nabil laoudji

poetry, prose, design thinking & entrepreneurship

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Is Stand-up Comedy Storytelling?

July 30, 2010 by Nabil 5 Comments

Last Tuesday my workshop mates and I each took the stage at the Improv Hollywood and delivered a five minute stand-up routine. As we worked through our sets, I marveled at the fact that in an era of smartphones and instant gratification, an audience of people willingly unplugged from the world and for one hour focused all of their attention on one stage, one microphone, and one voice. Storytelling lives, I thought. Or is stand-up comedy really a form of storytelling?

Fresh off of a four-week stand-up comedy course, my answer to this question is yes, it is. However there are subtle differences between the two: Traditional storytelling tends to be longer form; stand-up tends to be shorter. Traditional storytelling tends to focus on one journey; stand-up is often about several disjointed experiences.

That said, the similarities far outweigh the differences. Both forms of expression are delivered without technology: just a stage and a mic. Both can be formulaic in their structure (traditional storytelling: beginning – middle – end; stand up: premise – opinion – act out). Both are inherently funny – and more gripping – when the performer is vulnerable with their audience.

I’ve always defined storytelling very broadly — from a tale told around a campfire to an epic projected onto a theater screen. That said, my stand-up experience was a neat reminder that storytelling, in its purest most basic form, can still cut through the most modern distractions and capture the imagination of a room full of people.

Standup Comedy

Filed Under: Stream Tagged With: comedy, los angeles, standup, storytelling

A Fortnight in Hollywood

July 16, 2010 by Nabil Leave a Comment

Over the last two weeks I’ve had some eye-opening experiences across the three dimensions of storytelling on which I’m focusing this summer.

On storytelling via open mic, I’ve started a standup comedy workshop with the esteemed Leslie Wolff, and have audited a class by Judy Carter, a standup comedian who, ironically, is focused on bringing comedy into the business world. Lesley and Judy have very different approaches to standup: whereas Lesley encourages her students to talk about themselves and do so via story, Judy says, “nobody cares about you” and encourages her students to keep their material about their audience, and structured in a way that is more focused on a punchline. Either way, the more I workshop standup with my classmates, and attend comedy nights around LA, the more I realize that standup is special in that it’s one of the few areas of successful, popular entertainment that is not technology-driven. Standup is still (mostly) one girl or guy with a mic, a stage, and an audience.

On storytelling via improv, I performed at the Upright Citizens Brigade theater with my colleagues from my 101 class at UCB. Given that everything we performed was made up on the spot, it was amazing to see how everyone’s nerves melted away while we found our groove as a group. On my own performance, while one of my skits landed well, some others did not and I feel that I’m still being too cerebral when it comes to how I enter a scene. I need to really let go a la “jump and the net will find you.” Some of my friends from the class and I rented a theater in Culver City this afternoon and hopefully will be practicing as a group for the rest of the summer.

On storytelling via film, I’ve spent the last two weeks learning the ins and outs of Final Cut Pro, Apple’s professional editing suite. It’s incredibly powerful (and built sort of like Microsoft Excel but for video) and I’m excited about the control that it offers above and beyond the Apple iMovie editing suite (which I used for my first couple videos). I’m just putting the finishing touches on my first movie from the roadtrip, titled Buffalo Walk. It is a 9 minute piece that tries to answer the question: “what are the values that will make people across America want to pack up their bags and move to Buffalo NY today”?

Finally, this week I had a chance to drop in on the set of Matt Walsh’s new movie, the High Road. Besides getting some cool insight into the brains of director Matt Walsh and his actors (including Rob Riggle, of Daily Show fame), I also got to play an extra in a scene (I’ll be the guy at the Cadillac Jack’s diner counter during the chase scene). Off we go-

@

Filed Under: Stream Tagged With: buffalo, film, final cut pro, improv, standup, ucb

Checking in from Los Angeles

June 25, 2010 by Nabil 1 Comment

If someone asked me to define my summer internship in one word, I’d say, “storytelling.” If I were given two words, I’d say, “performance ethnography.”

My goal for the summer is to get a lot better at understanding peoples’ personal stories (ethnography), and sharing their stories – as well as my own – with others in a compelling way (performance).

The first 20 days of my internship have been decidedly ethnographic. With the exception of a workshop I held for students at a community center in Springfield Missouri, my days have been spent listening, rather than talking. I felt that it was important for me to start in this order because my gut tells me that in order to tell a good story, I must first become a good listener. Over my cross-country drive, I’ve interviewed 32 people on camera, in eleven cities across America, in discussions that ranged from five minutes to two hours in length. From the electrical engineer who became a pastor in Tulsa Oklahoma, to the graphic designer who moved to Mumbai India to start a nonprofit, to the Polish refugee who built a large baking business in Chicago, most of my interviews were focused on people who took a big risk to follow a passion.

So now that I’ve arrived in Los Angeles, what’s next? Well, now it’s time for performance. In my mind performance is defined as taking an idea and sharing it with others in a compelling way. This can take many forms, from addressing strangers on a street corner to publishing a documentary. In the following two months, I plan to practice performance in three ways:
1. Open mics: Reciting stories at open mic venues throughout LA.
2. Improv: Creating stories on the fly and performing them in front of others.
3. Film: Telling story via short-form video.

To that end, next week I start my open mic training via Fresh Faces, a standup workshop instructed by the talented Leslie Wolff. I also start a one-week intensive improv course with the Upright Citizens Brigade. Finally, I plan to hit the editing room and produce a series of short, hopefully inspirational videos using the footage I gathered over the course of my journey thus far.

So there we have it: performance ethnography. Here we go-

Filed Under: Stream Tagged With: film, improv, los angeles, performance ethnography, standup, ucb

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