By Dune Irons

I thought I would take the opportunity of the SCAB to tell how I feel about Stand-Up Comedy…

Why did I choose to take this class? Well for a few reasons, I wanted to improve my relationship with English as a complex language.

I wanted to master it, to learn how to be witty and improve my capacity for forthright repartee.

I’ve learned a few things since I’ve started this comedy class, the first thing is that being funny on purpose is definitely not that easy. Even if I am usually a pretty easy going person, being funny during a Stand-Up routine requires something else, I’ve realized how much work and testing it necessitates.

For now, I feel like I am fumbling in the dark. Before each session I am a bit reticent to go, knowing that I have to perform. Doing it has revealed itself as a real challenge. One more scary thing is that when I applied I had absolutely no idea that we would have to perform on a real stage in front of other people than our SCA peers. There are two weeks left and I am still trying to figure out how the hell I’m going to manage without making a fool of myself? One reassuring thing is that I am not alone in that case, but there’s like an omerta around the Comedy Course, I feel like we only talk about it 10 minutes before each Comedy Class. I am confident that with practice and training we could all succeed, we would do well to remember the old adage: « Hard Work beats Talent ! ».

I am both impatient and reluctant to finally be on the d-day, I want to see the others perform, I am sure from what I’ve seen that they’ll all completely smash-it. I feel that this Comedy Course have another effect that I didn’t really think through while applying, I was too focused on perfecting some skills, that the human dimension of the entire thing kind of slipped out of my mind.

Yet since we’ve started this comedy class, I’ve learned to know my fellow classmates.

I feel like there’s a better understanding of who each of us is. Being in smaller groups all the makeup we apply to disguise ourselves is starting to flake, we can see much more through every layer.

We can decipher by the way you present yourself, your posture or how easily you deliver your routine: some unapologetic, some shy, with a strong or shaky voice, all of these details giving away a much deeper understanding of who you are.