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Zen and the Art of Stand-up Comedy

by Jay Sankey

Can you imagine anything more challenging than getting up on stage all by your lonesome, positioning yourself in the centre of a blinding spotlight with little more than a glass of water to set down on a solitary stool, and then spouting lines that will spark riotous laughter in a room filled with jaded, overstimulated folk? Imagine now, if you will, that you have placed yourself in that spotlight with your glass of water, and that you’ve begun firing off your sparks only to have them ring silently around the room. Is there anything more excruciating? Many young comedians have experienced this very torture at the hands of an audience desperate to reward them with a laugh. These aspiring stand-ups should turn to Jay Sankey’s Zen and the Art of Stand-Up Comedy.

Sankey has been performing comedy for two decades on many national shows and in numerous clubs, so he should know. He offers advice, in this pithy little book, on everything from what material will work, to how to deliver it – from how to insert the segues between jokes, to what to wear and how and where to set down your glass of water – reminding us all along that “you have the power you do because the audience has given it to you. Act ungratefully or suggest you don’t care about their feelings, and they will take that power back. Quickly.” As with every other art form – with the notable proviso that this art form rewards and punishes its practitioners immediately and with equal force – the best in the field are those who make it all look easy: those who have polished the excess fat off their jokes; those who have dispensed with lines flattened by complexity: those who have learned to string the gems of their collective shows into a simple but elegant necklace everyone will admire.

The “Zen” of the title refers to the state you must be in to succeed on stage, you must neither show “strain” nor be “restrained,” Sankey tells us. There must be “no sense of division between how you feel and what you do. No sense of division between your character and your material. No sense of division between you and the audience.”

 

Reviewer: Joseph Kertes

Publisher: Routledge

DETAILS

Price: $22.99

Page Count: 216 pp

Format: Paper

ISBN: 0-87830-074-0

Released: June

Issue Date: 1998-6

Categories: Reference