Never Be Speechless Again: Comedy Success
Whenever you are speaking in front of a genuinely large audience, or really any type of audience whatsoever you will find that a certain amount of your comedic script will elude your capacity for recall. Often the larger the audience, the more substantial this cost of anxiety on cognition is. The reason for this is because a certain amount, which could perhaps even be quantifiable scientifically, of cognitive energy that was used for the memory retrieval of jokes stored away in synapses is now being used to suppress your anxieties and prevent overstimulation and fear.
There is one and only one cure for this rather disappointing fact and that’s repeated iteration through your script in one form or another. The more times you repeatedly iterate through these things mentally the more you are able to figuratively burn something into your memory to the point that it becomes as natural and mechanistic as driving your car. No matter what the conditions. This is the secret of the greats. If you mentally transport yourself to the first time you drove your car you will remember how difficult it was the first time to perform even the most mundane tasks, but now that you have done it for a number of years it feels nearly as natural as breathing.
The less conscious, active energy you have to dump into delivering your script the greater your capacity to excel on stage in front of even extraordinarily large, and challenging audiences will be. This can only occur after pain-staking, exhausting rehearsal has transpired — much like those first few joy rides in .
Often delivering presentations of any kind isn’t as fundamental to every day life as driving a car or truck is. Most often it’s an act of self-actualization. It requires more determination on the part of the presenter, or comedian. A good litmus test for a person’s stage preparedness when delivering is whether or not they are able to maintain eye contact with members of a smaller audience for any reasonable amount of time while delivering their comedic script.
Try this with a small crowd (relatively speaking) of friends before doing stand up in front of a big audience in a comedy club. Do you have a habit of looking away when performing your routine? If happens to be so, then you’ve not rehearsed your jokes enough privately first. Find a few new ways to expand your boundaries and run through your presentation and deliveries more rapidly. Drink coffee if you must, find a quiet place, and bring a tape recorder. Make an audio recording of yourself delivering the routine (perhaps read from script), and then attempt to race against yourself to recall your own punchlines faster than you said them even on the audio recording.
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