy workshops when not only have they themselves gone from zero to celebrity by pulling themselves up by their own bootstraps, but so has every one else in their peer group.
They just had it, that undefinable quality of being funny. They didn't need to learn it, and can't necessarily bottle it to pass on to others. It seems to follow, then, that being funny isn't something that can be taught or obtained. You either got it your you don't.
Which sets comedy apart from a lot of endeavours, like learning carpentry, or how to play guitar, or studying math. In every case, I think everyone would agree that with those skills, and many others like them, not only do you gain from being taught, you almost necessarily have to be taught.
The difference is in the degree of success you want. A teacher can teach you how to play guitar, but no teacher can guarantee to make you a rock star.
Is comedy an entirely different beast than that? Is it ordained from above who is funny at birth, and that's the end of the story.
At first glance, it seems to be so. While a guitar teacher can concretely show you how to play chords which will definitely become a part of your future awesome rock power ballad, a comedy teacher can't give you anything as easily definable that will definitely become a part of your future one hour special on cable TV.
Can a comedy teacher give you anything worth having?
To answer that, I have to propose something that I feel is axiomatic about comedy, which I could explain completely, but it would take a book to do so. Until my book gets published , just roll with me on this.
My premise is that comedy is all about a relationship with the audience. Being funny isn't an on or off skill. No comedian can guarantee to be funny for all audiences, and no audience can be guaranteed to laugh at any comedian. Funniness happens when the right conditions exist so that you have a comedian and audience that can relate to each other. Laughter happens in a complicated interplay between the audience and comedian which the professional comedian aspires to be in control of.
And like all relationships, you have to be in it to get good at it.
Think of it this way - you can't go to a workshop on marriage and learn how to be a perfect spouse and then get married and from day one of your honeymoon live happily ever after.
Why not? Because even if you spent your whole life in some far off Tibetan monastery perfecting ancient techniques for executing the perfect marriage, there is one hugely important variable you can never fully control: the other person in the relationship.
To learn about how best to interact with that other person, you need to be with them, to learn about them, and to grow with them.
With comedy, that other person is the audience. Not any one individual audience member, or even the collected total of all the individuals. You don't need to get to know them personally in order to make them laugh. You do, however, need to get used to how the audience behaves as a group. You need to learn how to shape an audience from a collection of individuals into a unit that laughs together.
In terms of the variability, it's much more difficult than the interpersonal relationships you have in your life, because an audience is always made up of a different mix of people, most of whom you have never seen before and won't see again.
Still, within that variability, there are certain aspects that define them as a group, and you must relate to that group entity, the audience.
Just like the marriage, you have to get to know that entity by being with them and coming to terms with them. That takes time, exposure, and effort.
This is why most comedians and people advise that there is no way to learn comedy, and you only get good at it by doing it.
However, while that belief is widespread, I don't think it's the case that there is nothing that can be taught or learned about doing comedy.
Just like it's not the case that there's nothing that can be taught or learned about marriage.
The point is that it's about your expectations. There is good advice about marriage out there. There's a hell of a lot more shit advice about marriage, but still, there is good advice. Mostly about how to have open communication with your spouse, and what changes to expect when there are kids, and that sort of thing. None of it will make you a perfect spouse, but a lot of it can help you avoid a lot of unnecessary problems which will improve your marriage at least a little.
And so it goes with learning comedy. No workshop can promise to make you an awesome comedian who can go out and kill at every performance. If you see a workshop or seminar that promises anything about results, then avoid that workshop. It's for the teacher, not the student.
However, since as a comedian you're about to go out and put a fuck of a lot of work into making yourself into an awesome comedian who can kill at every performance, you could stand to get some tips that will help guide that journey.
I personally feel that the kind of information you need can be accomplished in a very short period of time, though there can't be any rule on what is too much learning. The danger is only that you might fall into the trap of feeling like you need to know more, to find that piece of learning that will help you put it all into place. I've seen many people obsessed with trying to learn stand up as a concept in place of learning by experience.
I'm biased, of course, in that I teach the occasional workshop. So maybe everything I've said above is just bullshit in support of my own ambitions. If you think so, and don't want to go to any workshops at all, then I'd support that. Get on stage and get in there. Learn from your own mistakes. The bottom line is that workshops aren't useless, they're just not necessary.
If you want to learn a little from other people's mistakes, just to get a little forward, then go to a workshop. Maybe mine. Just like you might want to crack the book on marriage if you thought maybe you were missing a point or two, or ask a friend who had been married for a lot longer than you.
The one thing you definitely should not do, though, is go to any workshop promising to make you a successful comedian. You can be shown the mountain, but you have to climb it yourself.
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