What can I do better?
I’ll admit, when it comes to computers and electronics, I’m a pretty big Apple fan. One thing I admire about them is that they’re always asking themselves what they can do better, but more specifically, what they can do better than anyone else. That means that if they don’t think they can do something better than someone else is doing it, they won’t do it.
I feel the same way about comedy. I was looking over my score sheet last night. I scored the best on originality, and yes, originality is something I think I can do better than 95% of comics out there. When I watch comedy, I’m constantly seeing how things could be more original, and I write more original jokes.
I scored a lot lower on stage presence. But, there’s a lot of comics out there that just have incredible stage presence. No matter how good of a stage presence I have, I don’t think it would be possible to do better than probably 60% of comedians, and even if I got better than 99% of them, it still wouldn’t matter because I feel like there would still be so many at 100%. It’s just not a place that I think I can make a difference by being better.
Furthermore, I feel like stage presence is one of those things that if it’s too good, can actually make you less funny. Sure, you might get more laughs per minute, and you’ll empress most critics, but it will be harder to get what I think of as true laughter, because people will be too impressed to laugh that way. So, stage presence is actually something that I don’t want to work on at all.