10 Good Things from Lin-Manuel Miranda, Eminem, Seinfeld, Phoebe Bridgers, Patton Oswalt, & Bruce Lee
"They’re not laughing at you, they’re laughing with each other." And more...
🔗 To be successful you have to study crap, according to Lin-Manuel Miranda:
“I can’t tell you how many times I’ve gone to see a bad musical. You want to check out, but that’s exactly when you can’t,” Miranda insists. “The thing you have to do is not turn off your critical faculties when something banal is happening. That’s when you go, ‘What is fucking this up for me?’ And you will learn. You can be just as inspired by what not to do.”
🔗 Eminem on writing: “When I write, I write the things that I think of. I think a lot of other people think the same things I do too, they just don’t say it.”
🔗 Rich Hall on the truthful kernel: “All jokes are manipulative, and audiences laugh when you reach a truthful kernel with the lie.”
🔗 Jerry Seinfeld’s 10 funniest jokes (well, according to one writer). Always loved this one:
I’ll tell you what I like about Chinese people … They’re hanging in there with the chopsticks, aren’t they? You know they’ve seen the fork. They’re staying with the sticks. I’m impressed by that. I don’t know how they missed it. A Chinese farmer gets up, works in the field with the shovel all day … Shovel … Spoon … Come on … There it is. You’re not plowing 40 acres with a couple of pool cues.
Pool cues is such perfect pull.
🔗 Musician Phoebe Bridgers on how she used to handle being ignored onstage: Get quieter. “I’d turn into a crazy person -- close my eyes and sing even more quietly. It freaks out the audience and suddenly they’re paying attention.”
🔗 Decent list of 50 basic standup tips.
You don’t have to be in Los Angeles or New York to be discovered (see “Get good. Then get seen”). Far too often new comedians will move to these cities in hopes that they’ll soon be discovered (very soon, cause rent is usually horrific). Instead, they find that there are TONS of comedians doing the same thing and it’s difficult to actually stand out. Hone your craft in your own city and move only when people keep asking you why you’re still staying.
🔗 Patton Oswalt: Don’t be surprised when that dark comic is healthy and that friendly comic is awful.
Some of the friendliest, most harmless-seeming, and non-offensive comedians carry around some pretty horrific mental plumbing. The comedians I’ve known who joke about rape—and genocide, racism, serial killers, drug addiction, and everything else in the Dark Subjects Suitcase—tend to be, internally and in action, anti-violence, anti-bigotry, and decidedly anti-rape. It’s their way—at least, it’s definitely my way—of dealing with the fact that all of this shittiness exists in the world. It’s one of the ways I try to reduce the power and horror those subjects hold for me.
🔗 Bruce Lee on flow:
🔗 The writing on Cheers was so good.
🔗 They’re not laughing at you, they’re laughing with each other.
According to neuroscientists who study laughter, it turns out that chuckles and giggles often aren't a response to humor—they're a response to people.
"Most of the laughter we produce is purely social," says neuroscientist Sophie Scott. "Laughter is a very good index of how we feel about the people that we're with."