How do you get your start in stand-up, however? What if you felt that you needed a little more confidence or a guiding hand that’ll show you some tips of the trade? Perhaps the School of Hard Knock Knocks can help.
“There’s ways of getting into any form of art – whether that be painting, whether that be learning guitar, or learning how to sing,” co-founder Morry Morgan says. “Some people just pick up a guitar and go for it. Some people watch countless amounts of YouTube videos, and they learn that way. Others, on the other hand, they prefer a structured methodology. They go to a singing lesson, they get a guitar coach, or in the metaphor of a gym, they go to the gym.”
One of the only institutions in Australia for those new to stand-up, The School of Hard Knock Knocks is a five-day course that works with budding comedians through hands-on workshops and mentoring from experienced professionals. The graduation ceremony sees you perform your own five minutes of comedy to an audience as high as 120 people.
“Over the last three years – and we’ve had close to 100 graduates – no one, by hand on my heart, has ever bombed,” Morgan says. “For some reason, it’s just a very warm room when they graduate – and that’s partly because the room is full of mums, dads, brothers and sisters of the performers – and no one bombs.“
With a background in adult learning, a business built overseas and even as a producer of a Chinese run of The Rocky Horror Picture Show stage production, Morgan found that many of the diverse elements that he’d acquired within those seemingly different realms were surprisingly applicable to stand-up.
“How do you get adults to do something two days ago they couldn’t do?” Morgan asks. “I just applied all of those skill sets to a very different medium, which is comedy. Strangely enough, even though comedy’s very unstructured – it’s very different than learning to drive a car, because obviously, you can measure the success of driving a car very quickly. Unstructured learning process like comedy, you can break it right down into little pieces of structure. After five days, someone who is funny around the barbeque can now be hilarious on-stage in front of 60 to 100 people.”
At this year’s Comedy Festival, The Best of the School of Hard Knock Knocks will see 39 of the school’s brightest rising stars performing over the course of 12 days. With each night offering a variety of styles, it’s a cornucopia filled with some of Australia’s best new comics.
The comics themselves share a wealth of different backgrounds and experiences. There are criminal lawyers, published authors, keynote speakers and character actors, who all share that same love of the stage.
“Our last show is the 16th of April, but we’ll probably have a party on the 14th, the Saturday beforehand, and I’ll know at that point that it’s been a success.”
For more info, head to The School of Hard Knock Knocks’ website.
