Learn From Your Influences, But Know When to Say Goodbye
Many comedians struggle with their influences. They truly admire a particular stand-up and imitate her style, wanting to be like her. This never works because at best they'll just end up being a faded second-generation copy of the original.
The faster you can shed your influences, the better. That doesn't mean you can't learn from them, but you shouldn't try to be just like them. Watch the acts you admire, and study them. Learn from your observations how the comics interact with the audience, dress, establish their character, organize their set, and make transitions. Look at all the choices they have made. Those are the things that will help you be yourself.
If you don't shed your influences, you'll never improve on them. That sounds almost blasphemous, doesn't it? But shouldn't that be your goal? Or, at the very least, shouldn't you want to be just as good, and get to a point where they admire what you do? You don't want to spend your career living in someone else's shadow, and unless you step out and away from that shadow, you'll never achieve your ultimate goal — being an original.
Take Advice With a Grain of Salt
Once you start performing and getting stage time, you'll receive advice from comics and club owners. In the beginning, listen and take their advice, especially when it comes from club owners and bookers. They know their room best and they've seen what will work and what won't. Listen to them and make changes accordingly.
Take advice from other comics with a grain of salt. Most will just tell you how they would do the joke, and that might not be particularly useful to you. Others will give you advice just for the sake of hearing themselves talk. However, if you get advice from a comic that you truly respect and admire, listen to what she has to say and follow her advice. This type of advice can really help you with your act and your career. You want good comics on your side. They can help you by introducing you to other comics and club owners and they might be helpful in getting you stage time.
If you want to know exactly how Steve Martin became a star, read his 2007 autobiography Born Standing Up: A Comic's Life. In this honest account of how Martin went from working at a magic shop at Disneyland to selling out stadiums and making movies, he doesn't hold back or gloss over the details of how hard he worked to develop his own unique voice.
Once you start doing well consistently and begin to get a sense on your unique persona, trust your own instincts over the advice of others. At some point you have to start trusting your gut, even when it means going against the advice that others might give you. When you know you're right, that you're onto something good, you need to defend your choices and stick to your guns — even if you meet some resistance. After all, it's your career; don't let others run it for you. If you fall out of favor with a club owner for not taking his advice, maybe you and that club weren't such a good match to begin with.
Do Your Homework
When you're writing your first sets, be careful not to accidentally use someone else's material. You're walking a weird line here: you want to watch and listen to lots of comedians, but you also want your own voice, which can get clouded if other comedians' voices are in your head as well. If you have friends who are already performing, run your jokes by them first and ask them if anything sounds too familiar. If a line comes too quickly to you and seems too good to be true, it probably is. If a line just enters your head and you can't backtrack through the thought process to see how you came up with it, it is suspect. Leave doubtful lines out of your sets until you can confide in others and run lines by them.
It's better to find out early that a line you thought of belongs to someone else. You don't want to get to the point where you have grown to really like or need the joke. Once you're in that position, it's a lot harder to give it up.
You can also try doing a simple web search using keywords within the joke. This might not be very accurate because many comedians are reluctant to put their jokes online, but keywords might be mentioned in a review of a show or on a comic's blog or fan site. You don't want to get off on the wrong foot by doing someone else's joke, even unintentionally. If it turns out that you independently thought of the same joke as someone else, it's still theirs if they did it first. Get used to it; it will happen a lot. But look at it on the bright side — you're writing professional level jokes!
