Seek maximum interaction
Thoughts from Jerry Seinfeld, Robert Greene, and Paul McCartney on getting great.
Jerry Seinfeld was once asked about what he’d do if he was conducting a comedy industry workshop. His reply: He’d just gather the comedians into a big room and unfurl a banner that reads, “JUST WORK!”
Perform as much as possible. I mean, write too. But there’s nothing that helps as much as getting onstage and testing material in front of real people.
There is a payoff to doing a lot of shows, even bad ones. Every heckler is another chink in your armor. Every disinterested audience is a challenge: Dig yourself out of this hole. Every hell gig comes with an ace you get to keep up your sleeve: “Well, now I’ve dealt with that.”
In The 50th Law, Robert Greene describes the source of the most powerful works in culture: maximum interaction.
Your goal must be to break down the distance between you and your audience, the base of your support in life. What you are seeking is maximum interaction, allowing you to get a feel for people on this inside. You come to thrive off their feedback and criticism. Operating this way, what you will produce will not fail to resonate because it will come from the inside. This deep level of interaction is the source of the most powerful and popular works in culture.
Comics should constantly be trying to break down that distance. Even at crappy gigs, I try to keep a mindset that I’m there to get work done: Get one crowd member onboard, tag one bit that’s working with another line, etc. And the worst case scenario is abandoning material and doing crowdwork in order to get better at being in the moment.
I remember hearing Paul McCartney say you need to write at least 50 bad songs before you can write a good one. The comedy version: You need to bomb 1,000 times before you can ever be truly great. So each one of those crappy shows is one more step on your journey to a thousand bombs.
Related: Is hustle culture really ruining comedians? [The Rubesletter]