Tapping Your Comedy Muse by Jared Volle

Author:Jared Volle [Volle, Jared]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

Using Feedback to Fuel Creative Flow The second aspect of flow is the ability to get immediate feedback on the evolving work. For short-term goals to be effective, you must be able to determine whether you are getting closer or further away from your desired outcome.

One of the most rewarding aspects of being a comedian is the ability to know exactly how well you are doing while performing on stage. The audience is either laughing or they aren’t. This feedback provides clear goals of what to do the next time you’re working on material. Thus, each time you perform, you enhance your ability to get into flow the next time you write.

However, there is a major problem that comedians face regarding getting feedback. For feedback to help a comedian achieve flow, the feedback MUST be immediate. Usually, a comedian spends a significant amount of time writing and rewriting their material before the material ever gets on stage. Sometimes the time between writing and performing is only an hour or so, but often it can be several days… or even a few weeks! Flow cannot exist for long when feedback is a future activity, even if that future is only hours away. To produce flow, feedback must take place at the same time you are developing your material.

When there’s no immediate feedback, it’s very difficult to be motivated to do anything. How inspired could a comedian be to write material if he had no idea whether he was writing quality jokes or not? He’d write a joke, look back at it to see if it’s funny and think “I dunno.” It’s easy to see how this would drain any inspiration to write another joke.

So how do you get immediate feedback when you’re at home writing on your computer? All great creators do it the same way, they give feedback to themselves. The only way a comedian can give himself feedback is by understanding what leads to great material or a great performance. The comedian that is able to stay in a creative flow is the one that knows how funny each punchline is.

He’s motivated to keep writing because he can see that something special is developing in his material. He knows enough about the industry and the audience to make a reasonably accurate guess at how the audience will react.

This doesn’t mean he’s correct every time. In fact, whether or not the audience laughs is a moot point in the long-run. What’s important is the motivation he feels to continue writing because of the feedback he’s giving himself. If he’s wrong, and the audience doesn’t go along with his new material, he simply learns from the experience. He makes a few changes to his beliefs about what leads to success in comedy and then uses the new, more accurate belief to provide feedback to himself the next time he’s writing. Either way, he wins.

All else being equal, veteran comedians have an advantage over new comedians simply because they’ve been around the industry long enough to learn what works and what doesn’t.

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