Creating a Comic

Today we’re going to stuff 100 people inside 100 barrels, and send them careening over Niagara Falls. Maybe they’re hecklers, but it’s not really important who they are.

How experts are made

Let’s say that sixty of them die for our little experiment, but forty of them live through the fall. We’ll fish these forty out of the water below, put them inside forty more barrels, and once again send them whizzing over the edge past the honeymooners.

This time, sixteen of the forty barrel-jumpers survive the plunge. Then we’ll keep repeating this experiment several more times, until only three people are left alive, by which time they’ve successfully lived through the ordeal eight times in a row.

These three people then go and write a book called How to Survive Niagara Falls In A Barrel. Does this book have any value? Is its advice worth paying any attention to? No matter how brilliant the advice may sound, the answer is obviously: no.¹

The Limits of Success

This is just another illustration, from a different angle, of yesterday’s point about criticism: advice should be judged on its own merits.

Just as we shouldn’t disregard criticism based solely on a critic’s questionable credentials, nor should we accept it uncritically from those who have achieved success. They certainly deserve a listen, by virtue of their success, but we still have to keep our own critical thinking faculties intact.

Even the smartest, most successful people in the world are sometimes misguided, ill-informed, or just plain wrong about the reasons for their own success. The mere fact of their accomplishments may blind them—and us—to the role that luck or other outside factors played in their success. This is normal; everyone tends to attribute their failures to bad luck and their successes to agency (e.g. their choices).

Successful people also tend to project their own experiences on those around them, prescribing a one-size-fits-all approach that might have only worked in their unique situation. For example, I’ve seen successful comedians offer critical advice to comics that basically boils down to: “act more like me.”

In some general cases, this is good advice, like in a discussion about overcoming pre-show butterflies. On the other hand, as in a discussion about delivery style, it ignores the fact that what works for them might be totally inappropriate for someone else. Everyone is different, and the road to success has an infinite number of variations.

Criticism is a gift, and can help light our way along that road. But it won’t help if we blindly accept or reject it based on our opinion of the critic.

Related entries in Creating a Comic:

• Accepting Criticism Graciously
• Preparing a Set List
• “How long have you been doing comedy?”
• Working new material into a stand-up set
• Gimmick Acts in Stand-Up Comedy
• Open Mic: First Timer Primer

1. I also learned during my corporate years that a lot of financial and stock-picking advice should be viewed with the same skepticism. [↩]

 — Posted by CJ under Creating a Comic. Please comment or trackback!