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Punchlines can take a while
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Content needs to have a formula
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How comedy applies to content creation
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How to engage in your video content
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How can I grab attention?
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Condense with Value
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Comedy And Video Content
Hey, everybody, it’s Craig with Clipscribe. I want to talk to you about creating video content and what you can learn from stand-up comedians about how to create video content that gathers and keeps people’s attention. Comics are great at this or they have to be good at it if they want to have success in this kind of career.
What I Learned From My Stand-Up Classes
Several years ago I decided I wanted to take stand-up comedy classes and I wanted to try my hand at stand-up comedy. It’s not anything I wanted to do for a job, but I wanted to see if I could do it because it’s kind of a bucket list thing. So I ended up taking some classes and everything, and we started doing some stand-up. I got in with a group of guys and we even rented out a theater a couple of times and did shows there. It was a lot of fun.
But in the process, I learned about this guy Steve Roy who has a course online called "Killer Stand Up". Something this guy taught impressed upon me and still I think about it today. It can be applied to creating video content, really, anything where you need to gather attention.
Storytelling – The Difference Between The Great And The Bad
People start out doing stand-up comedy a lot of times because they have been told over the years they’re funny. They have stories to tell. They’ve told stories and people encouraged them because they’re funny. I saw that a lot in the class that I took. I did it myself. We would just get up and you would start telling a story.
The problem with the story is that there might have been a great punchline to your story, but it could take a while before you get there. Your friends and family know you and love you. They care about you and they can wait. Maybe you’re hanging out one night at a restaurant or at home and so it’s okay, they don’t mind waiting for that punch line. But when you’re in front of an audience and you’re doing stand-up comedy, they’re expecting to laugh a lot.
The Formula To Retain Attention Effectively
Waiting to get through that entire story is not going to work. So what he taught is that even if you have a story that’s funny, you have to fill that story with comedy and jokes with punchlines. They have to be in there and what he taught was that you have to use a formula. It breaks down to something like you need to measure how many laughs per minute you are getting from the audience, and how much of the audience is laughing. Something along the lines of, if you want to be a headliner, you want to go up at a club and get people to buy tickets, you need to have around 5-6 laughs every minute.
I think something like 80% of the audience needs to be laughing those five or six times. So when I heard that, it totally blew my mind. I was looking at doing comedy all of a sudden when you realized in one minute, that’s basically every 10 seconds or so, 80% of the crowd needs to be laughing at something that you said, that changes the game completely.
Now you realize you can’t just sit here and tell a two-minute-long story that eventually gets to a punchline. You have to be doing something that makes them laugh every 10 seconds, basically. The game changes and you have to rethink how you do everything when it comes to doing your stand-up comedy.
How The Formula Affects Content Creation
How does that apply to creating video content? That’s just a reminder for all of us that if we think we’re just going to get up and just talk for 5-10 minutes about a subject that we think is important or something that we think others are going to care about. You want to rethink that.
Start trying to systematize it. How can I grab and keep attention? What can I do throughout my video content? Can I shorten it? Can I pack it? Can I edit stuff out that’s fluff or useless stuff? What can I do to ensure that those few minutes that I talk on video are going to grab and hold the attention of the person that’s on the other side of the screen?
Challenge
That’s my challenge for you today. Take that, and apply it to whatever type of marketing you’re going to do, but especially if you’re creating video content, and try to condense it down to something that just hits and provides value very quickly.
Thanks for reading. Let me know if you have questions I would love to help you out. If you need help creating videos like this, check out Clipscribe.Com because it can definitely help you amplify your message. It’s got everything you need to create video content that will grab and keep the attention of the people that are watching you in the feed. Thanks, everybody. It’s Craig Lillard and I’ll see you in another post.