How to Become a Professional Comedian

Don't let anyone tell you it's easy. Comedy is a tough way to make a living, and difficult to master with any kind of success. For every Jay Leno, Ray Romano, Ellen DeGeneres, Jerry Seinfeld and Bill Cosby, there are thousands of stand-up comedians out there trying to make it from the $25-a-night club gigs in Nowhere City to the multi-million dollar contracts for sit-com and Las Vegas stardom.

For example, this oft-used quote may be from Shakespearean times, or even further back to ancient Rome when there were stand-up orators in the original Caesar's Palace. The scene is an old actor on his death bed, and a young man from the troupe asks the venerable one if he feels pain in his last hours. The reply is, "Dying is easy; comedy is hard." Those who choose a career in comedy should realize that their road to success can be a very rocky one. Chances are very high that the road will lead to a dead end.

We often travel to Las Vegas to see a very close relative perform stand-up for a week in a major resort comedy club. He could be a model for any young person who wants to become a professional comedian. He began to hone his creative skills as a writer for his high school newspaper, where he covered news and sports. From the start, he always used humor to tell his stories, and by the time he was a senior, he began to consider becoming a stand-up comedian.

For his first summer before starting college, he worked as an announcer for a local FM station. Although he put in long hours, and rewrote much of the regular news articles that came in, his pay was less than he would have earned flipping burgers. However, he used those months to start a portfolio of his writings, an absolutely necessary tool for any budding comedian or comedy writer to build.

While in college, he worked, also with piddling pay, at a PBS TV station, where he wrote and did on-air reporting and commentary. His college major was communications, which emphasized meeting news deadlines, correct grammar, along with news and feature writing. It was an excellent base for a future in professional comedy.

In college, he joined the debating club and participated in campus stage productions. He wrote many ten-minute stand-up scripts and performed them on open mike (amateur performance) nights at local comedy clubs. He believes his considerable real-life experiences while in high school and college were at least as important as classroom studies. He says it's the best preparation for a career that requires both prepared and ad lib speaking and performing before live audiences. These are the backbone of the comedy profession.

At the same time, he accelerated his college studies, and earned his bachelor's degree in seven semesters. He was graduated at age 19, and had already sent resumes and audio and video samples of his professional-quality work throughout the media and entertainment business. At first, all he could get were one-night stand-up gigs or infrequent freelance writing jobs. Then, after only six months out of college, a producer saw him do his act at a comedy club and hired him as a full-time assistant writer on an afternoon TV talk show. The pay was low, but the real life exposure was invaluable and beginning to pay off.

Let me pause here to emphasize what this close relative has often told me. If you're just starting out, and you believe your open-mike stand-up routine will get you a comedy sitcom and millions of dollars, forget it. Once in awhile, a comedian will get a miraculous lucky break, but chances for almost all new comics run from nil to zilch. The advice is to get any kind of show business job you can, preferably one where your writing skills can be used, so you can make a decent living during the day.

Even if you must take a job as a janitor at a TV station to pay for your rent and groceries, use your time there to soak up the culture of show business and those who work in it. And you'll still have your nights free to improve and improv your skills at comedy clubs, whether the pay is $25 a night or zero. A comedian is like an athlete, and his conditioning is working whenever and wherever he can to develop and improve his on-stage mental muscles.

My close relative continues his career in stand up, and although he isn't a major star yet, he works at it whenever possible. His secret to success, if it is one, is that stand-up comedy is now his avocation. He took that junior TV writer job in his first post-college year, bounced around to other shows, until today he's a well-paid writer-producer on one of the top late night TV comedy shows.

He still uses his stand-up performances to try out new material, observe the reactions of the live audience, and then comes away improved each time as both comedian and professional comedy writer.