There’s a first for everything, like doing stand up comedy!

-Reclaiming my funny bone. Being scared and doing it anyway, part 2 of 2

Imagine your worst and most embarrassing nightmare, then imagine it’s actual life. That’s been my life since April 4, 2025.

Six weeks ago I signed up for a series of beginner stand up classes at Improv School Redlands. Not because I want to become a stand up comedian, I just thought it would be a way for me to learn techniques to be a funnier writer. I did not think through that the classes meant I had to be on stage, every week (except for the first one, thank God).

Stand up comedian George Ferido is a local prolific and talented guy who walked us through the ropes of making a stand up set. As someone who loves researching new stuff I enjoyed the low stakes in the first class learning the theory of stand up. Did you know the gold standard is five to seven laughs. per. minute. on. stage.?

A laugh is confirmation, you’re on the right track.

Waiting to go on stage in front of my peers.

I would settle for a chuckle per minute. Honestly.

Ferido drilled us on timing, to pause before the punch line (then pause again afterwards to make room for laughs). We learned about tags, subverting expectations, clap backs, name flips, how to hold a microphone. And how we needed to pretend to be relaxed on stage (easier said than done). To be fair, all of the suggestions sounded easy on paper.

In this Substack I write about things happening in and around my city/community. These days I feel it’s even more crucial to join events, meet new people, get to know strangers and realize we are all in this together. I hope to encourage my readers to attend events where they live, to meet people outside of their regular circles and have fun. 

For the next three Friday nights we prepared three minutes stand up to practice on stage in front of our peers. I learned quickly to schedule ample time for stomach aches, nausea and holding my head in my hands the afternoon prior to a class. I tried to be clever about my jokes, writing about death and eczema (traumedy¹ is way too advanced for my beginner level I realized). I stuck with cultural differences, with my background of being half Danish and half Finnish. And I struggled and struggled some more with Ferido’s advice of “Write the least amount of words for the joke.”

I protested internally for weeks. I like to be wordy. Can I just explain this thing? I promise it will be funny at the end. NO. There is no time, especially as we were working up to performing for five minutes (it’s longer than you think, too short when you think about the amount of laughs chuckles you are going for).

My fellow performers seemed to easily figure out the freakishly short format. Some were already hitting up open mic nights, practicing for a while before attending the classes. Why did everyone else look so comfortable up there, with their great and adorable personalities? I felt my personality was formed in cardboard, so dull.

See below, the great performers I learned to do stand up with. I enjoyed each and every one’s different take on jokes, their quirkiness, dead panned humor, the way they were willing to go beyond what would be deemed appropriate. The way they could become a persona!

The social media poster I hesitated to share.

“Write every day,” Ferido said and I wrote one long sentence after the other.

“You came up with a joke, laughed, wrote it down. Now look at it again and built it backwards,” he said, “Trim the fat. Use the least amount of words for the joke.” Ah, it’s so much easier said and done, I thought. I just wanted to write with words, many words.

Think of your set like boxing, Ferido explained. Set up - punch, set up - punch, set up - punch. Non-stop. “Be quick to make it land.”

I realized what was on stake. The first thing I remember losing, moving to the US, was the sense that I was funny. I could use subtlety, irony, the Danish language to make people laugh. It was all gone. Americans thought I was serious, when I was joking in English. I mourned losing that part of myself, that I couldn’t get people to laugh with me.

At the fourth class we were told to perform five minutes for each other, even though we had only prepared three. I think it was Ferido’s clever way of having us bomb as part of the experience. The fifth class got canceled because instead we were told forced to do an open mic night. Ferido send us a list of open mic opportunities happening all over the Inland Empire. No excuses.

My set was not good at the open mic I went to two days before our final showcase. Ferido told us, “I’m ready to quit twice a year.” Barely a chuckle from the 15 people strangers. I did however notice my ob/gyn in the audience which got me into serious embarrassment territory and that was the comedic gold my set had lacked (thank you, shame). A fellow stand up class member, Marty, told me afterwards, “Your set goes over my head. You’re too wordy. I think you are funny on paper, like if I read it, it would be funny.”

OMG, I have been going about it all wrong, I thought. I was still writing jokes like a writer. But I was not a writer anymore, I was a stand upper.

I finally understood why Ferido had hammered at us to only use enough words to get the point across. There were 48 hours for me to fix my set. It was time for me to kill my darlings -with a chainsaw!

I love my long and winding roads of telling a story, the more words the better. Writing for the local paper always gets me in trouble because my reporting is too long. Here on Substack, I can be as drawn out as I would like (it’s glorious). But… I know I need to learn to be more precise, learn word-economy and get out of my comfort zone (super yikes).

So after fretting and trying not to dry heave for a full afternoon, I arrived at Redlands Improv School just before 6 p.m. last Friday. 30 minutes to showtime.

Me before my set. Shenanigans in the green room. The initial list.

How many would there be in the audience? Some students hid in the green room, others sat with their family member or friend in the main room. The room started to fill up and the student performers gathered in the green room. Two plush sofas were ready to embrace us in a cozy hug. I couldn’t sit, I was 100% filled with fidgety nervous energy. I had invited a few friends, enough to make me thoroughly nervous about my performance skills. We had arrived at the point of no return. It was time to get real uncomfortable. Have fun out there, I heard someone said, I shook my head. I will only do this once, I repeated to myself as a mantra.

We each picked when we would like to perform. I chose 7, later Ferido bumped us down, so I ended up being number 8 (out of 11). Ha, that’s exactly what I would have rated my performance prior to doing it! I am used to chuckles, and I will be happy with chuckles, possibly one laugh per minute, tops.

George Ferido warmed up the crowd. I loved how relaxed and at ease he sounded up there, even though we could only hear snippets in the green room whenever the door opened. My fellow students began to perform, got laughs and I noticed a sigh of relief on faces as they returned. I did the math and realized I had to wait an hour to get on stage. An hour to stress, an hour with a pit in my stomach and a lump in my throat, an hour not knowing which leg to stand on.

I was going to go on stage after one of the in my opinion stronger performers, Cici. What if I bomb? If I was not funny it would look so much starker after someone who was funny. I was nervous I would forget my lines. My lines are connected, if I forget some the following will lose their bite. I regretted I invited some of my friends, that my husband was there. It would be easier to fail in front of strangers.

I remembered Ferido telling us, “Nerves means you care about it” and “Pressure makes diamonds but it also sometimes makes coal.”

Ferido introduced me as the studious student. I am a stickler for theory, research and writing. I get up on stage, grab the microphone, moves the microphone stand out of the way. It’s time to let it rip.

During the show and after.

And I surprise myself: They are laughing. I see a room full of people, close to a hundred, and because I am so focused on what I am saying, I don’t hear every laugh. But it’s going good. I can’t believe it.

For someone who has extremely high expectations and rarely if ever live up to them², how do I acknowledge that I did it? I actually did it. Watching the recording afterwards, I counted thirty laughs & chuckles in five and half minutes. That’s crazy.

It’s an absurd feeling exceeding my own (high) expectations. I don’t have any way to deal with it. In a way I am still feeling totally puzzled by it all.

Afterwards, Joe and Marty told me: “You killed it!”

I wish I hadn’t been in the green room the whole time, so I could have been the sharer of good news to my fellow students when they returned. And to be honest, I didn’t even feel relieved afterwards. I 100% did not know how to act. A couple of people ask me to go do open mic nights locally, so they could see me again. How do I react to that? Am I now doing stand up? It was supposed to be a one time thing.

Side note: Why do things that scare you? Why did I do two scary thing in one month? (Read about the first one here). Are you ever too old to do scary things? Because getting outside of your comfort zone builds you, makes you stronger. I have hopes that these experiences will make me ready for the inevitable rejections I get submitting the books I wish to publish. When you get older, don’t you just get more ready to fail? What’s there to lose? The clock is ticking.

In conclusion, I hereby reclaim that I can be funny in English. I learned important techniques in writing comedy, things that I would never have understood, had I not gotten on stage. Did stand up change my life? Maybe it did.

Are you stand up curious? I whole heartedly recommend Improv School Redlands. The coolest crowd, seriously. Such a fun class schedule and shows to entertain us all. Support local visual art and see our community members on stage.

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With gratitude, Siw

1. A term I learned from my writer friend, Katie Allen, which means how to write comedy out of trauma.

2. I once auditioned to become a tv host in Denmark and I was so nervous that my cheek muscles trembled, my whole face looked like a bowl of pudding on screen. But that’s another story.