Stand-up Comedy for Kids (and anyone else interested)
Want to tell your jokes onstage? Here’s how to get started.
Your First Stand-up Comedy Set
How to Come Up with a Joke
People always ask, “How do you come up with your material?” It’s not as hard as you might think. At first, it’s mostly about capturing the funny thoughts and premises you already come up with but forget, and then over time, your brain starts to think in jokes and premises. Remember the last time you made someone laugh? Really laugh? What did you do? Was it something you said, or a funny dance, or maybe an impression? If you like making people laugh then you’re already a very funny person, you just have to learn how to capture that funniness and rework it into a format that has mass appeal.
more than words
I also want you to remember that when you make people laugh naturally it’s rarely ever just from the words coming out of your mouth. It’s your facial expressions, your mannerisms, your voice, your emotion, all the things that take your funny words, and turn them into a stand-up comedy performance. It’s all those things put together in the right way and the right order that makes stand-up an art.
There are two main ways to come up with new material. Sometimes you think of something funny naturally, so make sure to write it down when you do. Almost all comedians collect their jokes into one place, whether that’s a notebook, or notes app in their phone, or voice memos, or something else. It’s good to have a place where you can jot down ideas that come to you so you can work them out later. The worst thing you can do is think, “I’ll remember that later.” You won’t! Write it down now, even if it’s on the palm of your hand. Whenever you make someone laugh, write it down. If it made them laugh, chances are it can make an audience laugh. Sometimes you’ll recall that really funny thing that made one person double over laughing to a different person and they won’t laugh at all, and they’ll say, “I guess you had to be there.” Now you have the challenge of adapting that funny thing that happened in the moment for retelling on stage so that it’s relevant to everyone.
“Spiral notebooks work well for lefties like me. I always have tons of empty notebooks lying around waiting to be my next jokebook. ”
Brainstorming
Another fun way to brainstorm is writing ideas on post-its and sticking them on the wall so you can rearrange your ideas in different ways.
The other way to come up with material is to brainstorm. Brainstorming is just pulling all the ideas out of your brain on a particular topic so that you can cherry-pick the best ones for your joke. It’s like pulling all the clothes out of your drawers just to find one shirt. The mess is worth the finished product if it’s the perfect outfit.
There are lots of ways to brainstorm. You can make lists or use the spiderweb method which is my favorite. That’s where you write your topic in the center, circle it, and draw lines out from it like a spiderweb. For each line you have to write one idea to go with that topic. It’s very important to write down your good and bad ideas. Dump them all out. When you’re finished, choose one or two to make more spider webs with. Keep doing that until you have enough material for a joke. Brainstorming is also important because you want to think out every angle of your joke so you can come in from the best angle. Expand the topic out as far as you can, then zoom back in and focus on just the parts that make you laugh. No idea is too silly, we want silly!
self-deprecating jokes
When we come up with material we want to make sure to write jokes about ourselves. This is called self-deprecating humor. Not every comedian does jokes about themselves, but it’s a good way to get the audience on your side. By making fun of yourself you are getting permission from the audience to make fun of them and everything else. It creates a more equal playing field where you’re not the bad guy even if you’re making fun of the front row of people at your show. The audience feels like they’re in on the joke and not the butt of your joke.
When I say to make fun of yourself I don’t mean bully yourself. Don’t make the audience feel sorry for you, but rather relate to you. Make fun of the most obvious stuff people notice about you. For example, I’m tall and I also have fair skin and freckles. It’s something anyone can see about me, especially when I’m standing on a stage, so I make fun of that. When I was young those things would have embarrassed me, but now it makes me feel powerful to be the one owning what makes me different and getting the laugh.
How to Write a Joke
Take all those ideas and premises from your jokebook and think about how to say it as a joke. Every joke starts with two main parts, the setup and punchline. Every joke needs this as a base just like every sentence has a noun and a verb.
Setup
The setup sets up the punchline. You’re laying out a premise for your audience. The premise is the basis or the plot of your joke. You want your premise to be original but also relatable. Some of the funniest jokes are based on taking a funny spin on something everyone experiences. You want to make it as simple and clear as possible. Most likely you don’t need all the details, just the important ones that lead to the punchline.
punchline
The punchline is the funny part, and it goes at the end of the joke. This may seem obvious, but once you get onstage in front of real people you can get nervous, and it’s easy to “give away” your punchline. Don’t do that. Save it for the end. In fact, save it for the very end. If there’s one main word that makes up the punch line, or a group of words, make sure those are the last words you speak in the joke. The closer you get your punchline to the end, the harder your audience will laugh.
If the setup is not the funny part, and the punch line is the funny part, then it makes sense that we want to get to the punchline faster right? That means shortening your setup. In comedy we use word economy to get the most laughs we can. That means using your words wisely and trying to say something in as few words as possible and still get the point across. The longer your joke setup is, the funnier the punchline needs to be. That’s called the payoff of the joke. How far did we have to go to get to the laugh? Could you have more jokes along the way?
Tag
The professional comedians you see on TV on average get around eight laughs per minute. What? That’s like one punchline every eight seconds. How can you possibly setup a new joke every eight seconds? You probably can’t, or you’d be talking so fast no one could understand you. The way to add more punchlines to your joke without having to setup a new joke is tags! Tags are your friend. They can be as short as one word, and are a continuation of your original joke. Each funny thing you add to the joke after your punchline is a tag. Each tag is another laugh. This is how you can rack up a ton of laughs in a short time.
Refining a joke so that it has lots of tags takes time. You can come up with tags when you write, but even more will come to you onstage when you perform, so don’t pressure yourself to have tons of tags up front. Focus on having a solid setup and punchline, and the tags will follow. If you’re having trouble finding tags for a joke, go back and brainstorm some more, or ask a comedian friend for suggestions.
riffing
There’s writing on the page and there’s also writing on the stage. Not all comics do this, especially when just starting out, but it’s a good way to come up with new material and also get more comfortable onstage. Riffing is just going off script and saying what comes to mind in the moment, in other words, improvising. If you’re new to riffing, my advice is not to start out your set riffing. Wait until you get a laugh or two and then try a riff. If it goes well, awesome! You have a new tag for your joke, or a new premise to work out. If it doesn’t get a laugh, just move on and go back to the material you know works.
Rule of three
You may have heard of the Rule of Three before, it’s used in all art. Why three? Our brains are designed to look for patterns in everything, that’s why we see faces and bunnies in the clouds. One or two pieces of information can start to paint a picture, but don’t quite reveal the pattern. Four or more pieces of information can be too much to organize in our minds and overwhelm us, but three pieces of information seems to be just enough. When giving examples in a joke, it works best to have three examples, the last one usually being the punchline.
Finish this joke, don’t try to be funny yet, just whatever comes to mind first. “I can’t survive quarantine without these three things…” You may have said anything like, “my dog, WiFi, video games, my cat, Netflix, my own bedroom, grilled cheese sandwiches.” Now redo the joke with the first two things being normal and the third one something funny.
“I can’t survive quarantine without coffee, WiFi, and binge-ing RuPaul’s Drag Race.”
Funny words
No matter how clever and hilarious you may be, there are certain words and sounds that are more appealing to our ears, and therefore funnier. Whenever you can substitute words to make it funnier or sound better, I would encourage it.
Here’s an example of a funny analogy, “trying to clean the house when your kids are home is like shoveling show when it’s still snowing.” I think that’s funny. It’s simple and visual, you can picture it easily and chuckle.
Now read it with just the ending changed. “trying to clean the house when your kids are home is like shoveling snow in a blizzard.” It’s a simple edit. A blizzard is more extreme than just snowing, so that amps the joke up a little. But to me, blizzard is just a funnier word. It’s fun to say and it has strong consonant letters, B, Z and D. Those letters make stronger sounds than the words “while it’s snowing.”
Because our brains naturally react to those strong consonant sounds more than softer sounds, alliteration is a good way to amp up some of the lines in your set. Alliteration is repeating consonants in a word or phrase, like the B sounds in big bouncy baby boy.
How to Tell a Joke
Now that you’ve got a few jokes written, it’s time to try them out in front of other people. Stand-up Comedy is public speaking, and public speaking is one of the most common fears people have. Most people say they’d rather die than speak in public, so in most people’s mind’s, the fact that you’re brave enough to get onstage and talk to them is an accomplishment. But now you have to make them laugh!
Know your audience
The first rule of public speaking is to know your audience. Does that mean go around to everyone in the audience and introduce yourself to them individually? No! It just means you have an idea of what type of people they are as a group. If you are performing at your school’s talent show you know that most of the people watching are other students your age and the teachers. Here it’s okay to use references that other kids your age know. It’s a school function though, so you will need to keep your content and language clean. If you’re performing at your grandparent’s nursing home, that’s a whole different group of people. They will be mostly elderly, so they won’t get references for people their grandchildren’s age. They made be hard of hearing so you have to speak much louder and slower than you did at the talent show. Again, you’ll probably have to keep the content and language clean. Now imagine you’re performing at a comedy club on a Saturday night! You’ve got an audience of paying adults who are out on the weekend. They’re having drinks and dinner and came to laugh. This is the best case scenario for a comedian. Just about anything goes!
SET LIST
Plan what you’re going to say. Prepare your jokes and the order you want to tell them before you get onstage. That’s a set list. A musician or a band takes uses a set list. They list out the titles of the songs in the order they’re going to play them. They don’t write out the lyrics to the songs on the set list, right? You should know your jokes well before performing them for a paying audience. Just like songs, we tend to give our jokes titles, so write out the title of each joke on your set list in the order you want to perform them. If you get lost in your set you can refer to your set list to get you back on track, but I don’t recommend looking at it if you don’t have to.
Where do I look?
Why is this so hard? The best thing to do is look at individual people but not one person, that’s creepy. If you need a spot to focus on, use the horizon line just above the highest person’s head. Try to face in the direction of everyone. Making a connection with the audience is key to having a great set, and eye contact is a big step in making that connection. It’s why you don’t want to look down at your set or at your feet. This used to be a huge issue for me. I’d pace around stage and kept looking at my feet, breaking eye contact with the audience over and over again. If the lights are really bright on the stage you may not be able to see the audience at all, only hear them. Try to look in their general direction, make it as natural as you can.
Use your whole body
Remember you have your whole body to work with. On paper it’s just words and the reader’s imagination, in-person you can do act-outs or characters. An act-out is where you act out what you’re talking about about in the joke. Doing a character is when you build a whole persona for someone in your joke. Instead of saying, “My mom said this…” you’d do an impression of her. Since characters are people in your life or people you made up, you can make them sound and act as silly as you want. When people are new at stand-up they tend to be nervous so they may stand behind the mic stand or cross their arms planting in one place. Not every comedian uses a lot of physical comedy, but you can explore and experiment every time you’re onstage until you find your style.
Use what’s around you
You have a few basic props onstage to use without having to bring anything with you. Usually a microphone and mic stand and a stool. Depending on how the venue is decorated or designed, you may have other things. I know of at least one stage that has so many knick-knacks it looks like an escape room. I’ve seen comedians do so many funny and creative things with just the bare minimum on stage. They used the stool as a walker and transformed into a hunched over elderly person, or they use the mic stand as a fishing pole and wrestled in a fish from the stage. Get creative and challenge yourself to use things on the stage as props.
These Pretzels are Making me Thirsty
How does your voice change for the joke, where do you pause, how does your face look, what’s your body doing? Combine everything together. Try your jokes out in different ways changing up the emotions, the volume of your voice, your actions, whatever is funny to you. So much of comedy is not just what you say, but how you say it. Watch this clip below from Seinfeld, a sitcom in the 90’s about NYC Comedian Jerry Seinfeld and his three friends. Kramer, one of the friends, has one line in a movie and he wants to get the director’s attention so he’ll make him a star. Is there a perfect way to deliver the line…These Pretzels are Making me Thirsty?
Kramer has a line a Woody Allen movie. "These pretzels are making me thirsty." Kramer, Elaine, Jerry, and George try their hand at the line.
Try it out loud. How would you say the line? Was it a lot different than how you normally talk? Now think of the way you delivered the line, and try it again in the opposite way, whatever that means to you. Was this way funnier? Now apply this same logic to your jokes. How can you bring the lines on paper to life? Did you know there was so much acting involved in stand-up comedy?
Timing
You’ve probably heard before “comedy is all about timing.” What does that mean? When you’re doing well onstage, you may feel that you’ve found your rhythm. Jokes essentially have beats, words that you’re meant to pause on to allow the audience time to react and laugh. Take this old joke, “Why did the chicken cross the road? To get to the other side.” How long did you pause between “Road?” and “To?” Now try saying it together with no pause. It’s very confusing and doesn’t actually make sense. Don’t forget to use pauses, take a breath, and find the rhythm of the joke. Having a rhythm or cadence to your jokes can also keep you from talking too fast, a very common mistake people make in public speaking when they’re nervous.
That leads into pacing. That’s the speed or tempo of your jokes. Are you energetic and talking fast, or are you more subdued and taking your time. One is not necessarily better than the other. If you’re talking too fast, your audience could have a hard time keeping up, and could miss punchlines. If you’re going too fast and not taking pauses you could “step on” your punchlines, meaning you’re not giving the audience an opportunity to laugh even if they wanted to because if they laugh they’ll will miss something. If you’re going really slowly, you’re giving plenty of room for the audience to react and laugh, but don’t go so slow that it gets boring or uncomfortable.
Virtual Comedy
For the foreseeable future, there won’t be many live events, including stand-up comedy, so your first open mic or performance might be online. There are things you can do to your advantage on video to make your set better.
It’s called Stand-UP Comedy for a reason. You can use your whole body to move and the space around you so why would you sit at your desk? Set up your laptop or webcam to where you can stand up. Don’t stand too far away from your microphone or they won’t be able to hear you. Still show just the top half of your body, but people will be able to tell you’re standing by your movement and energy. Make sure the audience can clearly see and hear you. If you don’t have a nice backdrop or a clean area to film in, download a virtual background. The most common stand-up backdrop is a brick wall, so that’s an easy place to start.
If you don’t have a microphone at home, use anything you have like a hairbrush. If you’re not comfortable with that, skip it.
Practice
I know this is the most awkward thing imaginable, but you need to practice your set out loud. That’s the only way to hear yourself say the jokes and to know how long your set is. I recommend using a voice recording app if you don’t want to take video. Most people hate hearing their own voice but you do eventually get used to it. I like to practice saying my jokes out when I’m driving. Listening to a recording of yourself is also a good way to remember your jokes.
showtime
Time to try those jokes out in front of people now! Every comedian you love got started at an open mic. If you want to find one in person, it will be more difficult now, but there are some happening. I recommend searching on google and facebook for stand-up comedy in your area. Before going to an open, always call the venue or get in touch with the host to make sure it’s still going on. Very important if you’re a minor, let the host of the open mic know in advance. They can tell you if you’ll be allowed at the venue (such as a bar), and may let you go up early if it’s a late show. Also check the comedy clubs in your area, they may offer a teen night or a comedy camp where you can get more experience. It can be harder to find stage time when you’re underage, but it’s not impossible.
For a weekly virtual open mic, check out my kid’s mic on Outschool.
Not on Outschool? Use my link to get $20 credit after your learner completes one class.