(page last updated 14 December 2005)

Where do you get your material?

Where does my material come from? All of it is true... except for the stuff I make up. I guess I have a good imagination. Ideas are all around, from people, in the newspaper, stupid stuff which wakes me up at night, stupid people who wake me up at night... It helps to have a slightly warped view of the world, I mean who else wonders about Amish pick-up lines? "Sarah Rachel, those heavenly three cubit-long legs put you so much closer to the Lord." (Okay, good thing I'm not Amish; with a line like that I'd probably never get any attention)

I can't because that makes it much easier for me. Sometimes I see what I think is a good setup to a joke (a newspaper headline, for example) and I do work to find something funny to say about it. When I read that the inventor of the snooze alarm died, it didn't take too much to come up with a half-dozen jokes about it. Which makes writing stand-up comedy, at least for me, a lot less work than writing a short story or a novel, where one has to sit down and actually work on a plot, characters and then after all that work, fill in all the blanks. A novelist starts work on a book and may finally see it in print two years later. I can think of a joke, tell it on stage that night, and then refine it over the next few shows, and keep it or get rid of it. But the feedback is immediate.

Do you buy material?

No, everything I perform is stuff I've written myself, with only one or two exceptions (an occasional punchline suggestion from another comic; we do help each other out a lot).

But I heard this joke that would go great in your routine...

NO, it won't... If you think stand-up comedy is memorizing a joke book, or trolling the internet for jokes everyone's heard before, then standing up and telling it on stage, well, you're way misinformed. Comedians are expected to be original. My material reflects my on-stage persona, and a lot of what I write I can't use (for example, it's okay to joke about what you are, but NOT to joke about what you're not, so I can't do weight-loss jokes even if I want to lose weight, because nobody looks at me on stage and immediately thinks "Wow does he need to lose weight!").

In fact it's rather insulting to comedians to suggest that something that someone else wrote, which you heard, should be part of their routine, as the implication is that we aren't being original.

But don't some comedians buy jokes?

Some do. But they buy original material, from comedy writers they know, not "Something I heard." That something you heard was ALREADY written by someone else and likely already told by a comedian.

As a general rule, both pride and poverty prevent most comics from buying routines.

Is your routine dirty?

No, and it's a very rare occasion when I will use a four-letter word. I brought my parents to a show and they didn't complain. On the other hand, they did need a ride home.

However, I am not the only one on stage at any given show. Not only do I have no control over anybody else's act, I often don't even know who else will be in the show until I show up.

Among the hours of material I've written over the years I have six or seven minutes of dirty jokes, which I haven't told except at an open-mike night in front of an audience consisting mostly of other comics (the jokes were very well received, but I don't tell them in my act)-- but still I tried to make sure that even those jokes had an intellectual slant-- Why make jokes about sex with prostitutes when you can make jokes about sex with the attorney general?

Look at THE most successful comedians-- Jay Leno, Jerry Seinfeld, Ray Romano, they work clean. Cheap dirty stuff gets easy laughs but it doesn't help comics advance to the next level.

That said, if I find that I'm performing in front of an entire audience which seems to want only this kind of stuff I might consider dropping in some vulgar material, though I haven't done this yet. It's not easy to follow a comic's sex toy jokes with jokes about the Environmental Protection Agency (I know, I've tried).

So your material won't offend me?

I've told people that my material won't offend you, unless you're a Democrat, a Republican, or a Canadian. Or a smoker. Or not a smoker.

What about the French?

It's too trendy right now to pick on the French. I'll get to them later, along with the Dutch, Eskimos and people who suggest toilet seat jokes for me.

So what DO you talk about in your act?

My strength is political comedy but since that doesn't always do so well in a comedy club I don't do too much of it. Do I do one-liners? I do short jokes AND stories, but the stories of course have intermediate punchlines. I aim for a laugh every fifteen or twenty seconds, and maybe I am emphasizing quantity over quality a bit too much, but people are laughing, and that's what counts.

Why aren't you telling jokes about ~?

Sure, just what New York needs, another comedian telling jokes about his ethnic background, or about not getting laid, or about self-pleasure (which the under-thirty crowd seems to talk about frequently on stage). The best advice any comedian can get is to be original, to avoid being just like everybody else; they all blend together and nobody remembers them.

So why do other comedians do the same types of jokes?

Why are comics doing cheap stuff? Because their friends are laughing at it. It's easy. Will it help their careers? No. Club owners, managers, booking agents, casting directors, waitresses at comedy clubs, they have heard all this stuff a million times.... So those jokes using ethnic stereotypes; the differences between New York & Los Angeles or men & women or blacks & whites; my parents are from some other country and aren't their habits/ accents/ customs/ comprehensions strange; I have a three thousand dollar a month Manhattan apartment and I use a postage stamp as wall-to-wall carpeting-- this type of material won't impress anybody in the business, even if the actual jokes are original (I just thought of the postage stamp line as I'm typing this, and I'm not going to use it on stage). Even jokes about internet dating are starting to get old (yes, we all know that 6' tall means 5' 6"; that petite doesn't mean short, it means short and fat; that proportional means height and width and depth are equal; that a forty year old is really fifty; and consultant means has no job). We're sick of these topics. My opinion of even a funny professional comedian goes way down when I hear "I'm from The Dominican Republic-- 150th and Broadway." I first heard this joke in the eighties. I heard it again recently, TWICE in the SAME SHOW. Even if one of them was actually the first one to write the joke (which couldn't be true, both were too young), they shouldn't be telling it.

It's called being a hack-- go to http://www.stormpages.com/hackfaq/hackfaq.html and click on Hack FAQ if you want to read more. A lot of comedians started out being hacks. I don't plan to be one of them.

I was sitting in the front row, and the comedian made a comment about my...

I don't do that. I've been in the front row too. It's cheap laughs making fun of your hair, your laugh, your clothing, whatever. It's not your fault you look like Carrot-Top. Of course if you DID forget to turn off your cell phone and it rings, you are absolutely fair game. Not only should you know better, but they make an announcement at the top of every show. We're not impressed that you programmed your favorite song into it.

Do comedians put people in the audience to heckle so that they can make jokes about it?

NO. No matter what you might think, hecklers are NEVER WELCOME. Usually they are drunk. They interrupt the flow of a comedian's routine; audiences hate them almost as much as comedians do. Comedians are given a set amount of time to perform, usually five to seven minutes at a showcase club. If we have to spend thirty seconds dealing with a heckler, while we're telling the next joke we also have to be thinking about what to cut to fit into the time slot. This screws things up for everybody.

I heard about a friend of a friend who was videotaping his show to use as an audition tape, and a drunk was yelling all through the comedian's routine. How would you feel if someone interrupted your job interview like that? The drunk was eventually thrown out of the club, but the comedian's set was pretty much ruined by that point.

This is not to say that comedians don't have ready responses for an occasional jerk; we just hope not to have to use them.

So please forgive a comedian's response if you threaten in jest to show up and heckle; there are people who seem to believe that it's okay (or even that it's expected and part of the show) and we're not always sure who they are.

Saw you at Gotham in November 2003 when someone's cell phone rang twice and you had a good come-back each time. Was that planned?

You mean did I tell someone to make a cell phone ring? No. Did I have a joke ready for a cell phone ringing? No, I thought of each one right at that moment-- and by total co-incidence they worked fabulously each time for the particular joke I'd just finished telling. I was very lucky, and I am not counting on that happening again. So TURN YOUR PHONE OFF when you sit down in a comedy club. It's rude; people work hard for their money and they are paying some of that money to hear comedians talk, not to hear you talk nor to hear your cell phone ring.

I saw this famous comic, he spent a lot of time talking with the audience (this is called crowd work) and he had a come-back for just about everything and everyone.

Sure, he's been doing that for 20 years, he's probably run into each situation fifty times before. How many occupations do you think cover most people in NYC? And there are only fifty states and a few foreign countries that people are likely to be from. Do you think you're the first Southerner or Midwesterner or German or carpenter or engineer or prison guard he's run into in a comedy club?

I was in a show with Rich Vos, two women in the front row had frizzy hair, and he had five minutes of jokes about that. Do you think he'd never seen frizzy hair before?

I once did a show that had three policewomen in the audience. I knew this before I took the stage because the MC talked to them during the warm-up. I remembered some jokes I'd written a long time ago about cops arresting other cops, and I used them, and they went over great. It probably looked like I had just thought of it but I wrote the jokes ten years earlier (and never thought I'd ever get to use them since the scandal about which I'd written them was a long time ago).

We do occasionally get lucky and think of something on the spot, and the better comedians are often quick enough with what's new. That said, sometimes the come-back is simply to say "That's wonderful" then to turn to someone else and say "And how about you?" You tend not to remember the ones we skip over (which, by the way, is also how fortune-tellers work crowds--they miss most of the time, but they're experts at making us not notice while they move on to the next person).

I saw famous comedian ~ and he/she wasn't funny.

Well, if you saw him/her at a showcase club, perhaps he/she was testing out new material. No matter what comedians may think of our own jokes, we really have no idea what an audience will like until we try the material (see Jerry Seinfeld's movie "Comedian" if you have any doubts; even he was worried his material wouldn't work, and he gets the benefit of the doubt-- I mean, if he said "What's with the top Kleenex, why is it always upside-down?" you'd probably laugh; if I said it, your reaction would be "Yeah, we know, we have noses too, tell us something funny.").

If it were at a place like Caroline's where he/she was headlining, or if it were on TV, it was probably not a case of testing new material.

Or maybe he/she just wasn't to your liking. Not everybody finds all types of material funny. I've found that younger audiences don't go as much for political humor, and older, mostly married audiences don't want to hear tons of stories about bad dating experiences. And nobody wants to hear sex jokes while sitting with their parents. Or, for that matter, while sitting with their children.

Maybe it was an off night for him/her?

Possible but less likely. Did the rest of the audience laugh? Maybe it was a tough audience? Was it raining? Every audience is different. I've had jokes work great one night, tell them exactly the same another night and get no reaction. And I've seen well-known professional comics have the same experience.

I was at a comedy club-- they announced that the next comedian was performing for the first time ever and he was really funny! How was he so good his first time on stage?

I can almost guarantee that it was a lie. When an MC announces that somebody's performing for the first time the audience becomes very supportive and positive, and it makes it much easier for the comedian. Some comedians want to have that supportive audience over and over again, so they continue to claim that they're new. I saw someone when I was first starting out that did just that. When I told him how impressed I was at how good he was his first time on stage, he told me that he worked at another comedy club and had done more than a hundred shows. I think this is dishonest and I won't do it, but it's not uncommon.

Why does the first guy up ask where we're from? We're there to laugh, not to have everyone else laugh because we're from Staten Island.

So move. Yeah, I used to wonder about that too. Until I learned that audiences need warming up. Even TV audiences for talk shows and sit-coms have someone do a warm-up before the show starts taping. You may notice that the first few comedians don't always get big laughs, then later the laughter builds. This isn't only because they may put the new guys on early-- placement really makes a difference. Laughter builds, and it's contagious, which is why comics prefer a large audience to a small one. I did a show recently in which the first three comics barely got any laughs, and they weren't that bad. Then the show's producer did seven minutes and the laughter built, and I went on next and did quite well. I don't think I would have done well had I gone on first (and yes, I thanked her for it). I don't mind playing for small crowds-- I did a week night show during bad weather and there were only a few people in the audience-- but we all had a great time!

Are you really dating the doctor you joke about?

I was when I wrote the jokes about her.

Are the jokes true?

Only the good stuff, the stuff that doesn't sound reasonable, no, it's not true. She's very nice.

What's the joke?

Come to a show.

Which of your shows should I go to?

ALL OF THEM! I am fortunate that I have a lot of material, so the material you see will likely vary from what you've seen before. Plus, the other comics will be mostly different people so on the whole it will be a very different show.

Strangers frequently come up to me after a show to tell me how much they liked my work, and that's always a thrill.

Every show I learn something new, refine my jokes a bit more, and get better. Probably on average I vary my routine about a third from show to show-- new jokes, additional punches to existing material, or simply different material from my pool of jokes, depending upon my mood and what the audience seems to like. And if possible I'll try to fit in a call-back (a reference to an earlier joke) to a joke another comedian told or something that relates to the particular audience.

Why aren't you doing shows at this particular club or at a particular time?

Not every comedy club allows new comics on stage. Some hold auditions only a couple of times a year, and the competition is fierce! And I am trying to limit how many clubs I do perform at, to give me a bit more leverage with the places I do perform. I would like to add some weeknight shows at times more convenient to my friends/fans, but it's out of my control. But keep checking the Schedule page.

Anything else we should know about you?

Yeah, I'm much better-looking in person. And I have much more hair.

How much more?

About fourteen thousand dollars worth.

Why do you say that stand-up comedy is such a wonderful art form?

It still amazes me to go to a comedy club, see other comedians, and realize how much there is for us to laugh at. So much good material is written all the time. Everybody loves to laugh and for ten or fifteen dollars plus your bar tab you can listen to an hour or two of live entertainment. But what amazes me most is how quickly a comedian can get started. Working comics talk about how much they have to struggle, and it's true, but stand-up comedy seems to be more objective than acting or music. There are plenty of good actors who will always struggle, because there are so many talented actors working and so few roles for most of them. And musicians could be wonderful but finding what hits the market right seems to be rather random. On the other hand, if a comedian makes his/her audiences laugh he/she will eventually get noticed. Or so I'm told. I started stand-up comedy by taking a class, and a month later I was on the stage of a top NYC showcase club, working the same shows as talented comedians with significant television credits (in my first four months I was in the same shows as Rich Vos, Judy Gold and Mitch Hedberg, for example). Had I taken up guitar instead of comedy, not only would nobody put me on stage, but six months later I still wouldn't be playing complete songs. I certainly wouldn't be in the same show as Nick Lowe or Santana or even any of the Spice Girls.

And yes, I do think of telling jokes as an artistic endeavor. How a comedian crafts a joke, or words a punch-line, isn't terribly different from a guitarist's chord progression, an architect's decision on where to place a window or a painter's choice of a hue, or even how a ball-player chooses a particular shot.

Where have you performed?

Here is a partial list:
Caroline's on Broadway
Stand Up New York
Gotham Comedy Club
The Comic Strip
Ha! Comedy Club
The Comedy Store
Numerous private functions

How does one become a comedian?

Well, obviously it helps to be funny. I strongly recommend taking a class before ever stepping onto a stage-- classes are given by most of the showcase clubs in NYC (Gotham, Stand Up NY, Comic Strip). I took a class given by Stephen Rosenfield, a full-time comedy teacher at the American Comedy Institute.

If you want to try stand-up, here's my recommendation (and remember, I'm no expert)-- write some jokes, but remember that your audience won't sit for two minutes of setup with no intermediate jokes. It is NOT like telling jokes to your friends. People in comedy clubs are paying to be entertained. Get to where you have at least 3-4 minutes, then take a class; it WILL help your writing AND your performing. But don't worry if your three minute set has only six laughs; as you write and perform more, you'll think of more funny stuff to stick in. I chose the ACI class for a few reasons-- a friend recommended it, and I saw her and other graduates in a show and they were funny, ACI offers weekly venues to perform, and the teacher is a professional instructor, not a comic looking to make a few extra bucks. Stephen is a lot of help-- some of the people in class were terrible at first, but after a couple of private writing sessions with Stephen they were a lot funnier.

My writing is self-taught. Before I took Stephen's class I'd had no formal training in comedy writing.

What do you mean by an intermediate punch-line?

If you're telling a story, nobody wants to sit and listen to a long story and not laugh. So you have to have funny stuff to say DURING the story. Watch The Tonight Show-- Jay Leno will have thirty to thirty-five punchlines in his opening monologue, which is usually around ten minutes. If you watch any other professional comedian telling a story, there will be stuff to laugh at during the story while he/she builds toward the finish. At least once a week any network late night talk show will have a comedian on, doing six or seven minutes. Watch a few (no excuses about when the shows are on; you do have a VCR) and see how many punchlines there are in six or seven minutes.

Why did you choose the domain name BrainChampagne.com?

Most comedians use their name as their domain name. But with three different ways to spell my first name I would have to have Sean Eli and Shawn Eli as well as Shaun Eli simply to ensure that people could easily find my web site. So I opted for a different approach.

I thought about it for a while, and realized that it's not so easy to choose a domain name. Obviously it didn't have to be descriptive-- after all, many of the most successful domain names (eBay, Amazon, Yahoo, for example) don't really tell you what they do. I needed a name that was:

Memorable

Not easy to confuse (for example, if I had chosen uptowncomic, some people might remember downtowncomic or uptowncomedian)

Doesn't sound boasting (I figure that anyone taking the stage after announcing that his web site is "Iamsodarnfunny.com" deserves to start off with one strike against him)

Not too intellectual (I originally wanted CubistComic.com, since I believe that comedy is really cubism* as applied to language, but half the people to whom I mentioned it didn't know what I was talking about). I still thought long and hard about using PicassoComedy.com but opted for BrainChampagne (sm) because it just sounds good to me. Besides, it's only six dollars if I change my mind.

* a style of art popularized by Picasso in which three dimensions are reduced to two and for some reason this results in both your eyes being on the same side of your face.

And-- possibly most importantly, easy to understand when told in a noisy comedy club environment (so cubistcomic would end up sounding like Cubancomic and half the audience would be wondering where I parked my raft).

What other writing have you done?

I wrote my first comedy sketch in fifth grade (with classmate Jimmy Fisher and somebody else but I don't remember who). It was around 1971 and the sketch was about an airline hijacking. So I guess I was writing topical humor even then.

I always wrote down what I thought of that was funny, so I have a lot of material. I'm very fortunate in that while most new comics start out struggling to come up with five or seven minutes of decent material, before I ever took the stage I had hours of jokes and stories. On the other hand, a lot of comedians start out with a lot of stage experience (singing, acting, dancing) and performance training (voice & acting), whereas I had not. Everybody starts with pluses and minuses, and most get better with time, especially if they work hard on improving their weaknesses.

After college, my college roommate Andy Lichy, my friend Marc Margolies, and I wrote a few hours of short comedy sketches we called Turtle Speed Racing Association and subsequently Vox Comicus. Never managed to sell it as a television show, which is what we had hoped to do at the time.

A decade ago I started selling jokes professionally to the host of one of America's popular late night talk shows, and I've been selling jokes to him ever since. I've probably written four thousand jokes for him although he has used only a small fraction of them (he pays for what he uses; the rest belong to me). I use some of the other jokes in my routine and they've typically done very well (this is no slight on him; doing jokes for a national TV audience is different from doing jokes for a live New York comedy audience and sometimes he had an even better joke on the same topic). Most of the jokes I've written are topical and therefore a lot of them have 'expired.' Of course if Dan Quayle ever again seeks public office...

See Expired Comedy for samples of this material.

I've also written a novel, "Murder on Page One" about a serial arsonist, which I have not yet sold. The feedback I've gotten has been very positive, though a few publishers have suggested that I either make it a comic novel or tone down the funny stuff to make it a serious detective novel. I can't help it if I'm funny...

So if you work in publishing...

I am available for private functions, so if you are sponsoring an event and are looking for entertainment, please feel free to contact me. I can also arrange for other comedians to perform in the show.