Writing a 5-minute stand-up routine is tough. However, it’s absolutely essential. For a variety of reasons, I believe that the first tight 5 minutes of a new comedian’s stand-up comedy act are without a doubt the most significant stand-up comedy material that they will “create” or develop…
During the crafting of the first tight 5 minutes, the new comic will begin to effectively tap into their “stage voice” — also known as that comfort zone that permits them to be who they truly are on stage rather than performing their “impression” of what a comedian should be.
It is a comedian’s confidence in their first tight 5 minutes of stand-up comedy content that will lead to the innovation of fresh stand-up comedy material.
I suppose I should illustrate what exactly is meant by a tight 5 minutes of stand-up comedy material that doesn’t receive 1-2 little chuckles every minute. In the realm of stand-up comedy, this is referred to as bombing.
What Does it Mean To Have a “Tight” Stand-Up Comedy Performance?
Each performing minute, a tight 5 minutes of stand-up comedy material creates an average of 4-6+ cumulative audience laughter.
While that may appear to be a fairly straightforward milestone to achieve on the surface, it is crucial to remember that many young comedians are never able to compose or produce a tight 5 minutes of stand-up material that gets significant laughs when delivered.
One simply needs to spend a year hanging out at comedy open mic nights to understand why I can say that.
I recall vividly telling myself after a few of my first stand-up comedy performances:
“How does a person even come up with 5 brilliant minutes of stand-up comedy material?”
At the time, it felt like a huge undertaking, especially given all of the effort I had put in to get the lousy “jokes” I ended up with.
Like most new comedians, I was writing my stand-up comedy in a literary sense (for a reader) while ignoring one obvious and critical fact:
Attempting to develop stand-up comedy material in a literary style is similar to attempting to thinly slice beef with a butter knife. To complete the work efficiently, a different type of knife is required.
Before I get into the characteristics of a tight 5-minute stand-up comedy routine, here’s some background information:
If it seems to be a lot, consider this:
When a comic performs, the audience laughing eats up the time — time that the comedian is not executing their act.
So, in essence, a 5-minute stand-up comedy routine, one-quarter to one-third of the minutes a comedian is on stage is unavailable for delivery due to crowd laughter.
In other words, a comedian performing a 5-minute set has only 4 1/2 to 4 3/4 minutes to deliver the set-up lines and punchlines required to produce 20-30+ laughs in that time frame.
You might even consider the following:
A comic performing a 5-minute stand-up comedy routine will utilize less than 100 words per minute to create 4-6+ audience laughs per performing minute.
It should go without saying that if a comic wants to execute a tight stand-up comedy act, they must understand what they are doing when it comes to crafting and delivering a routine that will elicit significant audience laughs.
What astonishes me to this day is that none of the popular standup comedy books ever note anything about levels of laughter, punchline frequency, or laughter intensity when it comes to formulating a stand-up comedy routine that delivers great and frequent laughs (note that I said the word “crafting” and not “writing” a stand-up comedy act).
Answer the following question for yourself:
How can a comic advance if they don’t know how to create and perform a stand-up routine that generates 4-6+ laughs per minute?
The truth is that they do not.
What I can say is this:
Your opening 5 minutes of stand-up comedy should be as tight and effective as possible.
Each performance should be recorded and examined in order to increase performance until your first 5 minutes are a spectacular 5 minutes.
You can even use your smartphone now (with tools you most likely have already loaded) to objectively analyze how tight your stand-up comedy routine is.