Jim's online tutorials
are just samples based on his home study program. Have they whetted your appetite?
Ready for the real deal? Eager to get started? No problem: the full home
study version is available now: covers topics far beyond Jim's ambitions
for this web site:
Note: highlighted
tutorials are web pages: functioning as bare-bones introductions to topics
(more detail and depth is now available in Jim's home study versions).
Fundamentals
of Stand-Up Comedy
Writing basics:
Performing basics:
Intermediate
Stand-Up Comedy
Intermediate writing:
formats
Intermediate performing:
acting
- Acting for Comics
and Speakers
- Choreographing
the Joke: learning how to move around the club stage or speaker's platform,
aesthetics that affect the audience emotionally
Intermediate performing:
character
- Narrative Character
(your stage persona)
-
How
to Create Funny Characters--a character may complex, hip, warm and wonderful.
But your character will never gain high visibility unless it can be easily caricatured
- Making the Audience
Like You a Lot
Advanced Stand-Up
Comedy
Advanced writing:
Premise Routines
- Ideal
- Simple: Classic
Tirade Routine
Complex Premise Routines
- Observations Routine
- Relationship Satire
Routine
- Wit Routine
- Humor Routine
- Three Dimensional
Premise
- Two Situation
Premise
Post-Graduate
School of Stand-Up Comedy
Post graduate school:
the Act to Sell Your Act:
- "Business" Side
of Show Business--marketing your character locally, nationally and internationally
- For a fast overview,
see Jim's example of a quickie approach to interviews at the Fundamentals
level using only the 7 basic joke forms:
Selling
Yourself During Media Interviews by: Newspapers, Radio & TV
Interviews at the
advanced level would involve both cross-roasting and premise routines. Contemporary
examples will be updated on a separate web page, available to current clients
with password accounts.
Sample update
to my home study materials, kinda hints you'll keep finding on this web site:
Wit vs. Humor
Three movies of Humphrey
Bogart provide a quick and easy illustration of "wit" and "humor," two very different
sides of the comedy coin. Fortunately, all three Bogey flicks are available in
video stores and are often played on TV. In fact, (12/97)Turner Classic Movies
showed the entire trio. I will list the titles in their sequence, which is at
once both chronological (year released) and evolutionary (aesthetically speaking):
- "The Maltese
Falcon" (1941)
--Bogey as witty detective;
director: John Huston
- "The Big
Sleep" (1945)
--Bogey as humorous detective;
director: Howard Hawks
- "In a Lonely
Place" (1950)
--Bogey as a screenwriter,
alternately witty and humorous;
director: Nicholas Ray
Most media and other
folks use the terms "wit" and "humor" interchangeably. Dumb, dumb, dumb.
You
will find a further discussion of wit vs. humor, and how it is central to any
legitimate understanding of comedy in Jim's home study
materials.
Which of all the subjects
listed on this page would you like me to tackle next?
Let Jim hear from you.
tempadd
Copyright © 1997-2009
