Self-Taught vs Course
Can you learn without paying?
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Become a memberIf you’re learning by gigging, do you give each set one job?
I’m wondering if “get more stage time” is too vague to be useful on its own. If you’re mostly learning by doing gigs rather than following a course, do you decide before each set what you’re actually working on — slow the first minute down, test one new bit, stop looking at the floor, hold the pauses — and leave everything else alone for the night? I keep wanting to improve six things at once, which makes it quite hard afterwards to know what I actually learned.
If you’re learning without a course, what do you actually review after each gig?
I’m trying to make “just gig more” into something slightly more deliberate. If you’re mostly self-taught, do you review every recording with the same checklist — where the first laugh came, setups that dragged, lines you rushed, bits you forgot — or only listen back when something felt noticeably different? I can see myself turning every five-minute set into forty minutes of admin, but doing no review at all feels like wasting the evidence.
If you're self-taught, how do you stop practising the wrong thing?
The bit I envy about courses isn’t really the exercises, it’s having somebody notice what you can’t see yourself doing. If you’re learning mostly through writing, gigging and watching other comics, how do you build a useful feedback loop without turning every post-gig conversation into “was I funny?” Do you ask one specific question, record sets and review them, swap notes with another comic, or just trust repetition to expose the problems eventually?
What do courses teach that you genuinely struggle to learn just by gigging?
I’m not anti-course at all, but I keep going back and forth on whether I actually need one yet. Open mics teach me very quickly whether a joke works, but they don’t necessarily tell me why it didn’t, or what I should practise between gigs. For people deciding between structured training and just getting more stage time, what skills do you think are genuinely harder to pick up on your own?