Can You Actually Learn to Be Funny?

I teach stand-up comedy, so I'm obviously biased on this question.

But yes. I think you can learn to be funny.

I've spent the past few years teaching thousands of people how to perform stand-up comedy through Sydney Comedy School. Some arrive convinced they're funny. Plenty arrive worried that they're not.

For the first episode of The Science of Being Funny, I spoke with Helio Borges, who originally came through one of my stand-up courses and has since started winning and placing in comedy competitions.

Trying to be funny isn't the same as being funny

This is one of the strangest things to teach.

People come to a stand-up class because they want to learn how to be funny. So naturally, they try really hard to be funny.

And sometimes that's exactly what gets in the way.

I've been in social situations where someone is obviously trying to make everyone laugh. The same thing happens on stage. You can feel the difference between someone who is being funny and someone who desperately wants you to know they're being funny.

I've even had students tell me they didn't really understand this distinction until they went out and watched other new comedians perform. Suddenly they could see exactly what I'd been trying to explain.

Start with how people already see you

When students ask me how they can become funnier, one of the most useful places to start is surprisingly simple:

Be honest about who you are and how the audience sees you.

Audiences start forming impressions of you before you've really done anything.

I was wearing a beanie in one of my classes and asked the students what they immediately thought when they looked at me.

Someone said:

“Ethnic Justin Bieber.”

I loved it.

Once I know that's something an audience might see, I can resist it or I can play with it.

Helio does the same thing with being Brazilian, his accent and even the length of his name. These are things an Australian audience notices about him, so rather than hiding them, he turns them into material.

I've seen new comedians do the opposite. They'll get on stage and talk about almost anything except themselves.

That makes things harder. The audience wants to understand the person standing in front of them. Once they have some sense of who you are, you can start playing with their assumptions and take them somewhere else.

How does learning comedy help with confidence?

One of the things I love about teaching stand-up is watching what happens when someone realises they can actually do it.

At our grad shows, students are often performing comedy for the first time in front of around 100 people. They're understandably nervous.

Then, somewhere in the set, I'll see something change. They get a laugh. Their smile gets bigger. Their body seems to physically expand. Suddenly they look like they belong on stage.

Comedy also gives you permission to fail without treating every failure as a judgement on you.

You perform again and again. One night something works. Another night it doesn't. You can change it, try it again or discover that the exact same material works with a different audience.

Over time, you stop defining yourself by one bad performance.

For me, that's one of the most valuable things people can learn through stand-up. You're not just learning how to make people laugh. You're becoming more comfortable standing in front of other people and trusting that you belong there.

So, can you actually learn to be funny?

Yes.

Everyone already makes someone in their life laugh.

Part of learning stand-up is identifying what you already bring to those situations that makes another person laugh, then working out how to bottle that up and bring it into the much stranger environment of standing in front of an audience.

You can write. You can experiment. You can perform. You can see what gets a reaction and change what doesn't.

But I don't think the starting point is trying harder to become some abstract version of a funny person.

It's understanding what's already funny about you, and learning how to use it.

Useful links

Learn comedy with Sydney Comedy School: ⁠https://www.sydneycomedyschool.com.au/⁠‍ ‍

Watch a Sydney Comedy School grad show where Helio performs: ⁠https://youtu.be/LX6CbioRsBE⁠‍ ‍

See Helio at Sydney Fringe:⁠ https://sydneyfringe.com/events/we-need-to-talk-a-couples-comedy-game-show-for-everyone/ ⁠

What students say after performing their first grad show:⁠ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=51EVa2bV1tQ