Should I try stand up?

If you want to write comedy do you have to get involved in all the performance stuff too? Stand up is daunting and surely very far removed from writing a sitcom.

Actually, that’s not true. They are more connected than you might think.

Ray Romano is best known around the world for writing and performing in Everybody Loves Raymond, where he plays a version of himself based on his experiences with family life. You may have heard of it.

Yet in a podcast discussion with fellow comedian Pete Holmes, Ray spends almost the entire time talking about his enjoyment of stand up, and how that is the true marriage and life of a comedian.

Stand up comedy and live sketch comedy allow a comedian to do something that is such a rare privilege on screen. Write, perform, cast, direct, produce and have full creative control of the comedy.

So why wouldn’t you do it?

Writing often doesn’t go hand in hand with getting on stage and performing. It can be uncomfortable, scary. And what if it turns out you aren’t funny after all?

Except that you know you are, because you understood exactly where the beats and comic timing should go when you wrote that script. The difference here is you don’t have to rely on someone else to do it right, you can make sure it is perfect yourself.

There are some obvious advantages of getting on stage too. When writing for someone else it can be difficult to get feedback. When performing your comedy on stage you get it straight away from your target audience. They are actually there and you can see the reaction to your jokes. The testing opportunities are superb. You can tweak a joke here or there and try it again the next night. Or even do exactly the same material and just test whether the audience was the difference.

It also forces you to be on the look out for funny things to include in your set. The best mindset for anyone creating comedy.

Trying other disciplines is about appreciation and flexibility. Don’t rely on someone else to do something until you have some knowledge and experience of doing it yourself. What better way to learn about writing for an actor than to experience performing your own writing, or performing someone else’s writing first?

Here’s another surprising example of comedic flexibility. Henry Normal is famous in comedy for not being famous. He is the writing and production partner of Steve Coogan, and one of the main writers on the superb British sitcom The Royle Family. He is never on screen in either, and yet Henry Normal started out in live performance reading poetry, which is where he now focusses his time.

How about Friends. The biggest sitcom of all time. Written and produced by Marta Kaufmann and David Crane, neither of whom feature in the show. They met in acting college.

And there are many more. In fact most people you can think of in comedy have tried their hand at various roles in writing, performing, directing, and producing at some stage.

There is something to be said for being a master of your specific trade. But increasingly the benefits of being a jack of all trades are coming to light.

If you want to master comedy, there is a whole world out there to explore. Don’t be scared to try it.