Julie Scoggins

Today I am interviewing Julie Scoggins, a comedian from Charlotte, NC who has been doing comedy for eleven years. To find out more about Julie, please visit her website.

Why did you start doing stand-up comedy?

I started doing stand-up comedy because my husband & I had moved back to the states from the US Virgin Islands & it was time to decide what we wanted to do career-wise. I didn't want to move back but did so under the condition that I be able to make a career change, not keep doing what I had before which was selling snack foods for Frito-Lay. We went to the old Comedy Zone on Independence every Wed. night because you could fill out the comment card & get free tickets for the following week. It just so happened that was open mike night & the guys were all pretty awful. Not only were they bad, they kept doing the same stuff week after week even though it wasn't working. I told my husband that anybody could see they should be tweaking the material until they got it right. He said, "You could do better than that!" So I started writing & gave it a try. It was fabulous! I was hooked immediately & haven't ever looked back.

Do you follow any rules for writing or performing comedy?

I got Judy Carter's book, "Standup Comedy, the Book" and did the exercises in it to put my ideas into set form. It gave me some structure & showed how to open with my second best joke & close with my strongest one. I also asked a comic I admired for advice. She did more than give me advice, she invited me over & watched my video tapes of my sets with me & then suggested changes.

Do you have any advice for beginner comedians?

Get a tape recorder or video camera & record yourself in front of live audiences. Review them & fix what doesn't work. Also, get three DVDs or CDs of comics you like. Get a stopwatch, timer, or clock with a second hand on it. As you listen to the pros, time how long it takes from the moment they begin until they get their first laugh. Write down the time. Then do it for the second, third, & so on until you have about a minute tracked. Then do it with your set. If it takes you longer to get that first laugh than it takes the pros, fix it. You can do this by either cutting out stuff that's not totally necessary to the joke or by adding funny descriptions, etc. to the setup. Then see what their average laughs-per-minute ratio is. Make your set fit their template. All laughs count, no matter how small. You'll notice times when the pro may take a lot longer to get a laugh than the normal average. But you'll also notice, the laugh that finally came was bigger than most , hence, "worth the wait".

Most importantly, DON'T WASTE WORDS. Get to the funny part as efficiently as you can. Don't make an audience be patient through a bunch of unnecessary junk to get to the payoff.

Stand-up isn't for everyone. Some people are better at writing than performing & vice versa. But if you're driven to do it, there's no changing your mind. It's the greatest high ever.

NEVER steal others' material. Your unique point of view is what makes you valuable as an artist. When you use stuff you've heard others do, you become just an actor & anybody can do that. The powers that be in comedy have seen it all & believe me, they will totally bust you. There's a lot of competition out there & if you hack, you offer them nothing new. Speak from your heart about what makes YOU laugh!