Course Schedule and Catalog

Long Title: WILL THE REAL COMEDIAN PLEASE STAND-UP? (HANSZEN)

Department: College Courses

Grade Mode: Satisfactory/Unsatisfactory

Language of Instruction: Taught in English

Course Type: Seminar

Credit Hours: 1

Description: In this class, we will educate guaranteed, without a doubt, future Netflix special comedians. However, if that isn’t your life goal, this class is still great for you. Perchance it isn’t a happenstance you’ve read this far. Mayhaps you want to enhance your public speaking skills or tell better stories. Essentially, we aim to find: What about your experience makes you funny? With an emphasis on comedic styles and joke-writing, we will use famous comedians’ performances to inspire our own. Comedians such as, but not limited to, Ali Wong, Aziz Ansari, Bo Burnham, John Mulaney, and Wanda Sykes, will be focused on highlighting all different styles of comedy. To prepare, we look through various joke structures including the Thomas Veatch Theory of Humor (1998) from Stanford Linguistics and the James Veitch Spam Mail (2016) TED Talk. This “research” will help the student identify their own brand of comedy. Students will be asked to look back on their own life and chuckle, then refine those chuckles into a set unique to themselves. After many workshops and epic training montages, we will all develop our own 5-minute sets to showcase individually at the end of the semester performance.