Generating ideas for stand-up comedy is difficult at the best of times. Just about any topic is open game, but that freedom doesn’t make joke writing easier. If anything, the brain needs constraint to help focus the creative muscle. Here’s four constraints that we use at the Hard Knock Knocks comedy school to help our students generate ideas for stand-up …
Comedian Katie Burch didn’t want to work at NASA or work towards world peace. She wanted to be a comedian, and a dark comedian at that. In this 100th episode of the School of Hard Knock Knocks podcast, host Steve Davis chats with former National RAW Comedy Finalist Katie Burch about what it takes to be a successful comedian, her …
There’s many ways to write a joke. At the Hard Knock Knocks stand-up comedy school, we teach three. Our favourite joke structure is the Normal-Normal-Twist. The Normal-Normal-Twist takes the audience on a familiar journey and then suddenly zigs sideways, with a surprise. And no, we didn’t invent this. It’s been used by comedy greats for aeons, even Jerry Seinfeld. Seinfeld demonstrates …
