One of my resolutions this year was to try out stand-up comedy. Even though I had a couple of jokes, I didn’t know if I was funny enough.
I decided to go to a comedy show and rate myself against the comics that were performing. For some of the performances, I thought I could do better than the comics. It was at this moment that I decided to go ahead and jump in.
If you ask comics what pushed them to start, a common answer that will come up is that they watched someone on stage and they told themselves: “I am probably funnier than that guy” or “I have better jokes than them”.
This gives you the confidence that you can probably do it because the person that did bad still got a few laughs.
The confidence comes from seeing that the comedian tried even though there was a likelihood that some jokes wouldn’t work.
Once you start doing comedy regularly, you realize that sometimes you will be the comic that spurs someone else to start. It is not because you are a bad comedian but because jokes take time to perfect and someone saw your joke on day one.
By the time a comic realizes this, they have gone up on stage several times and they realized that they liked doing it.