"We are interested in hiring you to perform your show, what is it, a pantomime?!" - a nice gentleman, the organizer of one of the "cultural" events, addressed me, and I thought of getting out of the conversation like a pantomime artist. pulls out of an invisible box. Not to sound ungrateful, a little flattered that a man wanted to hire me despite not really knowing what I do, but... If he knew just a little more about stand-up than "I heard it's funny," maybe we'd avoid the awkwardness that comes when comedian, who talks about sex, church, politics without restrictions or censorship, you can include in the program between the recital section of the local elementary school and the children's choir "Različak".
"So it's not a pantomime," continued the organizer, and there was no longer any doubt that my words "No, it's not a pantomime at all" were correctly interpreted. "So what?"
"In short, stand-up is a stage form where the performer presents his thoughts and observations in a direct address to the audience in the most humorous way possible. It starts by writing an author's standup text, which is a process that follows a certain routine that usually looks like this:
I have many ideas for fore, I have developed them all in my head and now I just have to write them down. I sit down at the table, take the paper and realize that there weren't that many ideas, actually the ones I had weren't any, I'm not even going to write them down, it doesn't matter now I'll think of and write down new ones. Here I am sitting for the fifth hour, looking at the white paper and thinking that jobs from 8 am to 15 pm are not bad either, I don't really have to be a comedian. I give up writing and do something else. An excellent trick comes to my mind, from which several more ideas are born, I return to writing.
After writing the text, the written text is presented to the audience and modified, i.e. improvement according to the reactions."
"Aha... nice", he said in the way I would say "Aha, nice" to a programmer who told me that he wrote a console program where the number n is entered, and in the next n lines 2 numbers are entered which are the coordinates of a point.
"Standup, is that something in English?"
"The content I speak is in Serbian, but the title is in English, because that is where the stage form was created and has been successfully developing for almost a century. In the West, it is a serious show-biz industry, and we at Standup.rs are trying to put Serbia on the stand-up world map through quality work. The extremely successful and accepted international stand-up comedy festival Standup Fest in Belgrade, where the world's leading stand-up stars performed, is proof that we are on the right track."
"Are you kidding me that it's popular with Americans?"
"You might say that they rarely mix up a comedian and a mime."
