Hey, so we've talked about arranging your material and making it flow logically. And we've talked a little bit about how to how to make a bit come together. But what I want to talk about in this video is getting to your five minutes and what that really means. So there's a handful of things that you need to figure out when you're putting together a routine for comedy. And that is, how much time are these jokes going to take up? And how much time do you have?

Now, what this normally looks like for a five minute bit, and what I want you to think about is it's going to be between five and 10 jokes. Now, what do I say five and 10. That's a huge range, right? Well, you might have some very large jokes, you might be kind of a storyteller. And naturally as you're writing material, even though you try to cut it down, it feels like you need to continue to build out material a little bit. It feels like there's a lot of narrative that goes in there.

Now it could very well be that you have a lot of laughs lines. Which is just where audiences will laugh within those stories, that's fine. Sometimes you don't have a laugh line, you just take the audience with you. And the story itself is entertaining, and you eventually get to a big punch line. That might be one joke. That's one whole joke might be an entire minute, 45 seconds to 50 seconds, maybe five seconds of applause or laughter over the course of the entire bed, and then you get into your next joke takes a few seconds to transition that's an entire minute.

So it might be that you're just doing one liners, and they'll be really quick, about 1520 seconds, maybe you get five seconds of laughter or applause or something. Maybe you rearrange yourself, then you do another joke takes about 20 seconds, you might get three of those done. ralphie May is famous for saying the more punch lines per minute you can pack, the better. He does, I think a punch line every 13 seconds or something like that. It's really amazing. The guy was a extremely good comedian.

But the reason I'm bringing this up is because you're going to arrange your material and have to think About how much time you're filling out and how that's looking. Now, it's not just a logical flow of material, but how do you open? How do you close? How do those things happen? Well, for the purposes of this bit, which is the first one that you're going to do on stage, what I want you to think about is just opening with material. That's funny.

That is that is your second best material. And then trying to have that material be self exposing meaning material in which you're describing yourself to the audience, you might say something like, I'm the kind of person who, or I am acts like one of my jokes when I open is and I've said it a few times is I just turned 30 recently, like 39 months ago just turned it that exposes a lot of who I am with the audience, I'm talking about myself, and the audience is just getting to know you, and it helps to have that kind of material. So if you can put that first that's great. You don't have to but if you do, it's better to put it early. I say second best material because your best material is going to close. comedians always put their best material last, their best joke comes last.

People remember the last feeling that you've left them with. And leaving an audience with that kind of material is fantastic. Because they're going to all think you're great. And probably if it's your first time and you close on a good joke, the audience is going to applaud and they're going to come up and be like, Oh my gosh, that was your first time. That was amazing. Let's hope it goes that way for you.

It might not didn't go that way for me my first time. But the point is, is that you want to think about five to 10 jokes. You want to time yourself doing them and you want to open with self expressive, a material that's your second best, have your best material last and close, strong. That's the way that you want to arrange that material that's getting to your five minutes. Then when you've been begin recording this and rehearsing it. We'll we'll talk about that in the rehearsal section.

You want to begin cutting down time and recording time and half Enough jokes to fill out six about five and a half to six minutes of recording. So five and a half to six minutes of recording time. When you're listening to yourself going through your routine is about what it's going to take to fill out five minutes on stage.