Creating a Comic

Stand-up comedy is like any other skill: it takes practice, practice, and more practice to develop your talent. If you take time off, you’ll be a step behind when you take it back up.

When I take a few weeks off from jogging, I know that my first day back is going to be lousy, especially compared to my peak — and that I’m going to be a lot more sore than usual the next day. The same goes for stand-up, although the soreness the next day is more psychological than physical (unless you were so offensively bad that you got beat up after the show).

A few years ago I went jogging with one of my brothers, who had been a big runner in school. He hadn’t exercised for some months, though, whereas I had been running almost constantly for the previous two years. I was astonished that he was able to keep up with me so easily — in fact, he probably could have left me in his dust — and when I asked him how he was in such good shape, despite having taken so much time off, he shrugged modestly and said that he had built up a pretty good base.

Another kind of base: a Zerg base. Like
Andrew, I used to be a huge Starcraft nerd.

Since he had been running for years and years, often at a very high competitive level, his regression to the mean was still far, far beyond most people’s huffing and puffing and oxygen tanking and EMT calling and next of kin notifying. He couldn’t have set any personal records on that day, but he had built up his base for so long that he was easily able to pace me.

The same is true with any other skill: sports, musical instruments, writing, computer programming, academics — when was the last time you solved a quadratic equation? We used to do that shit on a daily basis, but these days you might just as well ask me to build a time machine that dispenses candy and blowjobs.

Anyway, I took about a month off from stand-up, and my first few appearances back have been rough. Last night, my third time back on stage this week, was the first to approach the comfort level I had when I left off. Since I’ve only been doing this for a year, my base isn’t very high, and certainly not high enough to take that much time away from the stage. Lesson learned. Time to keep building the base.

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