The Five Minute Spot Assignment

“Five Minute Spot” and Context Memo

Most comedians start out by doing short sets at “open mic” nights.  Later, when comedians land spots on late night television shows they are asked to put together five minutes of their best material.  This final project will be in the spirit of the five minute spot.  Write and prepare to perform a three to five minute set based on the work we’ve done in class.  In addition to performing this set, write a context document that explains your process and how the spot represents work conducted in this course.

IMPORTANT!!

Please note that in order to receive full credit for your Final Project, you must perform AND submit a Context Memo. If I do not receive a Context Memo from you, you will not receive credit for your performance!!!

Performance

3 to 5 minute spot

Limon writes,

the collective experience of humor, like the personal experience of pain, fills its moment and perishes; reflection misprizes it of necessity. (Laughter may be the social equivalent of pain, the group incorrigible.) Third, you cannot be retroactively disabused by a critic. To criticize a joke is to miss it, because the joke, as Freud demonstrates, is, in the first instance, an escape from criticism to a prior happiness. (11-2)

While we’ve spent much of the semester testing Limon’s observations, what we should all be able to agree upon now is that stand-up comedy depends on performance and audience. What we do with the performance, as audience members, afterwards is something very different (just as necessary, I would argue) from what happens in the moment when we collectively experience humor.

It is this experience of humor (as a performer) that this final assignment pursues. That is, what better way to test what we’ve learned—what better way to understand stand-up—than to do it?

So for your final assignment, you will put together material for performance—and then perform.

Given the potentially polemic nature of comedy (again, something with which we are very familiar at this point), I want to establish some ground rules for your performances:

Material must reflect awareness and synthesis of course concepts.

While I don’t expect anyone to perform comedic bits about Judith Butler, I do want your material to be sensitive to and mindful of the bigger issues we’ve discussed all semester. Remember: Stand-up is its own kind of rhetoric, and the words you use, the bits you create, will have ideological significance and reverberations.

Material must be, more or less, original and identifiable as yours. 

No Dane Cooks here, please. While I am fine with material that shows its influences, I want your bits to be original to you and your experiences. This is why I’ve asked you to work on material in your Inquiry Notebooks and test it in front of your classmates.

Material that intentionally courts the polemical must be justifiable within the matrix of our course concepts and readings.

This is a fancy way of saying, if you perform material that’s edgy (from the coarse and vulgar to the potentially racist, bigoted, sexist, homophobic, etc.), you better be prepared to defend it. Think back to our discussions of Daniel Tosh, Sarah Silverman, and Gallagher. If you do material like Tosh or Silverman, then you need to be able to explain the nature and motivation of your rhetoric. 

If you do material like the latter day Gallagher, I will not support it. 

I may even get the hook and yank you from the stage. Finally: Just be careful. You can take risks. I appreciate risk taking. What I don’t appreciate (or support) is stubborn, willful ignorance and bigotry.

Timing is everything! 

While I will likely not penalize you for under-performing, I will penalize you if you go over your allotted time. Everyone needs their stage time; if you go over, this might create problems for those performing later in the evening. So please keep it to five minutes at the most!

Don’t worry, be happy!

I’ve noted on several occasions that your material doesn’t necessarily need to “kill.” So don’t worry about being funny. I will not be grading you based on how much laughter you provoke. You will be graded on two things: Making it through your spot; writing a context memo about your experience. So as long as you can muster the courage to step up to the mic, you’re golden! It’s the experience that matters not the material. So try not to get too worked up over performing.

Your classmates and I support you.

While we can’t be sure how the audience will respond to us, we can be sure that our community of learners is also a community of supporters. For performers: Know that the rest of us support you and have faith in you. For the class-as-audience: Please give your unconditional support to those performing. Show this support by listening, engaging, laughing, and being present in every sense of the word. This is why everyone needs to be present for all performances. We are all obligated to each other.

Context Memo

equivalent of 4-6 pages

The second part of this assignment is almost as important as the first: While performing is, in and of itself, important, reflecting on that performance is also valuable, particularly in determining how the act of performing matches with what we’ve been doing all semester long. Put differently: We’ve been analyzing comedic acts from the outside, peeling back layers of meaning and ideology to find rhetoric and other goodies for intellectual consumption. By performing, we are turning that formula around: We are working from the inside toward the outside.

So, after you perform, I would like you to write a memo, addressed to me, that provides reflection on the experience and connects the experience of your performance to the ideas we’ve been working with all semester.

Your memo should seek to answer some, if not all, of these questions:

What was it like to perform comedy? What was it like to be on stage instead of in the audience?

How did the audience’s reactions affect your performance?

Were you surprised by any of the reactions to your performance?

Did you surprise yourself?

What went well? What didn’t go well? What might you do differently if you had to perform again?

What did you learn from the experience?

Can you perform a rhetorical analysis of your own performance?

What would Judith Butler or Kenneth Burke think about your performance?

Did performing change your perception(s) of stand-up?

Looking back over what we’ve read, watched, and listened to this semester, can you think of anything that directly connects to your experience performing? Did your performance change your mind about anything? Reinforce it?

Your memo should also include references to course materials.

For example: “When I was performing, I thought about Butler’s comments about interpellation and…” You don’t need to worry about citation styles, or using specific quotes (though these would be appreciated).

Your memo needs to address the points I’ve laid out here.

As long as it carefully and honestly addresses these requirements, I will not be concerned with page length or word count. What I want most is sincere and critical reflection.