Course Description and Overview

This course will offer a specific look at the art of Stand Up Comedy and serve as a laboratory for
creating original stand-up material: jokes, bits, chunks, sets while discovering your truth and your
voice. Students will practice bringing themselves to the stage with complete abandon and
unashamed commitment to their own, unique sense of humor. We will explore the “rules” that
facilitate a healthy stand up dynamic and draw on anything and everything for our work in class,
ultimately delighting in the human connection through comedy.

Learning Objectives
By the end of the course, the student will have embodied and integrated the various components
of stand up comedy in a live performance in front of a comedy club audience. The creative,
physical, and academic ‘strands’ of study will come together for a final assessment. The final
assessment will be students doing their own 2-3 min standup set. 

Week 1: The Art and Structure of Telling Jokes, Creating a Persona. Using Your Environment. 
Week 2: How To Read the Audience. Improv Jokes. Class Project: Each student to do 2 -3 min set. 

Format: This will be interactive and will include slides, class participation,  and age-appropriate videos. 

Proposed Objectives
• Get familiar with a comic’s tools: notebook, mic and stand, “the light”, recording device
• Practice the basic stages of stand up: write, “get up”, record, evaluate, re-write, get back up
• Learn how to write for stand up comedy
• Examine elements of a joke: set up, punch, tags, toppers, callbacks
• Develop jokes, bits, chunks, sets, ultimately creating your act
• Take the stage with confidence, flexibility and a sense of play
• Develop an awareness of audience feedback using sight and sound
• Improvise in the moment, utilize crowd work, handle heckling, edit on the spot
• Review what works and why, what does not work and why
• Participate in constant, constructive evaluation of work
• Listen to and critique recordings, re-write material as needed, adding tags, adjusting order,
cutting, etc.
• Investigate the concept of “writing onstage” vs. taking the stage with a set script
• Build a strong sense of your own point of view
• Explore your own stand up persona using physicality, personality, voice, repetition of themes,
tempo, speech patterns, etc.
• Distinguish between persona and character
• Create a strong, broad, physical and vocal rage
• Experience being an active listener, offering “pitches” and support
• View and discuss the history, style and contributions of seminal artists
• Learn to identify style, structure, point of view, and persona in the work we admire
• Produce a showcase of work