Stand-up comedy

Stand-up comedy is a comedy performance and narrative craft whereby a comedian communicates to a live audience, speaking directly to them through a microphone. The performer is commonly known as a comic, stand-up comic, comedian, comedienne, stand-up comedian, or simply a stand-up. Stand-up comedy is a dialogic monologue, or a grouping of humorous stories, jokes, and one-liners, typically called a shtick, routine, act, or set. Stand-ups may fuse props, music, magic tricks, or ventriloquism. Stand-up comedians perform quasi-autobiographical and fictionalized extensions of their offstage selves.
Overview.
Stand-up comedy can be performed in comedy clubs, comedy festivals, bars, pubs, nightclubs, colleges, theatres, niche locations, etc. Stand-up is also distributed commercially via live action, audio, streaming, etc.
It can take an amateur comedian about 10 years to perfect the technique needed to be a professional comedian; this is a constant process of learning through failure.
Genres.
Just as within any art form, stand-up has multiple genres and styles, with their own formats, unwritten rules, and target audience. Some of these include:
Circuits.
Bookers "book" comedians on the basis of how "clean" or "dirty" their act is, their popularity, and their ability to draw an audience.
A comedy "venue", like a music venue or sports venue, is a building, structure, or place where comedy takes place.
Stand-up comedy show.
Audiences expect a stand-up comedian to provide a constant stream of laughs, and a performer may feel pressured to deliver, especially during the first two minutes. The late Phyllis Diller holds the record for most laughs per minute, at twelve laughs per minute.
Basic format.
Opener, feature, headliner.
The "host", "compère" (UK), master of ceremonies ("MC"/"emcee"), or "opener", performs for around ten minutes, warming up the audience, interacting, making announcements, and introducing the other performers; this is followed by the "middle"/"feature" who does around thirty minutes; then, the "headliner", performs for roughly an hour. An opener can also double as a feature for travelling headliners.
Showcase format.
Showcase format has a host/MC with several other acts who perform for roughly equal lengths of time.
Festivals.
Comedy festivals are arts festivals. Industry professionals, or "scouts", use comedy festivals to seek out new comedians to hire.
Open mic.
Stand-ups use open mics to practice. Industry scouts rarely watch open mics.
Bringer shows.
"Bringer shows" are open mics that require amateur performers to bring a specified number of paying guests to receive stage time. Some view this as exploitation. The guests pay a cover charge and there is often a minimum number of drinks that must be ordered. These shows are often "showcase" format. Different bringer-show venues have different requirements.
Guest set.
A five-to-ten minute, time slot.
Salary.
Most comedians have day jobs. In a comedian's first five years, they will lose money from traveling and performing.
Stand-ups start getting paid by hosting. While it can take around a decade to make a living at comedy, unknown comedians may achieve great financial success.
Hosts and MCs are paid $0-$200, depending on location and the time of week (emcees average $25); showcase spots get $10-$75; features get approximately $300-$600; a headliner with no following gets $150-$1500, depending on many factors; headliners with a following or TV credits can make $1,500-$10,000 per show. The headliner makes "10 times" more money than the feature act. Famous headliners get paid from "door deals," or a percentage of the revenue, based on the number of seats sold; these comics rely on their notoriety to fill seats, which makes them more money than headliners with no following. Comics will sell merchandise after their shows; this will make up for other expenses, like traveling.
Mark Normand has stated that a set on Conan pays "a couple grand" for five minutes. In 2012, Comedy Central routinely offered $15,000 for a half-hour special. As of 2015, Comedy Central will pay comedians about $20,000 for a thirty-minute set; an hour, Comedy Central special can be up to $150,000; as of 2018, Netflix will pay comedians $26,000+ for a fifteen-minute set; Netflix pays celebrity-comedians different amounts from one another.
The cruise-circuit comedian can make up to $10,000 per week, Cruiseliners have both clean comedy and blue comedy at different times during the day, but opinionated political material is frowned upon. some $85,000 per year; and, a college-circuit comedian can make six figures per year or thousands of dollars per gig. Christian circuit comedy headliners make $1,500-$2,500 per show. Although one source states that newer comics on the national (L.A.) circuit make $1,250-$2,500 per week, another source claims that this is very inaccurate, and the amount of money one makes is closer to $20 for a spot.
Famous comedians may pay other professional comedians for jokes and hire them on as writers, but many famous comedians do not reveal this, as it is considered a taboo to admit purchasing material for stand-up comedy sets. Comedians may knowingly sell plagiarized jokes.
History.
Stand-up comedy got its start in the 1840s from the three-act, variety show format of minstrel shows (via blackface performances of the Jim Crow character); Frederick Douglass criticized these shows for profiting from and perpetuating racism. Minstrelsy monologists performed second-act, stump-speech monologues from within minstrel shows until 1896, although traces of these racist performances continued to be used until the mid-1900s. Stand-up comedy also has roots in various traditions of popular entertainment of the late 19th century, including vaudeville (via minstrel shows, dime museums, concert saloons, freak shows, variety shows, Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus), American burlesque (via Lydia Thompson's feminization of the minstrel show, concert saloons, English music halls, and circus clown antics), and humorist monologues like those delivered by Mark Twain in his first (1866) touring show, "Our Fellow Savages of the Sandwich Islands". Unadulterated, vaudeville monologuist run-times were 10–15 minutes.
The room.
The room is a colloquialism for the space where the interaction between the stand-up and the audience occurs. A comedian will "read the room" by interpreting signs from the audience. A stand-up will "work the room" by interacting with the audience. A stand-up will "walk the room" when punters become so personally offended by a joke that they physically leave "the room". Playing to the "back of the room" is an in-joke among comedians.
Soft architecture of "the room".
The quality of "the room" affects how the audience perceives the stand-up's performance. The flow to "the room" has a hot and cold cognition. The energy of "the room" changes with substances. Comedic genres are separated by experiences.
A warm-up comedian (or crowd warmer) warms up "cold" audiences as the opening act or before the filming of television comedies in front of studio audiences.
Humor through "the room".
Comedians create psychological tensions in "the room" that are relieved with laughter. Comedians observe normality and social norms as a type of relatable audience fulcrum. "Punching up" and "punching down" are political terms for the direction in which a joke punches, or who should be the "butt of the joke". It carries with it the assumption that, relative to the comedian's socio-political identity, comedy should "punch up" at the powerful rather than "punch down" at the marginalized.
There is no consensus among the comedy community as to which is most important for getting laughs: persona, material, or fame. A stand-up defines their craft, in part, by how they convince the audience to laugh and by their development of a persona.
The audience.
"Punter" is a regional term for a member of the audience. The audience's feedback at a stand-up performance, even from the moment they enter the venue, is instant and crucial for the comedian's ever-changing act. Audience members, in a comedy setting that doesn't have fixed seating, are seated very close to one another.
The comedian's act and set.
A stand-up comedian frames the tone and mood of "the room" as a construct of play. Audiences license the suspension of normal social conventions. Stand-ups appeal to telling jokes for the sake of joking. Stand-ups design their sets through the construction and onstage revision of jokes.
When a stand-up does well by making the audience collectively laugh in unison, they are "killing"; if the stand-up is doing poorly, they are "dying".
Crowd work.
Stand-ups use second person to address the audience. Comedians perform "crowd work" by communicating directly with audience members through forethought, improvisation, or some of both.
 One result of crowd work is an inside joke.
In stand-up, a heckler is a person who interrupts a comedian's set. Comedians will often have a repertoire of comebacks for hecklers. Comedians rarely get into physical altercations with hecklers.
Onstage personality.
When a professional stand-up is at ease or in "stage repose", they still possess the characteristics of a professional stand-up, such as being interesting, entertaining, engaging, and relatable. "Mugging" is to facially pose in a way that reveals one’s identity and emotions (i.e., common phrase "ham"-/"mug"-/"clown for the camera")(q.v., "chew the scenery"). "Pointing" is when the comic puts an inflection on the "laugh-line" that comes before the audience reaction.
Modern stand-up relies on narrative. Character is tied to narrative. Persona is not a character but a self-managed version of one's offstage personality that comes from onstage, audience feedback. The performer's reputation is a continuity of onstage and offstage "image".
One-person show.
These performances are stylistically dominated by autobiographical storytelling. One-person, stand-up comedy shows became popular in the 1990s.
The routine.
"Bits" (linked jokes) and "chunks" (linked bits) are an arrangement of interlinked thematic units from within the "set" or "routine". A stand-up routine is a gestalt that emerges from performing interconnected jokes, bits, and chunks to a live audience. Stand-ups structure jokes, bits, and chunks to end on climactic laughter. Comedians often end their jokes with taglines, toppers, or afterthoughts for increased laughter. A segue is the link between jokes.
A callback is a reference to a previous thing that was experienced by the audience during that set, designed to create an inside joke. Bombing refers to when a comedian has failed to get an intended laugh.
Intro.
The opening remarks to a stand-up comedian's set are the hook.
Stand-up joke.
Stand-ups deliver "canned jokes" through the use of thematic narrative structure. A stand-up comedian delivers the joke through the use of timing: the "setup" and then the "punch line", or "laugh line". A joke is made of a "premise", point of view, and then the reveal. The setup to a joke contains the information needed by the audience in order to understand the punchline. Most of stand-up comedy's jokes are the juxtaposition of two incongruous things. Stand-ups use "jester's privilege", or "comic license", to feign sincerity for maintaining a close aesthetic distance with the audience (e.g., they frame their stories as having happened "recently"). The comedian's delivery of a joke is integral to the process—the comedian's "voice", pauses, intonation, inflection, attitude, energy, and other elements. Comedians often include stylistic and comedic devices, such as tropes, idioms, stop consonants, archetypes, soliloquy, expletive infixation, and wordplay. A paraprosdokian is a popular method of joke structuring by using a surprising punchline that causes the listener to reinterpret the setup. Stand-ups will often use the rule of three.
A comedian's ideas and jokes will fail nine times out of ten; this may require a comedian to write hundreds of jokes to achieve enough successful ones to fill a set. A stand-up comedian cannot know if their material has succeeded without an audience to give feedback.
Tight five.
A "tight five" is a five-minute stand-up routine that is well-rehearsed and consists of a stand-up comedian's best material that reliably gets laughs.
It is often used for auditions or delivered when audience response is minimal. A tight five is the stepping stone to getting a paid spot.
Memorization.
Comics memorize their jokes through the use of on-stage practice/blocking. Some professional stand-ups are known to use a mnemonic device called the method of loci. Professionals may use a set list; this is generally hidden (e.g., on a cue card or a stage monitor).