Stand-Up Comedian

>> Ben Rosenfeld: Hi. My name is Ben Rosenfeld. I'm a comedian. And mostly I do standup comedy, but it's -- I'm sure as we get more into it, and I'll discuss it, but like to do standup comedy you also have to do lots of other things in order -- especially while you're coming up in order to like take care of bills and stuff. So in addition to standup comedy, I do improv, I write, I film my own sketches. I film videos for other people. That's an extra source of income. I build websites for other comedians to get some extra income. But primarily standup comedian is the bread and butter of where my focus is. Well, I'm onstage pretty much every night like 2, 3 times a day. So I do most of my shows in New York City, so you can just kind of run around from show to show. So it's not -- you're probably thinking like, "Oh, you drive like 5 hours, and then you prepare for that show." Here you just kind of run from place to place. My daytime is separated from my nighttime, where I kind of view it as like 2 separate jobs, like 1 job is writing jokes, getting the jokes in your head, doing the marketing, responding to emails, doing the bookings, all the stuff you can do at a computer during the day. That's one job. And then the second job is going out to the comedy clubs or those shows, wherever they are, performing and talking to other comedians, talking to the audience so you can build your fan base. And it really feels like it's 2 separate 8-hour-a-day jobs. There's different parts of the creative process. One thing I try to force myself to sit down every day for at least a half hour and either stare into a blank piece of paper until something comes, rewrite something that already exists, or just like popup news items, and like just try to write jokes. But you can't control inspiration, but you can control perspiration. So like sometimes 3 ideas will pop into my head while I'm out. I'll just jot into my iPhone; sometimes nothing for a week. That part you can't control it, just when you get an idea, you put it in. But you can control expanding the idea and working on it. Then it goes to my computer. And I have 3 main files. This is probably completely boring to anyone who's not a comedian. [Laughs] I have Ben's Act, which is the jokes that work. Then I have jokes to sort, which is ideas that are currently forming in different stages that I think are potentially funny, but aren't -- I'm not ready to bring to the stage yet. And then the third one I call it "jokes that are still forming." That's just the polite way of saying "the junk pile, the bone yard." So that's one part of the process, is the direct writing and like figuring out where what goes. A different part is I record either video or audio pretty much all of my performances. I know generally how a show went, but I don't know the specific punch line to punch line. So watching it and like listening to it, you can't dispute the evidence. Like if the third punch line of a joke isn't working for 5 shows in a row, you should drop or change that punch line. So like some of the rewrites will just be like I know this line doesn't work as it is, so I'll just try to brainstorm like a whole page of alternative punch lines; where, you know, and I mean, I've read a lot of books, but like if you just start writing, even if they're like bad at the start, just the process of forcing yourself to keep going, a lot of the times you'll get something that's more usable than what you have. [Silence]