Speaker's ToolsAt the same time I was publishing my humor service, Comedy Update, I was at the Holy City Zoo and I was working with Robin Williams, Dana Carvey, Barry Sobel, Kevin Meany and I was performing at the time and I learned a lot about the differences in humor.
Carvey would bring something and say, Hey Cantu, what do you think of this? And I'd look at it and say, "God that's really great. That's funny. You're going to kill with that." Dana Carvey would get up on stage and it just went into the dumper. Just absolute death and destruction.
We'd get together and said, what happened? I said, I don't know. Well what do you think? I said, I don't know. You looked good. After a while I realized that what reads funny doesn't always sound funny. And what sounds funny doesn't always read funny.
If you remember Saturday Night Live in the beginning. One of the things that surprised me about Saturday Night Live, I could not understand how one sketch they would have would be brilliant and the next sketch would be a piece of crap and the next sketch would be brilliant.
And they put out a Saturday Night Live Workbook. I don't if you ever saw that. A lot of inside jokes in there. But they also had sample sketches for the show. A lot of sample sketches. I think it's out of print now. But you can pick it up at used book stores.
When I read these sketches, sketches that I saw on television that had bombed - when I read them I was laughing out loud. Most of the writers for the early Saturday Night Live came from National Lampoon. They were used to writing verbal sketches meant to be read.
So a lot of that stuff would be funnily written but when you acted them out they didn't work out. So in here, this class is primarily slanted for standup. But the principles hold true in writing. So we will be focusing on writing also. In fact, the principles are the same for all types of applications including platform.
So I went from writing for local comedians to writing for Joan Rivers, Phyllis Diller, Rip Taylor, greeting card ideas, Paper Moon Graphics, Portal Press, Curtis Swan. I have written fillers for Saturday Evening Post, Readers Digest. I have written humorous pieces for public speakers and corporate publications. The principles are the same, it's the execution that is different. And I'll talk about that in the polishing.
