Pushing Boulder: A Mark-umentary

I love watching content about comedians developing their material, as a comedian I find I get a lot out of it. Mark Normand again provides some valuable insights, life on the road, in a documentary that follows 10 shows in an attempt to refine jokes and work punchlines.

Some great bits I got from the show:

Do, don't tell

I did the do not tell because before I was telling it.
"Once you have sex with an animal, it's so much easier than a woman. A woman you got to buy dinner and drinks and a movie"
So then I just did the do.
"You want to go out sometime? Let's go to the zoo. The animals are there, my ex is there"
So I'm just doing instead of telling

If you get groans from the audience instead of laughs

A groan means you're onto something (Dave Attell)
So you're not there, but you're getting there

Specials that suck

Every special you see that sucks is like,
"Oh, if you only spent another six months on that," or, "Oh, she didn't work on that enough."
Or, because comedy is a lot, it's like a a steak where it needs to marinate.
It needs to like roll over and sit for a while and boil and simmer and people just write a joke, they put it out.
Like, no. Jokes's got to coagulate a little. So, uh, that's what this is. This is going to You want to learn something?

Talking about different crowds and what he has learned over the weekend

it's really teaching you about tension like that.
The muscle I'm learning from this weekend is build tension, build tension, and then release. And that's really been working.

You can almost only do that when you're struggling. You can't do that when you're succeeding.
That's a good point. You could pause longer and things like that, but that's about it.

Hard shows

Like a lot of work, but then it just got better and better and better. And I hate to say it, but the hard shows make you better. They make you dig deep.

They make you grind. They make you find something. And uh now you start to wonder, am I better at the end because the crowds got better or because the crowds were bad and it made me better, right?
So, I think it all worked out and I think it was all for the best.

Real reactions from the audience

Being famous is a detriment for comedians.
They're like, "I'm famous." And you notice they get less and less funny because everything gets a laugh cuz they're loved. And you need a real reaction from an audience.
I used to open for Louis CK 8 years ago and he would say, "I'm jealous of you cuz you can you're if you get a laugh, you know it's real." And he's like, "I I'm famous, so I don't know if they're laughing at my fame or my joke

Why some feedback is stupid when you're trying to work out a bit

That's why it's so frustrating. People are like,
"That's not funny."
I'm like, "I'm working on it." Right?

You know, if you saw me jumping off a flight of stairs with a skateboard, you wouldn't be like, "That's a that's not going to work." It will eventually. So, quit yelling at me.