Tips on how to use InnerSanctum

First you do need to find someplace to practice the skills you will learn in InnerSanctum. You can go to comedy clubs and sweat it out in front of a "dare you to succeed" audience or try the safe and sane approach of joining Toastmasters. Joining a Toastmasters club will help you get "stage time" whether your ultimate goal is to do standup comedy, develop speaker platform skills or just to make getting up in front of your peers in a business meeting less of a chore. You'll get the kind of feedback and support you just won't get performing in a paying venue.

Then if you want to continue on with standup, go to a club's open mike, talk to other open - mikers and find out what's what in your area.

Writing can be intimidating. When I took John's course at the Holy City Zoo, John recommended going to the SF Main Library and take advantage of their special collection of joke books. I took his advice and spent hours there reading and writing down jokes (mostly punchlines with some of the setup) that I liked. Then using the skills I got in John's writing class, I switched them, made them my own and tried them out on audiences. It got to the point I had so much experience doing switches that when I had "help" from someone in the audience, I could take what they said, repeat it and then adjust my punchline to flow-into the interruption. Wow, did that make me look good.

In InnerSanctum you'll find articles on both writing and performing and something unique. An over the shoulder look at updating a joke. John first did this in his Joke Study ezine and later just included them with the regular jokes he published every week. InnerSanctum has the original series and a short series of some of the jokes I updated for the post-Cantu Humormall. I asked Paul Giles to write a whole new series of Joke Studies that HumorMall sells, but only the original series available in InnerSanctum has John's comments.

Then there's John's failsafe method for speakers to add humor to their talk. Sorry, that's not in InnerSanctum but John's best selling Ebook, "Get Paid to Make People Laugh." It's not hard to do but it took a consummated comedy guru like John to dream it up.

Last tip? Have fun. Comedy isn't pulling teeth, yours or anybody else's. If you don't like it, you won't do it well (or anything else you don't like to do.) You can get over stage fright (or at least develop techniques to control it) but a distaste humor you'll never out run.

Susan Cerce
editor

Increase Your Laugh

Response Using a Yearly Humor Calendar

By John Cantu

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As silly as it may seem to you, if your talk has a couple of references to the unseasonably cold winter they've been having, or the sudden heat wave or a line about the first baseball game of the season, you do not come as across as giving the same old tired speech you give to everyone.

(continue column 4)

What's the difference between a Humorist and a Comedian?
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Aardvark's odd ark
Robin Williams and the Gay Church Joke
The Holy City Zoo... & other stories I've lived

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by John Cantu ©HumorMall.com

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Over 4,000 Jokes you can use free without fear of copyright infringement! Whether you are a comedian, comic, comedienne, monologist, toastmaster, radio personality, minister, club president, emcee, mc, educator, clergy, community leader, communication expert, advertising writer... Or just someone with a personal interest in humor and creativity.

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You Gotta Have Heart.

"What's the difference between sky diving and performing at a comedy club? In sky diving, you can only lose your life.

Read it here! The 1979 Playboy article that helped to start the '80's comedy revolution by Craig Vetter.

adult language

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Professional Humor Tip Series & Study Guide

by John Cantu

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STAGE & PLATFORM SKILLS:

• Want to develop as a stand-up comedian?
• Or if that's too intimidating, maybe as a professional humorous speaker.
• Then again, maybe you just want to be more comfortable in making your friends and relatives laugh.
• Do you relish the thought of speaking to an audience?
• Or is the thought of giving even a five minute presentation your severest form of mental torture?

You can think of InnerSanctum Stage & Performance Skills Section as your personal speaking/comedy coach with practical advice on delivering effective talks, speeches, and presentations as well as Stand-up stage advice providing YOU with the Wit and Wisdom of the legendary comedy coach John Cantu

If you can present business content humorously you have a big edge. Businesses need convention entertainers but too often are embarrassed by foul mouth comedians.

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Then go to Practical Examples section to see how to switch and update them

PRACTICAL EXAMPLES OF HUMORTECHNIQUES:

• Off-The-Wall Humor
• Finding humor lessons For You in the Work of Gary Larson
• Your Humor Lessons In The Work of Monty Python's Flying Circus
• Doing Full-scale Sketches
• Writing Entertaining and Realistic Dialogue
• How to Make Any Subject More Humorous No Matter How Inherently Dull or Boring it Seems at First
• Real World Examples of Editing and Updating Jokes

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Work in Progress

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Writers sit down and write it on demand. Writers write in a week what most comedians take a year to develop. We are going to show you in this class how to sit down and do it on purpose.

I love this class. It's great. It will knock your socks off.

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HUMOR WRITING TECHNIQUES:

The primary purpose of John Cantu's HUMOR DEVELOPMENT TECHNIQUES series was to provide his subscribers with a virtual home study course in professional joke writing. John wanted to make you aware that there are very specific techniques and principles being used by comedians, comedy writers, and humorists to create humor. And that YOU can use the same techniques professionals use to punch up existing stories and techniques to create material for either platform presentations or stand-up comedy acts.

The second goal is to enable you to study your personal role models, heroes, and idols with regard to humor and to enable you to see the structure of their humor, listen to the rhythm of their wit, and develop your feeling of confidence to the point where you're utilizing your own innate sense of humor.

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(continued)

It's obvious to them that you couldn't have been telling jokes about the freezing cold three months ago - it just happened. And you couldn't have been telling the joke about the last week's Academy Awards forever, since that actor just won. But you could have had a generic academy award winner joke in place, and just plugged in the actor's name as soon as you knew.

So, from now on note the time frame of when you are booked and check the humor calendar and add maybe a joke about the expected weather (and have one counter weather joke in case it is unseasonably hot or cold or windy, etc.) And maybe add a joke about what will obviously be seasonally related. If you are speaking within a week after Thanksgiving any reference to still being stuffed due to over eating will bring a chuckle.

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