10 ways to learn story telling and what can standup comedy teach you about story telling
1. Learn from the Masters
I would say, to start with, watch Louis CK. He's a master at telling stories that go nowhere and make you laugh hysterically. Here is one of his routines:
2. Observe life around you.
Now turn each into a story (even if they are very small stories). Now tell them to someone else. See how they react. If they are not laughing or smiling then try again and see what happens next time around.
By telling and re-telling small stories like this you will learn many lessons about the structure of storytelling which will help when you have bigger stories to tell later on in your life.
For instance, one of my earlier comedy bits was about going to a restaurant with my dad and ordering a hamburger for him but not knowing what kind of hamburger he liked so I just ordered every single hamburger on the menu hoping one would be good enough for him to eat it so I wouldn't have to take him out again (this is true by the way).
That's a simple story but I learned many lessons about storytelling from it such as: don't use too much setup before starting the story (the set up was "I took my dad out for dinner" which is boring compared to the rest of the story), keep it simple, don't try too hard to make people laugh because it won't work and will make people uncomfortable, use personal stories rather than made up ones (personal ones seem more real) , etc...
The more you tell these little stories, the more comfortable you get with telling stories which in turn makes it easier for you to tell bigger stories later on in your life when they come along. Or even better - maybe these little stories will turn into bigger ones later on in your life as well!
3. Don't try too hard
There's nothing wrong with trying something new and then failing at it but that's how we learn things
through failure and experimentation
so embrace failure
This is why comedians do open mics all the time
there's no pressure there since nobody knows who they are so they can experiment all they want without feeling judged or scared that their career might be over if they fail there (which 99% of them do)
But still, even after doing open mics for years, comedians still experiment all the time because there's always new ways to improve their act or new material that might work better than old stuff that didn't work as well as hoped
4. Ask yourself "why" several times while telling a story until eventually you run out of answers which means now you know everything there is to know about this particular event in your life (and hopefully an audience will also understand e
5. Be honest
Then I started going up 2-3 times per week and experimenting with different combinations of those 1000 jokes until finally finding an act that worked for me
But here's what nobody
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