As Kenyans, we love comedy. Especially ones that resonate with home.
Comedians like Churchill, Sleepy, and Jasper Murume are making a decent living from making Kenyans roar with laughter!
But what is it about them that makes them tickle our funny bone?
I recently attented (pun intended) a Churchill Live Show, and here’s what I gathered about these Kenyan comedians that make them stand out.
Secondly, if you plan to go into comedy, here’s what you should understand about them:
They tell stories, not jokes.
A joke is a fake story that sets up for a punch line. If the punch line falls flat, you end up looking like a fool.
Rather than tell jokes, exceptionally funny people tell relevant stories that have humorous elements.
If people don’t find a story funny, no big deal, because the story has a point beyond just being funny. If people laugh, so much the better.
Here’s how sleepy captivates his audience with stories:
They remember details of a funny situation
Exceptionally funny people don’t depend upon their memory to keep track of everything they discover that they find funny.
In the olden days, great comedians carried notebooks to jot down funny thoughts or observations and scrapbooks for news clippings that struck them as funny.
Today, you can do that easily with your smartphone. If you have a funny thought, record it as an audio note. If you read a funny article, save the link in your bookmarks.
They draw on real-life experiences.
The beauty of using personal experiences as fodder for humor is that your life experience is unique and therefore stories based on it are guaranteed to be original.
Take a look at this piece by YY:
They get to the point.
There’s an old saying that “brevity is the soul of wit.” Exceptionally funny people leave out the boring details and get to the funny part as quickly as possible.
However, while they get to the point quickly, exceptionally funny people put the funny part at the end, rather than in the middle.
They use voices to create characters.
The funniest stories are always about people, and people are funny (in the telling) only if they have something to say.
Exceptionally funny people use different voices to represent the various people, or even the states of mind of the same person, in their story.
For example, if your story has you saying something aloud but thinking something else, you make your “aloud” voice very clear and your “thinking” voice an audible side whisper.