Cantu Humor: Breaking into Humor - Comedy and What to do When You Get There

Cantu Humor

John Cantu's first love was coaching - helping beginners break-in with a minimum of sweat, pain, and anguish, as well as providing professional guidance for the journeyman performer/speaker/ writer. Cantu has helped launched the careers of more working comics and comedy writers than any other comedy coach in the San Francisco Bay Area. Cantu had more than 30 years of comedy/humor/performing/producing experience before his untimely death. Cantu Humor is a series of articles John wrote during the last four years of his life where he sums up for you what he had learned and taught so well.

GET ALL FOUR YEARS Cantu Humor ezine retitled as
CANTU'S COMEDY WIT AND HUMOR WISDOM $29.95 - 265 pages PDF EBook

OR - Included with a subscription to Inner Sanctum
(4,000+ jokes, practical examples of updating jokes, articles on humor writing, performing, platform skills and producing comedy. A virtual Encyclopedia of how-to comedy information and that's just to start with. More will be continually added until John's stand-up comedy class videos, writing seminars and speeches have been added.)

Excerpted from CANTU'S COMEDY WIT AND HUMOR WISDOM

PERFORMANCE/ON-PLATFORM OFF-PLATFORM SKILLS:

Bombing When You First Try to Use Humor.

by John Cantu
© HumorMall.com

Franklyn Ajaye's "Comic Insights" is a MUST READ for anyone serious about using humor. I have been touting Larry Wilde's Book "The Great Comedians For Years." Franklyn's book matches it.

Let's look at two issues from interview snippets in Ajaye's "Comic Insights".

Bombing when you first start trying to be funny:

Richard Jeni: (Page 106)

Ajaye: "Were you that comfortable when you first got on stage?"
Jeni: "I sucked. The first whole year I was quitting every day. I'd go to the guys and say, 'Should I be doing this? Cause I suck and the audience doesn't like me.'"

Bill Maher: (Page 156):

Ajaye: "Did you bomb much the first year?"
Maher: "Of course. I mean how can you not bomb the first year? I don't know how anyone can get laughs even the fiftieth time.

Jerry Seinfeld: (Page 198)

Ajaye: "How can a beginning comic avoid bombing?"
Seinfeld: "You can't avoid it when you are starting cause you don't know what's going on. For example you don't have the experience that you are talking too fast or that you're talking in a rote fashion instead of the present moment."

Gary Shandling: (Page 210)

Ajaye: "Did you bomb much when you started out?"
Shandling: "For the first five years."
Ajaye: "Are you serious? How did you hang in?"
Shandling: "I thought that was part of how I grew as a person, being able to survive that.

If the pros had this much trouble in the beginning, why do amateurs give themselves so much self-induced grief because they are not rip-roaring funny at first? Getting laughs is a skill that has to be developed. These pros share their secrets for success. Learn from their mistakes and avoid the pain they went through. Trust me, most of what they did to become funny, you can do also.

Cantu Humor: Breaking into Humor-Comedy

Cantu Humor

Bombing When You First Try to Use Humor.