| I wish that were true. I've performed stand-up comedy for nine years. I have an MA in mathematics from UCLA. And have been programming since I was a kid. My humor is definitely more on the clever side (http://richardkiss.com/). Unfortunately, stand-up comedy is mostly dominated these by people trying to show how cool and selfish they are. All too often the punch line is a variant of "I'm an edgy and anti-social loser", aka the "I'm a piece of shit" school of comedy (a phrase I coined a few years back). This is often coupled with a careless (carefree?) towards knowledge and fact, and discussion of mundane or trashy details about the comic's life that requires an audacious quantity of (undeserved) confidence to pull off, lest the audience realize they're being hoodwinked into listening to narcissistic drivel. When most comics are not clever, the audience who show up are the kind of audiences who are not interested in clever humor. Clever people go to a comedy show and realize it's not aimed at them. This makes it even more difficult to try to do clever humor that requires the audience to think. Unless you're famous (and bring your own audience), live performances tend to be mass-market/lowest-common-denominator. I find this very frustrating. I wish I could figure out a way to create a business model for comics whose style is not the dominant mode. |