improvisation improvisation is how
you waste your parents money in your 20s
hi vanity fair i'm amber ruffin and
today
i'm going to teach you some comedy slang
[Music]
the song is free blackout
that's what happens when everyone in the
audience is black just kidding
it is when you have a
a very short scene that goes to black at
the end
set up now you can't have a joke without
a setup what's the setup
it's the beginning part of the joke for
example
oh no i shouldn't have started an
example okay but for example
is your joke about astronauts you can
tell because astronauts were mentioned
in setup nicks
punch up okay now punch up is what you
need
when you have written something that is
not funny enough
punch up is what happens when you write
something and then you want more jokes
in it so you give it to someone else
usually
and they punch it up for you a callback
is mentioning something that you
mentioned earlier in the show
hopefully to get a laugh so
if earlier like when i mentioned
astronauts
oh my gosh call back that term is
out of this world not unlike an
astronaut
[Laughter]
so many people watching are going this
is comedy
okay now below is what you do when you
don't have enough energy to i'm just
kidding
blow is a term for the
end of a scene so it's the last
big splashy joke that you do to end
whatever sketch uh you're doing blue
material okay so blue
means dirty so
whenever you get to like a corporate
show
you go how blue can we be and they say
no blue at all or they say everyone's
drinking you can go as blue as you want
a spot is when you have a
set at a theater
so you got a spot at a place that means
you're going to perform there
now spot can also be where you live
if you're like in the 90s it's
where you it's just fat
old people are somewhere laughing now
again if this is
1990 bomb means something different it
means
great you did a great job it's great but
bomb
comedy term means you did a very bad job
and you are not good at comedy or
the audience hates your goods um have
you ever been hated by a whole audience
i have it's bad you can bomb
premise oh man you're never going to
believe what a premise is
a premise is just the whole
thing like scooby-doo the premise is
a bunch of children drive around in a
van with
no supervision well one of them is high
as a heckler okay now a heckler is
when someone is in the audience they
have a lot to say about your act
and sometimes when you have a heckler
you can let them boo you and be really
mean to you
and then you can go home and cry or
sometimes you have a heckler
and then you can hurt their feelings
real bad
it's your choice bit
a bit is a joke it's kind of like um
you know what a good bit is that's
that's what she said
like that's probably the main definition
of a bit
it's a goofy thing you do over and over
and over
it gets funnier every time you do it and
then not funny at all
physical comedy is when
you fall down
[Laughter]
physical comedy can be any type of
laughs you get
off of a physicality so it can be
dancing
it can be uh making faces
so who's really good at physical comedy
jim carrey
who is 41 and doesn't move around that
much
amber ruffin a catchphrase is something
a character says over and over again for
comedic effect
like um you got it dude from
full house or um um did i do that from
family matters
or amber ruffin's famous catchphrase
which is
holy moly look at all
those sausages
still working on it killed
killed is what happens when you do a
good
job so when you get out there and people
are laughing
crying having the time of their lives
that means
you killed bud now
killed also has a second meaning and
that means you stabbed someone and then
they died from it
it's also killed heck is when someone
is doing comedy that
is well worn territory
it's stuff you've seen before it's cheap
it's uh it doesn't take a lot of
creativity to come up with
it's hack crowd work is when you
uh talk to people in the crowd now lots
of times you do crowd work because
you sense the audience might not be all
the way into it
so you have to go out into the audience
and
pluck their attention from them so lots
of times you go oh yeah who here is from
omaha oh my god i'm from omaha
y'all think y'all zoo is the but
it's not like that
ps our zoo is the literal best zoo in
the world
go to oman nebraska see for yourself
tight five
is what every stand-up should
be aiming to have at the beginning where
you have five minutes of material and
you know
it kills because it kills
it's tight and because it's five minutes
it's five
and because it's those things together
it's type five
okay so a sketch is when you write a
silly bit that is part of a scene
where you can um
just explore a single funny idea or
the structure of a joke usually over and
over and over again
some sketch examples include two
wild and crazy guys or
um no
i think that's the best example of a
sketch it's too wild and crazy guys
and that sounds like a bit but it's not
excellent sketch a capper is
uh what you do at the end of your show
that
caps it off thanks for watching i hope
you learned some new comedy slang
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