At the end of this month, I’ll be headed to Lisbon for Stand Up Europe‘s next Comedy Festival. And while it will surely be a weekend full of jokes, drinking, and classic comedic tomfoolery, this time I’m there to work!
I’ll be leading one of the several workshops the festival offers, focusing on an essential tool for every comedian: the Voice.
As comedians, we’re ultimately story tellers – just funny story tellers. Our instrument? The body and, maybe even more importantly, the voice.
A good comedian has good jokes, true, but good jokes still need good delivery. There are several key elements to the voice, and control of all them is essential. Volume, speed, pitch, inflection, and diction are all necessary tools of the comedian and all of these begin in the body itself. Beginning with posture and breath-work, we’ll build our voices back up again from scratch before learning to manipulate them in order to create characters, convey tone, and be understood.
Non-semantic cues such as pauses and inflection are crucial in engaging your audience but especially so when both performers and audiences are operating in a second, third, or even fourth language. When you’re working outside your mother language, you have a lot working against you, don’t let intelligibility get in your way! Learning to tell a story with not just words, but with voice, will enhance any comedian’s ability to land the joke, get the laugh, and tell their story onstage.
I’m always happy to be back with the team at Stand Up Europe as I’ve attended their festival as a participant twice before, on location in Frankfurt and Prague last year. A small team, they have built an incredible community of comedians from all across Europe and the world. Every workshop and mic is a friendly, encouraging, fun space to tell your favorite jokes and try new ones. Not to mention to meet a whole bunch of other artists and subsequently make a bunch of new friends!
Artists stick together. And upon planning a European tour, my friend and I (another comic) realized that out of 35 cities, we knew performers and show runners in 30 of them. When I last traveled – to Vienna – I applied for open mics before a friend of mine from the festival asked if I wanted a showcase spot. I said absolutely! He asked if I had 10-15 minutes which I did, then with a couple taps of his phone and a few minutes later he responded, “You’ve got 15min on Tuesday.” I had another comic here in Barcelona put me on his show despite never having seen me perform, just trusting that I knew what I was doing. These are the kind of connections that these festivals foster and these are the kind of connections both business and friendship that everybody needs.