h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Becoming a comedian, means perfecting your art, this entails spending many hours every week working on material, and doing a lot of free (Often badly run) gigs in order to hone your craft. However, initially many acts neglect the imports of creating distinct on-stage image. This is often the difference between success and failure. Often it can take many years to develop this, but the more attention you give it early on, the better your chances.

A unique comedy image can capture the attention of the audience, and make some jokes work, which would never have flown without the foundation of a good comedy persona. Think about your image and what you're comedy persona will look like, and sound like. What will you be wearing. How you will come across to your audience. Ask for advice from other more experienced performers and swap tips with your peers on the subject.

So, do you think you have got a defined persona? Are you cynical, zany, naive, dead pan or may be a combination? Real life persona's tend to be quite complex. However, your performance persona needs to be easy to understand in a very short period of time (Perhaps 5 minutes), so it can’t be too deep. However, when you start to do longer 25 – 30 minute sets, you can start add much more depth to your persona, and your material.

It’s important to try to stay away from the persona's of other acts that you might consider funny. Many audiences have already seen Jimmy Carr, or Milton Jones. Gravitate toward the persona that depicts you best. For some people, that is literally being themselves on stage, for others it's exaggerating traits of their personality to an extreme. It's still you, but it's a caricature of some of the more amusing aspects of your personality. A person becomes the funnier when they’re brutally honest about themselves, and what's funny about them , and their attitude toward life. Larry David's Curb Your Enthusiasm is a great example of this.