Twenty-five years ago I got myself an open-spot at the venerable Bearcat comedy club in Twickenham, greater London. I was at university as a mature-ish stude...

The role of the compere (or emcee/MC) is a crucial one in a stand-up comedy night and the compere has many things to do as the night unfolds. One part of the...

Hecklers often believe that heckling is all part of the fun and that comedians welcome it and that it helps them. While there are some comics who relish taki...

For this the twenty-second lesson I thought I’d speak to a couple of working comics. To get a broad perspective I spoke to one newer act, James Ryan, and one...

In the last lesson I discussed Set List, the entirely improvised stand-up night. In this lesson, I’m discussing the use of “games” in improvisation - and I’l...

I'd been planning a lesson on persona and inspired by a question from a reader of my blog Ronan Anderson, I have combined the topic with improv. He said: “I'...

In this bumper blog we’ll see pretty much everything we’ve discussed about stand-up writing in a two-and-a-half minute Jerry Seinfeld routine. Yes almost eve...

Mark, a stand-up student of mine on my intermediate new material course, asked me to say more about what he termed ‘comedy metaphors’, where a comic finds a ...

Twenty five is a nice neat number isn’t it? It’d be a shame if it were ‘27’ lessons – hence me combining these three topics. I think I can justify the combin...

In the last few lessons we've been exploring transpositions. Let's end this exploration on personification. Also known as anthropomorphism, this is where som...

In the previous lesson we discussed transpositions. We’re going to develop this idea and look at a common comic effect that can be achieved through such tran...

In the previous lesson I discussed the importance of going beyond what actually happened, and going into playful speculation. In your stand-up, don’t just ta...

Comedy, and all creativity, begins with questions. What takes you into comic territory, rather than literary or dramatic territory, is that your answers are ...

A stand-up will send me a video of their set and I will watch it, meeting them subsequently to discuss my observations on their material and performance, and...

How do you write one-liners? It all starts with words and phrases the comic encounters (or seeks out) in life. One approach to turning a phrase into a one-li...

There’s a problem with true stories in a stand-up context. The long set-up followed by the quick payoff is often the form that anecdotes take; they have this...

In 2007 I interviewed Richard Herring in a Caffe Nero in Hammersmith for the short-lived comedy magazine The Fix. I’d recently seen him perform and was struc...

Let’s zoom in and look more closely at a technique I mentioned in the last lesson: misdirection. I would unconsciously have laughed at misdirection for years...

Now we've explored the wider context — the writing process and, starting the gig itself — let’s get stuck into the nitty-gritty, starting with the basic comi...

Having discussed bespoke material for the gig in the last lesson, I'm going to begin this lesson with the physical practicalities of starting a set and then w...