How To Become A Stand Up Comedian
How do you become a stand-up?
I actually became a stand-up by accident in truth. I was working in the Holbon Hotel and Art Blakey walked in, the famous jazz musician, and told me and I had a slight resemblance to Eddie Murphy. At the time I didn't have a clue who he was at the time, because ‘Trading Places' hadn't come out yet, '48 Hours' wasn't released and it was through being told I looked like Eddie, fortunately that same weekend my cousins next door neighbor had the video ‘Delirious', which I watched and for the first time I laughed for over 60 minutes straight. I went back to work and said, “I've now seen who this guy was”, and I was quite taken by him and fortunately the people who I was working with in the catering industry, at the Holbon Hotel were actually out of work actors, people who wanted to get into the arts and they told me about a look alike agency' called ‘The Lookalikes' and I contacted them. The next thing I knew I was promoting "Beverly Hills Cop 2" throughout the whole of Scandinavia. So I was doing a lot of look a like work at first, as a Murphy look a like and it progressed, I started to meet up with other look a likes who were also performing as their look a likes. As more requests started to come in for Eddie, I found myself in clubs. Through getting into the clubs I was told “Why don't you get up and do a bit of performing like Eddie?” So I thought “Why not, I can do that”, only to find that I wasn't really happy in Eddies skin – I didn't mind taking photographs as him, but I wasn't happy trying to recreate what he did as a stand up because I found that stand up comedy is a very personal thing. It's about personal experience, therefore me trying to share Eddie Murphy's experiences, utilizing his material, was not effective in no way, shape or form. Yeah I can get up and act like him, I can do the laugh and off of that but once you try and start to get into his routines – it was something that wasn't working for me.
