So, you may have heard that I used to be part of a show called the Three Stuffed Mums. The premise of the show was that I was “physically stuffed”, because I had a toddler, Maggie was “mentally stuffed” because she had a teenager and Kehau was an empty nester, and she was telling everyone to “get stuffed!”
Back in 2012, we were touring with Country Arts SA and got commissioned to run a stand-up comedy workshop for the locals in Goolwa SA, as part of their rural arts program.
We got together about two weeks before the workshop, and sat down and asked ourselves, “so what are we actually going to teach these people?” And we had no idea where to start!
Even though there was over 35 years worth of experience, between us, we weren’t 100% sure of how to teach comedy to others, because we’d never had to unpack the process of how we became stand up comedians.
For instance, when I first started my stand up career, I was often under the influence of alcohol. I spent a lot of time drinking a beer (or 5) before each show, trying to muster up enough courage just to walk out on stage! In the early days, I was pretty much in survival mode, focussing on trying to remember my lines, calming my nerves and trying not to throw up or completely freak out!
And when you’re in that flight or fight survival mode, where you’re getting instant feedback from the audience, and it’s pretty much a baptism of fire where if you crash and burn…
You crash and burn properly!
In front of a live audience,
on stage,
with the spotlight on you!
It’s absolutely terrifying.
So as you can imagine, the last thing I was thinking about at that time was “How am I actually doing this? And what’s the best way to teach this to others?!!”
Thankfully, Maggie, Kehau and I had a couple of weeks up our sleeve, so we had time to work out what we were going to do, and we eventually broke it down and worked out what were the essential things we needed to teach everyone as part of the workshop.
We took the workshop participants from week one, where some of them rocked up very nervously going “I signed up for this course, and right now I’m regretting my decision, and I’m not really sure that I should’ve signed up”; to five weeks later getting out on stage and doing their first stand up comedy routine.
And as the proud Mums we are, we were so chuffed as everyone got a standing ovation! And we were proud of ourselves too because what we noticed is that our comedy students had got to a place in about five weeks, that most people take between 12-18 months on the open mic circuit to get to a similar level of skill.
And what we realised at that moment, is that humour is a learnable skill if you have the right guidance and somebody who’s able to teach it. It’s not something that you have to be born with or something you have to miss out on if you’re “not a funny person”. You can learn skills on how to become funny and skilfully use humour.
And the other cool thing is that we got to run the stand-up comedy workshop again the following year, with the same results – to prove to ourselves that it wasn’t just a fluke the first time!
So, if you’ve been thinking about using more humour to gain all the benefits that come from it, just remember, you don’t have to be a “funny person”, and you don’t have to be “born with it”, you can actually learn humour skills.
And to prove it to you, I’m going to be running a free Comedy School for Speakers Short Course, at the end of the year, just to finish off 2020 with some much-needed laughs. If you would like to find out more stay tuned because there’ll be details coming very soon.
Have fun!
Cheers Kate
