Your truth is more powerful than your mask
Jordan Peele, Seth Meyers, and Paul F. Tompkins explain the intimacy you get from telling the truth.
Jordan Peele on why the truth works.
I’ve noticed that the truth works. People can feel the truth. If you’re being yourself and you’re just using your own emotions, they can feel it. If you’re doing fake, they can feel it. It took me a while in comedy to realize that your truth is more powerful than your mask.
Seth Meyers recently talked about the power of being genuine, lacking artifice, and how each f*ckup is an opportunity.
Often we just leave in the f*ckups. We leave in things that we would have cut out 1,000% [before]. The most genuine I’m being is how I react to a fuckup, there’s no artifice to it. The great thing is that I’ve been doing the show long enough that, in the first two or three years of the show, a f*ckup would have genuinely made me angry. Now I see it as an opportunity.
How you react to mistakes gives the audience a window into the real you.
And here’s Paul F. Tompkins on the intimacy you get from being conversationally funny:
Being able to make it conversationally funny – it's dressed up a little bit for the stage – but I try to keep it as much like I would talk about it in life as possible. If you have a funny story that you tell, even if you're just hanging out with your friends, you're trying...It's the way you're sharing something with a friend of yours, you're not trying to impress your friend. You're coming at it from a point of view that's 'Wait until you hear this. This is what happened to me.' You're not approaching your friend like they are an audience. There's an intimacy there where you're saying, 'Hey, you're going to appreciate this.' That's the feeling that I'm trying to get to onstage always that we're all hanging out and I'm telling these stories.
The goal is to create this kinda vibe:
We’re just hanging out. I’m being myself. Nothing’s fake. You’re getting the genuine me. I’m talking to you the way I talk to my friends.
Get that across and you’ve already accomplished a lot.
Watch my latest standup special: Substance.