AN ASSESSMENT OF STAND-UP COMEDY INSTRUCTORS
PART TWO
Article Written By Greg Dean
In my previous article, An Assessment of Stand-Up Comedy Instructors - Part One, I gave a brief explanation of how the end of the comedy boom of the 80's and early 90's created the stand-up instructor's market with two major groups of instructors: Comic-Turned-Instructor and Club Owner/Booker-Turned-Instructor. I showed how each type of instructor has several weaknesses and strengths depending on what one wants from a workshop. I concluded with the proclamation that teachers need to be taught how to teach as a way of presenting the necessity for a stand-up comedy curriculum.
This article, An Assessment of Stand-Up Comedy Instructors - Part Two , is dedicated to exploring two different approaches to teaching stand-up comedy: Opinion-Based Instruction and Technique-Based Instruction . Opinion-Based Instruction is founded on the instructor's sense of humor, personal preferences and what the instructor thinks is funny or acceptable; Technique-Based Instruction is founded on a curriculum of fundamental principles and skills the students learn and apply to their own style of being funny. These two approaches are diametrically opposed ways of teaching and are discussed in terms of their effect on stand-up comedy students.
· Opinion-Based Instruction Is Inconsistent
Since all comedy instructors have radically different senses of humor, it naturally follows that their opinions about what is funny will be inconsistent, if not outright contradictory. Instructors who give their opinions in place of techniques create confusion in their students because the students then become faced with the dilemma of figuring out which of the conflicting opinions is correct.
For instance, if two instructors tell a student which jokes the instructor thinks are funny and which ones they think are not funny, what happens when the opinions of the two instructors disagree? Which instructor is right? The answer is neither. Students need to keep in mind that an instructor's opinion about what is funny is only that one person's opinion, and that opinion is no better or worse than anyone else's opinion on this planet. This inconsistent information can frustrate students and discourage them from continuing to study stand-up comedy.
The purpose of teaching comedy techniques is to remove the instructor's opinions about what is funny or acceptable from the process, and to replace them with consistent fundamental techniques of writing and performing. If the technique is truly a comedy fundamental it will always be true. Therefore, teaching techniques creates clarity when a reoccurring problem arises because the instructor can offer a consistent solution.
For instance, I teach the joke structure fundamental that all jokes shatter an assumption . Then, when students ask me if a joke is funny, I answer by asking, "What assumption is shattered by your punch?" This keeps my opinion out of the equation and puts the responsibility back on the students to determine if the joke is properly structured. No one can tell if a joke is funny until it is performed for a particular audience. The technique-based approach to instruction allows the students to trust their sense of humor and learn a series of tools they can apply throughout their comedy career.
When an instructor offers an opinion, this is what is really being said: "If I were to do that, this is how I would do it." Since students usually wish to please an instructor, they will negate their own comedy instincts to defer to the instructor's advice. Soon the students no longer trust their own comedic judgment, but instead become dependent on the instructor's opinion. This approach creates clones of the instructor as the students stop seeking their own comic voice and adopt the instructor's.
The reason for teaching fundamental techniques is so that students can learn and apply these techniques to their individual senses of humor. When my students experiment with these techniques, I am always amazed at the originality of some of their material. After showcases, I often have an audience member congratulate me, "They were all so different. How do you do that?" The answer is: technique. Comedy instructors need to get their sense of humor and style preferences out of the way and allow the students to create their own.
For instance, here is a principle I teach my students to help them find their individual comic voice: Style=Honesty. I encourage them to be blatantly honest about their personal judgments about their topic. These judgments are expressed as opinions and emotions in the performance. The audience gets to know the comic's beliefs and values when the comic expresses his or her opinions and emotions. The more honest a student is about a subject, the more individual their comic voice.
· Opinion-Based Instruction Is a Form of Censorship
Comedy instructors practice creative censorship when they state their own opinions about what they find offensive or inoffensive, what they think is funny or unfunny, or what the student can or cannot do in their show. Some instructors go so far as to list the topics students cannot address in the workshop. (By the way, I do support the right of the instructors to do this—even though I don't agree with the practice—because it is the instructors' business, after all and they do have the right to set the rules of conduct. As the student, however, you get to vote on this practice by taking or not taking the class.) I firmly believe censorship restricts the student's creative horizons. Students shouldn't be restricted to the topics the instructors agree with or find inoffensive. The irony is that those "offensive" topics might be infantile bodily function jokes, or might even be the basis for a unique comedic perspective. The students, not the instructors, should make these decisions.
An even more subtle form of censorship is how instructors pass on their own personal limitations. This is not a malicious act, but an unconscious one with good, but misguided intentions. You will see what I mean if you attend several of an instructors' classes. You'll quickly observe that the instructors who are primarily writers are turning out students who are primarily writers. The instructors who are one-liner comics are turning out students who are one-liner comics. Without a curriculum, instructors will impose their own likes, beliefs and values because they can only teach what they know. And what they know is being themselves.
Since Lenny Bruce, stand-up comedy has had a history of being at the forefront of pushing socially acceptable boundaries. As I have asserted, I believe that the purpose of technique-based instruction is to get the instructor's personal taste and limitations—and therefore censorship—out of the classroom. When students are encouraged to freely experiment with finding their own comic-voices, I've discovered that they will come up with a variety of uniquely funny ideas. Some of these ideas are offensive, some are ingenious, and as I mentioned earlier, I believe students must learn to discern the parameters of these matters for themselves. After all, it is the student not the teacher that is up on stage holding the microphone or sitting at the pad of paper holding the pen. Therefore, the stand-up comedy classroom-environment needs to be a safe place where students can feel free to present and test all ideas without the teacher's instant condemnation about the nature of their content.
If the material is offensive, I want it in my classroom for three primary reasons: 1) the students can get feedback about how offensive it is before presenting it publicly, 2) a fix can be suggested that will remove the offensive aspect so the funny concept can emerge, and 3) the students can realize that it is offensive and decide to perform it anyway and prepare themselves to deal with the audience's response and practice making that funny. For these reasons, I truly believe a Sam Kinison or an Andrew "Dice" Clay could have developed in my workshops because they would have had the support and freedom to push the comic envelope.
Even though my students openly exercise their constitutional right to freedom of speech, I do draw one line of unacceptable conduct. I do not allow personal threats or attacks that indicate a clear and present danger. That is to say, freedom of speech ends when someone endangers others or incites violence toward others. This is stand-up comedy, not the World Wrestling Federation. Short of that, the sky's the limit.
· Opinion-Based Instruction Creates Teacher-Dependent Students
Allowing the students to become dependent on the teacher to write, edit, routine and/or approve their shows is the most egregious long term effect of opinion-based instruction. The problem arises when the students leave the classroom and need to put together another show on their own. If the instructor has done much of the work for the students, they won't have the opportunity to struggle through the trial and error process of learning to write, edit, and routine for themselves. To complicate matters, the students often blame themselves and believe they are untalented or didn't learn anything in the class—where in fact, the fault lies with the instructors, because they didn't teach anything. People rarely learn by watching others perform a task; rather, they learn best by doing that task for themselves.
· Technique-Based Instruction Creates Teacher-Independent Students
The purpose of creating a curriculum is to teach a consistent set of principles and techniques. To truly learn, the students must apply and practice these principles and techniques until they become competent with these skills. Ultimately, this produces students that are so capable that they no longer need the instructor.
For instance, the process of ordering a routine can be a perplexing dilemma for students, the first couple of times. To assist the students, I teach the technique of B, C, A . This is to say, I suggest that they open their routine with their B material, put their C material in the middle, and close with their A material. With this guideline, the students can experiment and eventually figure out for themselves how to order a routine. Once they've done it for themselves, this technique gives them the confidence to do it on their own the next time they need to order their routine. This approach creates students who can function independently of the instructor. After all, isn't this the whole point of teaching?
In Conclusion
In the first part of this article, I discussed the two different types of comedy instructors: Comic-Turned-Instructor and Club Owner/Booker-Turned-Instructor. In this second part, I showed the two contrasting teaching approaches: Opinion-Based Instruction and Technique-Based Instruction as a way of illustrating the differences in stand-up comedy workshops. Depending on what you want from a workshop, this information should help you decide what kind of instructor and what kind of approach best suit your needs.
