Five Life Lessons I Learned from Standup Comics

4)  Social adaption is a valuable skill

From the comedian’s perspective, standup can be pretty brutal. Here they are, exposing their psyche to a group of strangers who dole out immediate aural judgment at the end of each bit. Yikes. And every audience possesses its own unique dynamic; a joke that kills one night could get crickets the next. The best comedians, however, can change their set on the fly if a given bit falls flat. Essentially, reading the audience is part of the job description.

This “know your audience” principal should sound familiar to anyone who has taken a public speaking class, but it doesn’t apply exclusively to business presentations and marketing pitches. In comparison to the person I am today, I was incredibly two-dimensional as a teenager. We all were. But after stumbling out into the real world, I learned how to tailor my personality to fit whatever social situation I found myself in. If you think about it, knowing your audience is a huge part of life in general. Some examples of this are fairly obvious (you probably wouldn’t interact with your granny in the same way as your weed dealer), but I use a bunch of overlapping personas on a regular basis. They look something like this:

5)  Life isn’t fair, but sometimes that’s still OK

As I mention above, standup comedy involves a lot of personal risk, and many comics come from checkered pasts. For the ones brave enough to share their history, we’re graced with brutally honest tales of drug/alcohol abuse (Russell Brand), dangerously absurd family lives (Christopher Titus), and messy divorces (Louis C.K.). These moments can be cringe-worthy at times, but comedians somehow find the humor in ugly situations. Life can suck all over the place, but it’s healthy to pause occasionally and check out all the things that don’t suck; if you can laugh at a bad experience, you can probably get through it.

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