8pm Support Act
8.50pm Interval
9.10pm Russell Brand
10.10pm Finish

presale seats weren't great so i didn't buy...yet. still leaning towards no.

Does anyone have tips on how to write good bits/jokes? I have always wanted to get up on stage and surprisingly the main thing holding me back is not physically getting up there but rather that I am not creative enough and have no material.

What I plan to do in the future is write down things that I think of over the course of my day that are funny and have potential and flesh them out in Word or something.

Act or acts? Know who it is?

I really can't get into Russell enough to bother going to see him even if it was free.

naw, no clue, this show isn't for a while.

Listen to comedy podcasts. WTF with Marc Maron, Comedy Bang Bang, Doug Loves Movies, Never Not Funny, etc. Some will expose you to comics you've never heard of, some will delve into the actual craft of standup and how some of the best in the game go about exactly what you're asking about (namely WTF for this. The 2 part episode with Louis C.K., the Chris Rock episode, the Kevin Hart episode are all good in this aspect).

Watch comedy specials. A lot. Analyze the comics, their stage presence, their pacing of jokes, their delivery, their subject matters, their transitions between jokes, their ability to use call back humor effectively.

If you live in a big enough city, you can also take improv classes. UCB in LA and New York, Second City, ImprovOlympics and The Annoyance Theater in Chicago, The Groundlings in LA have produced some of the funniest comedians of our generation. Obviously improv and sketch are way different from stand up, but you should be able to learn valuable things from classes and workshops at these types of places.

Besides the above advice which is good, I'd also think about what kind of jokes you wanna write and what suits your style. Stand up jokes or TV late night jokes or sketch or sitcom or what.

Give yourself a challenge to write 1 joke a day for a week. And don't agonize over it. Dont try to write the funniest joke ever written, just write.

For you LA folks, Bill Burr is gonna be at the Comedy Store on Wednesday hosting an All Things Comedy show. Al Madrigal, Neal Brennan, and others.

Seeing Jim Jefferies tonight!

Also have tickets for Burr June 18th, but might not make it as I'll be at the U.S. Open. Contemplating doing the 6 hours of driving that night to see him, we'll see.

The venue was in a brand new building here, and they had chairs setup in the very front where the orchestra space would be. The front row chairs were so close to the stage people were sitting their drinks on the edge of the stage, and as soon as he walked out he just walked up and started kicking over their drinks.

We got a heckler... A younger woman who was likely high on something was in the first row and stood up in the middle of his material and reached out her hand with a business card.

He just walked over near her without reaching for it and said "Wtf is this!?" and she quickly replied "if you ever want mushrooms in the Bahamas, call the number on here." Umm, ok...

He didn't grab it obviously and started going off on her and the group of people she was with, which was 6-7 fat guys in the front row. No other women with the group. As he started interrogating them about the 7:1 ratio she blurted out "they had me come so they wouldn't look gay" and he quickly replied "you aren't the reason I don't think they're gay..." and then went off about how overweight/unkempt they were. At the very end of his rant he just said "God, what a dumb f***ing c**t."

His routine was great of course, but since Portland is the most liberal/progressive major city in the US, he made a few of his usual points about and other progressive issues and the typical granolas were like "they're both legal here!" and it took a little steam out, in a good way, like he was congratulating us I guess.

Favorite bits were

i actually liked nick swardson's seriously who farted special but i thought the new one that premiered tonight sucked


this nate bargatze guy seems pretty darn good to me though. guess it's a double special night i think this is the premiere of his new stuff. i have been watching a lot of stand up on netflix and some lol amateur hours in real life and this guy seems super funny gonna have to keep an eye on him

nate is hilarious.

Nate Bargatze is phenomenal. It seems like its only a matter of time before he is absolutely massive. He has the comedic chops to be respected by Maron and the alt comics (for lack of a better term), but at the same time he has enough southern folksy aww schucks charm to appeal to the blue collar demographic, all while being 100% TV clean. He has a development deal at NBC, which obviously is pretty barren on the sitcom front right now, so it'll be interesting to see what comes out of it.

I opened for Nate for a weekend in March and he destroyed all 5 shows. Super nice guy too.

that is a legit sick brag.
u have any clips online?

I don't usually put much stuff online, but what the hell.
This is from a show in December with Pete Holmes and Chris Thayer.

Nice! I really love the Hitler time travel stuff. You took it in some really funny, smart directions.

Nice set, Aaron!

On Thursday I'm seeing Shane Mauss at Acme in mpls. I've only really heard him on recent podcasts, so it'll be fun to see his standup.

Aaron,

that was really good bro.
great material great delivery.

loved the Hitler bit think you def could expand on that and really explore the idea of a perfectly normal Hitler being turned into a paranoid jew hater due to time travellers attempting to assassinate him.

overall tho really impressive, think the next step in going from opening to perhaps doing a solid 30+ min set is to expand on some of these great premises and turn them from quick set-up - punchline into longer drawn out stories.

thanks for sharing.
if u have any other material pls post it.

cheers.

noodlemans delivery is so ****ing tight, i was impressed. good **** man

+1 definitely the funniest bit, really enjoyed it.

Russell brand is great live, especially if high

The homeless pet joke was very funny!

That was 9 minutes of thunder, great job!

Thanks.

I'm glad you guys like the Hitler joke. I love doing it, there is something really fun about taking a cliched concept like that and taking it in my own direction.

As much as I like doing that joke, honestly, it only really works about half the time.
It has two pitfalls that can derail it. The first is that the moment you say 'Hitler' the energy in the room changes. It is just one of those keywords that makes a whole lot of people tighten up, which makes it all the more fun when they loosen up and come back, but some people just don't want to laugh at anything even remotely Hitler related.
The second problem is that some audiences just aren't very bright and can't follow the idea of alternate timelines. Then I've got a bunch of confused hill people staring slack jawed at me.


Getting from 10 minutes to 20+ is really challenging. The problem with crafting long form bits is that right now, probably 75% of the sets I get are under 10 minutes, and lots of those are 5 to 7 minutes.
Until I get to the point where I can feature and get 20 minute sets, its very hard to find sets where I can work on longer bits without making my entire set depend on that bit.

Thanks

Thanks. I feel like I could write a ton of jokes about the homeless, but I've found that after about two, they just start to feel mean and the audience turns on me.

Also, my favorite Hitler time machine joke I've seen someone else do was by a guy out of NYC named Jono Zalay, who said that instead of killing Hitler he would marry his mother and raise him right.

I'm pretty sure Stanhope has gotten his fair share of love in this thread. I haven't looked at it for ages.

But if you can marry the term "Shi* pussy" to Keyneseian economics, you're my hero.



Sorry if that's been posted before, but I reckon it bears repeated viewings.

This guy played a block away from me, and I wouldn't cross the street to go see him for 20 bucks, because the Stanhope/Rogan version of the Man Show was such an abomination.

Yet another occasion I wish I could go back in time and punch myself in the face. And also, punch the moronic producers of that god-awful TV program.