Incorporating Physical Humor into your Act

Something New

Something that you can all try to do that can add a lot of laughs to your act and only require minimal effort to do is to add some Physical Humor to your act. What is Physical Humor you ask?

That is just about anything that you can do that is over and above the usual “Vent” type of act. You are already getting pretty good at your Vent stuff (or at least you should be). Now lets think about going on to the next step in this type of show business.

If all your puppet does is sit there on your lap and move its mouth while you speak for him, you can indeed call yourself a Ventriloquist. However, if your puppet can engage you (and the audience) by doing other things that are funny, then you can consider yourself much more of a showman.

While you are going back and forth with the puppet, maybe the puppet can do things that make him a bit of a smart aleck. Maybe the puppet can reach out and put his/her hand over your mouth while saying “Shush” or “be quiet” or words to that effect.

Maybe the puppet can scratch under its arm and then smell his fingers and say . . . “Whoosh. Time for a bath. Its getting bad down there.” Maybe the puppet can reach into your pocket and pull out a handkerchief and hand it to a lady in the front seat who just sneezed.

At the same time he hands her the rag he could say “Hey Lady, wipe off your hand . . . you got stuff dripping off of it.

Make sure that you stay within the boundaries of good clean humor. You want to get laughs but you don’t want to have people wishing that they had not brought their children to see you.

There are many other things that you can do. Use your own imagination to think up more types of Physical Humor for your show. There are no limits to the type of things that you can do.

Keep practicing and improving your act. As one person once said, “The harder I work, the luckier I get”.

We will talk again next week.

Steve and JET