Right now I’m reading the book Be More Funny by Christoper T. Magician. When it arrived, I was amazed at how thick of a book it is, most comedy magic books aren’t nearly this heavy. Currently I’m about a hundred pages into it and am liking it!
One of the things he says in the beginning is to find a character, you take two things and put them together. Essentially it’s magician plus something else, so basically a charcater mash up. Once you have that angle everything else starts to get easier.
This got me thinking a little bit about character and one thing that has grown in my performing persona is travelling. I talk a lot more about travelling, so what if my performing character was magician PLUS travel show host? I already talk about many of my adventures in my preshow, and it’s part of the hook in many of my routines, so why not dig deeper?
Travel is something I’m personally very passionate about…I love finding strange things in off the beaten path places. For example a couple weeks ago I was performing in Menlo, WA, and that town has a pioneer buried there under very interesting circumstances. That person is Willie Keil, also known as the “Pickled Pioneer“. Essentially his body was moved cross country in a coffin filled with wiskey to preserve it.
When I travel for shows, I always find things like this and am surprised at how many locals are unaware of it. In my shows try to write little jokes about them. After I told the story about Willie, the joke went:
“Do you know what they call a modern day person that crosses the country full of whiskey? A Delta Airline Pilot!”
It’s great that this book made me realize that this is something that my character on stage has grown into, and I’m going to explore it a little bit more and start seeing what turns up!