10 Good Things: Colin Quinn, Tom Segura, Judd Apatow, Stephen King, and more
A roundup of interesting links and quotes.
💥 Colin Quinn Just Wants to Make Small Talk [New Yorker]:
In the bar, people began singing along with “Take Me Home, Country Roads.” “It’s a weird time,” Quinn said, of the pandemic era. “People are saying weird shit because there’s almost nothing to say and there are no solutions.” Small talk’s little connections—in the elevator, on the subway—are only good. “It’s like two ships that signal each other when they’re passing in the ocean,” Quinn says in the show. “They can’t help each other if a storm comes. But it’s basically saying, ‘Hey, listen, we’re two ships, and we both know all the joy and agony that goes with being ships. I’m just acknowledging you, you know?’ ”
More CQ: Colin Quinn on Comedy in an Era of Political Correctness. He speaks with Hari Sreenivasan to discuss how to be funny in today’s era of political correctness and why he thinks compromise doesn’t work.
💥 Joel Byars #1 piece of advice to young comics: Produce your own show.
A few reasons why producing your own is the FASTEST way to level up your comedy game.
Hosting is the best way to get more comfortable on stage. You learn how to be more conversational and interactive with the audience.
Producing a show teaches you the business side of comedy: how to negotiate pay with a venue, how to market a show and build a local fanbase.
You also learn how hard it is to produce a show so next time you’re at a show you won’t annoy the host about “can you go next?”
💥 Lord bless the partners of comedians, a video from
.💥 Mike Binder on Tom Segura’s latest special and the value of flow.
This is an act. He comes out and he’s performing. He’s putting on a show. He’s letting you in, revealing himself, yes, but he’s doing it as he’s performing a precise, well planned piece…There was no dead air. No lag. No lull. None. It all moves with a great flow…I don’t think you see any of the great specials with any crowd work or even B+routines, the best are all cut to the bone, and all have a flow and some version of a theme. You watch closely you can get the sense that there really aren’t segueways needed because the bits lead into each other organically, as they’re all of a piece.
💥 Neal Brennan’s building blocks to comedy success: Be fast. Be funny. Don’t get too famous.
“Comedy now has fewer gatekeepers and an almost infinite amount of gates. In some ways, the YouTube algorithm and the Instagram algorithm are the bookers now, but it still favors the same s—. It’s about having a sticky premise and memorable jokes, but you have to be way faster. People in my generation will release specials, and it’s like, ‘Oh, dude, all of these premises were done six months ago.’”
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