Feedback: Friends, Family and Other Foes

When you have exhausted yourself you need to widen your circle and bribe your friends and family to listen to your stuff.

Pros

They are your friends. They know and like you already. So they will give you a lot more leeway when it comes to making mistakes.

You can directly ask them questions about your material.

You will finally know who your REAL friends are.

You can control the when and where and who.

Cons

They are your friends. They know and like you already. So there will be some laughter because it’s you and not because your joke was actually funny.

Depending how well you handle your feedback it can become a nuisance to give you feedback. And even if you handle ten minutes of silence with the grace of butter sliding down a hot glass roof top you can only bother them so much before it becomes a burden to be asked to listen to you.

Luckily there are ways to remedy the Cons. Here are some tips to get the most out of your friends.

Three Questions Rule

One way to get the feedback you want and to not overwhelm your friends is to restrict yourself to three questions per person. It will force you to think about what exactly you want from feedback and also minimize unwanted, confusing or simply too much feedback.

Some questions you could ask:

Was anything unclear?

Which was your least favourite bit?

Which part should I expand?

Make it an event

Make it an event. The wonderful comedian Mike Birbiglia invites his friends and colleagues to a feedback and pizza party. You can read your script and they get pizza. It’s a classic win/win situation.

Develop a system to evaluate your material

You need to develop a shorthand to evaluate your material. I primarily use three symbols to rate an audiences response to my jokes.

A tick means they laughed. (The bigger the laugh, the more ticks a joke will get.)

A wiggly line means they were some laughs and it maybe deserves some work and a second chance.

An X means crickets. Ear deafening silence. Kill the joke. Kill it good. It was never your darling to begin with.

But please feel free to develop your own system. I know of comedians who use an ABC rating system and they only keep the A material after a tryout. Others I know use markers (green for excellent, yellow for “needs work”). Just use a system that is simple and effective. Or at least one that works for you.

Comedy Writing Partner

Get yourself a comedy writing partner and feedback each others work. I would recommend using a rating system (1 - 10) instead of simply saying funny or not funny which can be quite hurtful.

(If you can’t or don’t want to meet up you can just email your material. One system I use is to mark the funny bits bold and what could be made better cursive.)

A good way of getting feedback from your comedy partner is reading it out loud without any emphasis, without selling it.

“But shouldn’t I really sell my jokes?”, I hear you ask.

Well, somewhere I picked up this little gem of a saying:

“It’s joke telling, not joke asking.”

Which I consider to contain a lot of truth. So when you are in front of an audience say it like you mean it. It’s show business. So show’em that you mean business.

But your comedy writing partner is not a real audience. So a good way to test the strength of a written joke is saying it as neutrally as you can. If your comedy writing partner still laughs, the joke most probably has legs and will probably go over swimmingly with your actual audience later.

Social Media

If you write one-liners consider posting some of them online. The resulting amount of likes could give you an approximation of an idea of how funny your material is.

The Maria Bamford Method

Maria Bamford is in my opinion one of the best comedians of all time. She also has an interesting rehearsal technique: She asks strangers to meet up with her in a coffee shop where she will perform her show for just one person.

And when I say strangers I say fans of her comedy. I’m not sure if she uses this to just rehearse her show and make learning the jokes by heart easier or if she actually uses it to gauge the validity of her jokes as well.

Either way it’s a good strategy to not be afraid of silence on your next Tinder date.