10 Good Things: Jerry Saltz, Albert Brooks, Mel Brooks, Jerry Seinfeld, Paul Graham, etc.
Finding your voice, crossing "the line," Albert/Mel Brooks, “the second rule” of improv, and more
🔗 Jerry Saltz’s 33 Rules for Being an Artist offers this idea on how to find your voice.
Make an index, family tree, chart, or diagram of your interests. All of them, everything: visual, physical, spiritual, sexual. Leisure time, hobbies, foods, buildings, airports, everything. Every book, movie, website, etc. The totality of this self-exposure may be daunting, scary. But your voice is here. This will become a resource and record to return to and add to for the rest of your life.
🔗 Casey Michael Henry: The only line comedy shouldn’t cross is the no-laughter line.
Yet comedy requires passage into the ugly, uncomfortable areas of the human heart, particularly in a live forum. So, in the manner of jesters before medieval kings, comics need a temporary pass, a stay of execution, to do their work. Calling oneself a comedian is tantamount to issuing a personal-injury disclaimer. Like philosophical BDSM, the audience’s response gives signals to the performer in play. Stand-up audiences trust the stunt pilotry of the comedian – to watch the looping-through-obstacles of apparent offence into a broader pay-off.
🔗 Albert Brooks does a late night set about running out of material:
🔗 The radical idea that people aren't stupid by Adam Mastroianni (“the second rule” of improv).
The second rule of improv you learn, right after “Yes, And,” is: “treat your scene partner like a genius.” Don’t just grit your teeth and agree to whatever your partner says because it’s improv and you have to—instead, fall in love with their choices. If they place the scene in 1830s London, that’s where it should be. If they endow you as their two-timing girlfriend, what a gift!
🔗 Paul Graham on useful writing
Useful writing is bold, but true.
It's also two other things: it tells people something important, and that at least some of them didn't already know.
Telling people something they didn't know doesn't always mean surprising them. Sometimes it means telling them something they knew unconsciously but had never put into words. In fact those may be the more valuable insights, because they tend to be more fundamental.
🔗 Write for at least two hours every day, even if you don't publish what you write. (From Matt Zoller Seitz’ advice to young critics.)
Writing is like athletics. The more you do it, the stronger and faster you become. Try to get to the point where you write better than anyone who writes faster than you, and faster than anyone who writes better than you. If two hours a day sounds like too much time, it means you don't really want to do this for a living and should do something else instead.
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