My Favorite Crowd Work Tips

👋 Hey Comedy Fam!

As promised I’m diving deeper on last week’s email and shout out to Isadore B for replying to last week’s email with their favorite tip.

I love hearing from you on what you enjoy about these emails!

So onto my favorite crowd work tips courtesy of my interview with crowd work master Ian Bagg.

1. Practice During Daily Interactions

Real crowd work is learning how to listen to the audience and have a genuine conversation with them. Ian recommends all comics practice having these authentic conversations with strangers off stage to exercise that crowd work muscle for on stage.

2. Crowd Work is Having a Conversation

Most comic’s crowd work impulse is to lead the crowd into your jokes. I know this is something I will still catch myself doing during crowd work. However if you focus on connecting with that crowd member, you will find more spontaneous punchlines that might also become part of your act later.

3. Control the Room

In our interview Ian says, “crowd work is like flying a plane, you’ve gotta be prepared for anything.” Being in the moment and connecting with the crowd gives you the control.

4. Lean into the discomfort

Ian shares an example of a lady bringing up her dead husband and how he steered this moment into comedy. His reply was, “So you’re single? Did he leave you money?” Instead of shying away, Ian leans into the discomfort and creates and escape for both the widow and the audience. He breaks that tension with comedy.

5. Have fun!

If you perform with a fun energy, the audience will reflect that same energy. It’s easy for us to overly focus on every word of our jokes and forget to have fun. Yes you want to kill and have great material, but don’t forget to have fun while on stage. A fun trick I like to do is actually write “have fun” on my set list to remind myself.

💡Reality Check:

Ian has been practicing these tips now for over 30 years and although he is a master today he did not start that way.

You putting the tips into intentional practice now will put you miles ahead of others comics just going on stage and “winging it.”

Comedy is a marathon so just focus on getting 1% better each set and you won’t even recognize yourself in a year from now.

🚨 This week’s livestream was with Ginny Hogan and we have more guests booked in the upcoming weeks.

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