Is there any specific training you can do to become a stand-up?
There are specific techniques that you can learn for stand-up comedy. In 1998 or 1999, I set up a comedy school with a friend of mine called Keith Palmer. There are a lot of stand-up comedy courses out there which teach you things like similes i.e. talking in pictures. They train you in things like 'the list of three': where you say one thing, a second, and the third is the odd one out. These stand-up schools teach you things about sarcasm, such as making comparisons such as comparing today with yesterday: "Oh, they never had..." i.e. "Oh, kids have got mobile phones whereas we used to have two Heinz baked bean tins with a piece of string running through it." During stand-up comedy you can make like comparisons like that. There are performance techniques as well: how you use your body during stand-up comedy; how to utilise your voice because if you go up in volume it creates a certain amount of excitement, and if you bring it really down low it can create a lot of tension. We set up a stand-up comedy school to provide training of these techniques, which we took into the art colleges, which we took into the prisons, which we took to the community centers. It's quite successful actually.
