Enjoy a one-take semi-tipsy video of me sharing all my favorite books about comedy.
Guy Branum, I love you.


Also, Ian Brodie -- I love you and while making this video I realized that I read your book through a library! Gotta get myself a copy for posterity.

Book Mentioned, in order:
- My Life as a Goddess by Guy Branum
- Stand-up Comedy in Theory, Or, Abjection in America by John Limon
- On the Real Side by Mel Watkins
- Born Standing Up by Steve Martin
- Legacy of the Wisecrack by Eddie Tafoya
- Comedy at the Edge by Richard Zoglin
- Make Em Laugh by Michael Kantor
- I'm Dying Up Here by William Knoedelseder
- Reader in Comedy: An Anthology of Theory and Criticism
- Mock Stars by John Wenzel
- Oxford Introductions of Humour and Comedy
- The Comedians by Kliph Nesteroff


Steve Martin quote that I mentioned:
“With conventional joke telling, there’s a moment when the comedian delivers the punch line, and the audience knows it’s the punch line, and their response ranges from polite to uproarious. What bothered me about this formula was the nature of the laugh it inspired, a vocal acknowledgment that a joke had been told, like automatic applause at the end of a song … These notions stayed with me for months, until they formed an idea that revolutionized my comic direction: What if there were no punch lines? What if there were no indicators? What if I crated tension and never released it? What if I headed for a climax, but all I delivered was an anticlimax? What would the audience do with all that time. But if I kept denying them the formality of a punch line, the audience would eventually pick their own place to laugh, essentially out of desperation. This type of laugh seemed stronger to me, as they would be laughing at something they chose, rather than being told exactly when to laugh.”
p.111 of Born Standing Up

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