Saturday, May 19, 2012

How Improv Comedy Can Help Improve Standup Comedy

August 19, 2010 by  
Filed under improv comedy ideas

Improv comedy is a free-form of standup comedy. Some of the most notable stand-up comedians got their starts either as actors or doing improv. Improv is a way to learn how to make things up as quickly as you possibly can without having to stick to a scripted out act that sometimes can get boring or repetitive. Improv is a way to help you build your standup comedy routines and to increase your creativity.

Standup comedy is a form of comedy that is typically done in front of an audience live, but most standup comedians’ script out what they are going to say before the night of the performance. Sometimes you might see on the television channels that feature standup comedians that the comedian has a small paper that they will set on the table with their water. This is a way for them to keep track of what order their routine will go in. You also see this technique with speech makers.

This is fine for some comedians because this is a way to keep on track, but sometimes even after scripting out what you are going to say things can go wrong and this is where improv comedy will come in handy. If you have worked on your improv skills, you will be able to come up with something to say at that very moment and if you do it correctly the audience will not even know that you had made a mistake.

The best standup comedians can keep the audience laughing throughout the show. So if you can add improv this will help you be able to keep your act going without any pauses and can leave your audience guessing what you are going to say next.

If you are a standup comedian that has not applied for any improv classes, it might greatly benefit you to do so. Improv classes will help you be able to feed off of a group of people and how to make up things quickly as you go along. They will give you the tools that you need when you get stuck in certain situations on the stage and be able to also feed off the crowd on what you should say next to keep your comedy funny.

This is something that everyone that is looking for a career in the comedy field should look into because it has some of the tools that might be harder for someone to be able to do on their own. It will also help you learn how to perform in front of large crowds.

Sometimes this can be the scariest part for a comedian. The comedy part might come naturally but when it comes to large groups of people watching, this can cause you to clam up. There might be times that you bomb in a comedy club and this is the time that you can use some of your improv skills to come up with something funny quickly. If you just stop and just say “I am not going to keep going” then you are giving up on your career.

Some comedians like Andy Kauffman and “Carrot Top” used improv in their form of comedy and made it fun. Kauffman was able to do a comedy that was not like anything that was ever seen at the time and though he seemed to be an awkward man, he made things up that made his shows comical. Carrot top used props to help him come up with how his routine would go. These types of things all derive from improv comedy and are things that you can learn from to make your standup comedy a success.

In short, improv comedy can help you to learn how to work with a crowd and get them to keep laughing throughout your show.

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