at&t customer service - YouTube thanks appreciate this guys :) :D
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at&t customer service - YouTube thanks appreciate this guys :) :D
i got another joke here Indian psychiatrist - YouTube THANKS GUYS :)
that was a fuckin trainwreck, bro. Like it was really really bad. Disgustingly bad. I don't think this is for you, kid. And I'm being honest with you because I care, and if you want to go into that business you're gonna have to hear a lot of brutal honesty, and it's not always constructive, and you'll deal with endless rejection. All I'm gonna say is, find a new career path, go to college and get a skill or something. You're not cut out for it at all. That's my two cents...
While I agree with crazy bone, I thought some more constructive analysis might be helpful here.
I haven't tried performing standup comedy myself yet (it's in the books though), but I HAVE done a bunch of improv (think "whose line is it anyway"), and I've watched a lot of standup as well, so I do have some basic understanding of what's going wrong here.
1) You had a pretty good indian accent going there. But the accent is NOT what makes Russell Peters funny (I'm assuming he's kind of your inspiration here).
2) It really wasn't that funny... like, there weren't any exaggerations or surprises (the stuff that makes funny jokes funny). So really, I was just getting irritated at the phone tech character. It made me more angry than anything haha.
2a) Actually, the one clever thing I actually liked in there was when the guy says, "he's not very good... I think he's... Indian" :D
3) It kind of went on and on. In improv, they use the term "waffling" for "not making the damn scene go forward." So instead of doing something interesting and escalating/advancing the plot, it was just stagnating the entire time. At the start, we had customer being misunderstood by shitty tech support, and at the end, we had customer being misunderstood by shitty tech support. Make it GO SOMEWHERE!!!
Just a quick example. I saw this really great improv show in Montreal, but for some inexplicable reason, this one guy, in this one scene, created a horrible trainwreck. Here's the premise:
- Guy is sitting at a coffee shop, with a freshly-bought cup of coffee
- Cup of coffee starts talking to him (another performer, off-stage, with a mic basically)
The scene had some GREAT potential. The coffee cup voice was all hot and horny. The guy should have played into it, and talked about "taking her top off" and "dipping in his stirring rod" and "creaming it" and stuff hehe. Instead, for the entire awful 4-5 minutes, he was stuck on, "but you're a coffee cup, you CAN'T talk!"
And you could visibly see the audience getting frustrated with the scene. I think the same kind of thing is happening here. For 4 minutes, you're doing basically the same thing, and it wasn't all that funny the first time to begin with. It was just a kind of non-funny retelling of a story we've all experienced and been frustrated with.
To finish, I thought I'd show you two examples from Monty Python, just to show that happens even to the best. One scene I hate cause it goes fuckin nowhere, and one scene where there's a similar "conflict between client and professional" but that's really entertaining to watch, and actually goes somewhere.
Scene 1: The Job Interview sketch
Maybe it's just me, but I got really bored watching this scene.
Scene 2: Flying Lessons
This is the same kind of stagnant bickering, but it's escalating the whole time, so it remains interesting. And then when it's about to kinda become less interesting, they rightfully cut it off and move on to something different.
Here's a random other one:
The premise throws you off, which adds in some free "initial funny" and what carries it through is that it doesn't stagnate - it kind of evolves, and the "current game" that's being played is always changing, which keeps it interesting (though this one is really absurd - the same principle applies for a serious scene, so you don't need the absurdity).
If sketch comedy is what you're interested in, take some classes, meet some people, and form a troupe and start messing around.
If standup is what you're interested in, you might be able to find some classes, and just watch lots of standup and notice things that make them funny. When you watch something and laugh, what is it about the comment that made you laugh? How is the wording different from the same statement, in a way that does not make you laugh?
Some stories are inherently funny and just write themselves. However, some stories are NOT funny by themselves, unless you inject some funny, maybe with how you word things, or by noticing something really odd about it. In your first clip, you retold a non-funny story, but didn't really make it interesting/funny. I hope this helps some.
I think you spelled "aspiring" wrong.
I know you did.
The argument sketch is my favourite Monty Python sketch, next to the cheese shop.
It might just be me, but it seems there's something in your voice limiting the humor. But I'm not sure what it is. It might be the fact that you're young and have a teenage voice-crack going on, preventing your imitation from being believable. That problem should go away once you grow older of course, and there isn't anything you can do about it now.
Yeah the argument sketch is pretty awesome. :)
If I had to do a bit about at&t, I wouldn't spend the whole time just immitating. I'd just be narrating the story, and only doing the immitation after narration sets the stage. So like, maybe 30% of it MAX would be the actual immitation. Cause remember: Emotions are contagious, and the two emotional states in the at&t clip here are:
1) Being an asshole (the support guy)
2) Being irritated (the customer)
Compare this to how Russell Peters tells his classic "beat your kids" story. First, he doesn't just do the impersonation - he spends copious amounts of time telling the story, and as he does, he sets a good-humour mood, so all of a sudden, the audience is watching a story about a kid getting the shit kicked out of him by his dad through the lenses of "haha let's laugh at the past cause it's over" :)