A Director’s Guide to the Art of Stand-up

Why Comedians Aren't Lone Rangers (Comedy Resources #3)

When I first started stand-up, I kinda bought into a common myth that, up on stage, it was just me, my thoughts, and a light. No help and no collaborators, just me, running on pure instinct and raw talent. Like many, I pictured myself as a lone creative, mic in hand, conjuring jokes and truth and laughter out of thin air. That illusion lasted until I stepped on stage, bombed some jokes in front of a half-full open mic crowd, and they sat there staring at me.

Chris Head’s book, A Director’s Guide to the Art of Stand-up, has further blasted that myth wide open for me. It’s a work that doesn’t just teach technique, it teaches comedians how to see the entire process differently. Like, completely differently. Stand-up comedy isn’t a solo flight. Comedians aren’t islands. Stand-up is actually something built through collaboration, feedback, persona, and a little bit of suffering. Or, a lot. And, as any good stand-up comedian knows, what seems spontaneous on stage is often the product of rigorous architecture and repeated failure, many hours of practice, of trial and error. And in his book, Head doesn’t just say all this politely, he hands readers the tools to see their act the way a director would.

One of the book’s claims is that a comedian’s stand-up persona isn’t just a comedian being themself. A comedian’s persona is the comedian playing a character called “You.” That character is curated, heightened, and framed just enough to be consistent but not predictable. The idea is that, once a comedian understands that their onstage voice is a version of them, not the whole of them, everything gets easier to write and more honest to perform.

There’s an exercise in the book where Head tells his students to ask someone close to describe what they’re like when they’re being annoying using 3 words. And then he tells them to build material out of it: Pompous, disorganized, passive-aggressive. The idea is that a comedian’s most frustrating traits aren’t obstacles, they’re entry points, and the more specific and honest comedians are about them, the more the audience sees themselves in the person with the mic.

I’ve spent tons of time trying to figure out writing hacks, develop a system, and write the perfect joke. This book reminded me that “perfect” often means “sterile.” In other words, the best jokes, the ones that actually land, sometimes come from working backward (something frequent readers of this site will know I myself am fond of). In such instances, you don’t start with a topic. Rather, you start with a phrase like “just collecting dust” and then build a whole joke just to arrive at that line.

The final thing I want to point out that the book does, and maybe the thing I had thought least about, is the role of a director. Now, when you’re just getting into stand-up, you may not have to worry about this so much. But as comedians move to bigger stages, they have to see directors (often in the form of a producer or even booker/producer) not as someone barking orders, but as a mirror. Put differently: they reflect what comedians themselves can’t see. They point out comedians’ blind spots, notice their themes, ask questions they hadn’t thought to ask, and so on.

This book also reminded me that stand-up comedy is far more deliberate than it looks. That makes me want to work harder, of course, but it also gives me permission to accept help, to get feedback, and to stop pretending that doing it alone is a virtue. It’s not. In fact, it’s not even possible. The myth of the lone creative isn’t just wrong, it’s boring. What’s way more interesting is the mess of finding my voice, breaking my act, rebuilding it, failing again, and then slowly, quietly, landing on something that actually connects; in other words, something shaped by more than just my own cleverness.

JOKE WRITING COURSE: By the way, if you have any interest at all in learning about your persona, how to write some jokes, or doing stand-up comedy, check out my online joke writing course, “The Joke Writer’s Lab,” HERE.