Assignment 2 : Stand-up Comedy : Guide to being shameless

For the stand-up comedy assignment, I have chose to portray a part of me that are rather shameless and embarrassing at times. I thought why not to embarrass yourself by being shameless since it has always made people laugh. Though this is not something that I'm completely new to, I think its important you "be yourself" when it comes to stand-up comedies. Because thats where and when you use yourself and with the help of other tools to create a funny atmosphere for your target audience.

The whole idea branched out as a sequel to my first assignment on Self-Portrait where I've photographed the "process of how I am made". 

Therefore for this comedy assignment, I try to adjust the humorous part in me with being awkward when it comes to presenting myself to how some people may see me judging from my 'cold' appearance.

This is my video "performance" on that day :

This is so embarrassing I can't even finish watching it...

Research : Dane Cook

So when I started my research on stand-up comedy I came across Dane Cook. The name wasn't exactly unknown to me nor its well-known. I came across him from a movie a couple of years back and it is a PG18 movie titled "Good Luck Chuck". I advice you to not watch it if you're the type to feel uneasy with explicit contents, but otherwise the movie was good. So this Dane Cook guy is actually an american stand-up comedian and has released several comedy albums.

I took a look at some of his videos to get some inspiration on the upcoming Stand-up Comedy Assignment, and boy was he good!

I realised through the videos he tend to interact more with jokes that relates to people, jokes that actually make sense and that it happens in our everyday life. There was this show on "The friend Nobody Likes" and when he voices out the thoughts that people are actually thinking when they're not talking, is the best part of it all. (Scroll down to the end of the post to listen to the podcast version) It suddenly makes a lot of sense, that we all think the same thing but act the other way round. We all know the same thing but decides to be oblivious about it. The intonation of his voice are what highlights the point of his whole comedic story and he just goes with who he is.

I think its very important that we connect who we are to what we're doing, to how we should be able to reach out to an audience. If we can't be true to the people around us then we as aspiring designers would have a really really hard time trying to fit in with the rest of the world. This time it may be comedy but in the future we'd have a larger array of expectations to meet, a larger crowd to please.