How to Do It Standing Up: The Friars' Club Guide to Being a Comic, a Cut-Up, a Card, a Character or a Clown Review

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(More customer reviews)First of all, what this book is not: It is not about how to be funny, nor is it an analysis of what humour is. The title is blatantly misleading. The book itself is not funny, because these are comedians describing things that happened to them, not attempting to get the reader to laugh.
This is a collection of first-person narratives in which comedians reminisce about performing in comedy clubs, especially at the beginning of their careers when they were unknowns. Their stories are surprisingly similar - struggling for stage time, desperate for money, honing their craft, and so on. The stories are repetitive and, after awhile, seem interchangeable. At times the narrators engage in a bit of introspection about why some things are funny and some are not, but one has to search for those analytical moments. To a large extent, these comedians just kind of "wing it" and have trouble articulating why one joke is hilarious while another leads to dead silence.
Of the 30-plus comedians interviewed for the book, I've heard of about one third of them. The most famous participants are Richard Belzer, Phyllis Diller, and Lily Tomlin.

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