Everybody and welcome to the first lesson in rehearsing This is on pacing. What is pacing mean? pacing basically is how quickly you're speaking. How fast are you speaking? How fast are you talking? How are you going through your material?

How fast do you get through it? Now one of the biggest issues that new comedians have is that they tend to want to get through their material. They think that if I go quickly, if I get through the jokes, that's what makes them funny. The truth is, that's not what makes them funny. delivery is what makes them funny. There is a great joke about comedy and pacing, and it goes like this.

What is the number one rule of comedy timing? So the problem of course, with the joke, you can see it is that timing is the number one thing about comedy, it can't be rushed. You have to actually time yourself properly. And that's what pacing is. Now the first bit of advice I ever got with pacing came from my uncle who's a stand up comedian in Detroit, and he said this pacing is People go slower than you think you should be going. It's that easy.

If you slow down, if you slow way down and you go slower than you think you should be going, you're actually going to go about the correct pace. Because your brain when you're on stage is going to be moving a mile a minute, it's going to be going very quickly, you're going to be thinking all kinds of different thoughts. And you're going to want to move through your material because your heart rate is going to increase. The first time you're on stage, this will definitely happen. So this is why I want you to rehearse and record yourself speaking very slowly. I want you to internalize the words that you're using.

So the first lesson is this. Slow, down, slow way down. If you have a mirror in your apartment and you're recording, watch yourself, watch your body language record very slowly. If your joke is Why did the chicken cross the road to get to the other side, slow it way down. Why did the chicken cross the road? To get to the other side, the point of the rehearsing is to get these words into your brain to make muscle memory out of them to feel yourself saying them.

And then if you're doing it in front of a mirror, you can see yourself saying them, you might find new places to do things like gesture. We'll talk about that in a bit. We'll also you'll, you'll see different ways for you deliver this material and by inflection. But right now it's just through pacing, you'll feel your body want to speed up, you'll feel your body want to change in flexion. But right now just focus on doing it slowly. Continue to do it because in the moment when you're on stage, you will do those things.

But first, you need to internalize the slow cadence of speech to make sure you're not rushing your material out on stage. So move slowly go through all of your jokes, take out your phone or your voice recorder. Or if you've picked up one of these mics, take out your mic and record yourself saying it very slowly. It should take longer than five minutes and that's a good thing.