(Part 2) Top products from r/StandUpComedy

This question has a lot of complex parts to it. Mainly because we as a species don't know why exactly we laugh.


"Because something is funny."


Yeah, I get it. However, laughing in and of itself does not mean something is funny. There are different forms of laughter. Such as when tension from a scary situation occurs or maniacal laughter from an evil villain. These are some cases where laughter doesn't mean something is funny, but it still occurs. There are a few books written on the topic (my top two would be Ha!: The Science of When We Laugh and Why by Scott Weems and Laughter: A Scientific Investigation by Robert R. Provine.)


Some have speculated that laughter is a very primitive sign that lets others around us know that every is all clear. Which makes sense when a comic builds tension and then releases that tension with a punchline. But it doesn't make sense when we laugh at the misfortune of others, or why we laugh at someone else who is laughing, or why a comedian can do the same joke over and over and get different variants of laughter every time he/she does it.


Anyway, I laugh out loud on some comedians just because they are so fun to watch, but since starting stand-up (4.5 years ago) it has become less frequent to do so when I am alone because I'm not only watching for entertainment value but to study. Their writing, their performance, their hair style, their clothing, the lighting, the stage, their emotions, their facial expression. There is so much to learn from any given special that I sometimes lose the humor when I'm alone because I'm thinking about so many other things.


tl;dr We don't know why we laugh. Read "Laughter" by Robert R. Provine and "HA!" by Scott Weems. I do laugh out loud when watching/listening to stand up alone, but less now that I am a comic.

From a science-y point of view, I'm reading a book about this now. From the description:

>Some things are funny -- jokes, puns, sitcoms, Charlie Chaplin, The Far Side, Malvolio with his yellow garters crossed -- but why? Why does humor exist in the first place? Why do we spend so much of our time passing on amusing anecdotes, making wisecracks, watching The Simpsons? In Inside Jokes, Matthew Hurley, Daniel Dennett, and Reginald Adams offer an evolutionary and cognitive perspective. Humor, they propose, evolved out of a computational problem that arose when our long-ago ancestors were furnished with open-ended thinking. Mother Nature -- aka natural selection -- cannot just order the brain to find and fix all our time-pressured misleaps and near-misses. She has to bribe the brain with pleasure. So we find them funny. This wired-in source of pleasure has been tickled relentlessly by humorists over the centuries, and we have become addicted to the endogenous mind candy that is humor.

Essentially, non-obvious information makes something funny, whether that be a non sequitur or a clever pun or an unexpected turn in a story.

Despite your warning I listened to the revisionist history episode about this called Hallelujah. Loved it!! Saving up to buy the original book it was based on. This makes so much sense for comics. To me someone like Burnham or Sloss = Cezanne & Louie or Burr = Picasso.

https://www.amazon.com/Old-Masters-Young-Geniuses-Creativity/dp/0691133808

I agree good doesn’t equal successful but regardless of the talent the 4 years rule seems to hold steady. I should have specified - I’m talking about the big guns. The people who make it huge. The ones on my original list. Those types usually break in 4 or under.

I love that man. I highly recommend his book "Zombie Spaceship Wasteland" to anyone.

http://www.amazon.com/Zombie-Spaceship-Wasteland-Patton-Oswalt/dp/1439149089

Gary Gulman's 2012 special is on Prime (newer ones are on Netflix):

https://www.amazon.com/Gary-Gulman-This-Economy/dp/B07LC3NZ9L/

Gulman's Conan set on "State Abbreviations" is a six-minute masterpiece:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dLECCmKnrys

There is a "Stand up comedy bible" that's a bit outdated. The first few chapters are okay though.

This book for late night writing also has some pretty decent bits of info.

Jimmy Carr has co-written a couple of fantastic books which do exactly that. He analyses the history of jokes, where they came from, how they work structurally etc

Only Joking

The Naked Jape

>Nerdwriter

Hard pass.

For an actual comedian's perspective check out Stewart Lee. He's extremely self-aware and clever. Even wrote a book on analyzing comedy.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IrXVaytvJtQ

https://www.amazon.com/How-Escaped-My-Certain-Fate/dp/0571254810

You can write sitcom specs and then move to LA and get a manager and he tries to get you a job. I recommend this book if you're interested: http://www.amazon.com/Writing-Television-Sitcoms-revised-Smith/dp/0399535373

Not an understatement.
“Dostoyevsky by way of 30 Rockefeller Center . . . the best new book I’ve read this year or last.”—The Wall Street Journal

https://www.amazon.com/Based-True-Story-Norm-Macdonald/dp/0812993624

This is a good book that talks about the history of the place:

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Didnt-You-Kill-Mother-law/dp/0413173909

David Cross released two other albums.

Lewis Black did this one too.

Maria Bamford did this one too.

Also: You're depriving this person of the glory that is Mr. Paul Mooney.

This one?

https://www.amazon.com/Little-Bill-Book-Beginning-Readers/dp/0590521616


Or this one?

https://www.amazon.com/Scary-Night-Little-Beginning-Readers/dp/0590514768

https://www.amazon.com/Tough-Target-Street-Smart-Guide-Staying/dp/0788169092

Heard about this one called The Comedians on the Dana Gould Hour podcast and he spoke highly of it, but I haven't read it yet.

http://www.amazon.com/Relation-Unconscious-Standard-Complete-Psychological/dp/0393001458

Poking A Dead Frog

Instead of being a step by step guide on how to write comedy, which in my opinion is a terrible way to write, it's mainly conversations with some of the top comedy writers along with a couple extra tidbits ( Bill Hader's 200 essential comedy movies to watch)

If you enjoy his comedy, you will enjoy his book too.
It is about his life growing up as a troubled a child who grew up in a bad neighborhood, had deaf parents, and had substance abuse problems.

http://www.amazon.com/Kasher-Rye-Oakland-Criminal-Patient/dp/0446584266/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1411066596&sr=8-1&keywords=kasher+in+the+rye