Students to perform one night stand-up

Class was funny for 17 students this semester.

This semester 17 students left Jay Self's JINS course with smiles on their faces. This is the second time Self, assistant professor of communication, has taught the Art and Science of Humor Junior Interdisciplinary studies course, which was designed to allow students to analyze humor and its effects on the mind and body.

Self said his students wrote three papers analyzing stand-up routines, the career of a comedian and a comedian's portrayal of a humorous message. As a final project, Self requires the students to develop their own stand-up comedy routine and present it at an off-campus event called "One Night Stand (Up)," which will be at WrongDaddy's tomorrow at 8 p.m.

"They're building a routine throughout the course of the semester," Self said. "It takes a long time to really develop, and really good comedians will take maybe a year to get a good 30-minute set of material."

Each student has five to seven minutes to deliver their stand-up to a live audience. Routines will be videotaped, so peers can later view and critique each student. Students write what they have learned in a paper to receive their final grade, Self said.

"One of the hardest things to do is stand-up comedy because it's you all alone with a microphone and that's it," Self said. "And you're all of a sudden responsible for entertaining [people]. Last time we did this there were 300 people in the audience."

Junior Roger Alexander said he decided to take this JINS course because he is a business administration major and was hoping that learning about humor and how it works would help him in his career.

"I like watching a lot of stand-up comedy, and I like laughing, like everybody else," Alexander said. "I always thought that if I could add some humor into the business aspect of my career - if I could learn how humor works and learn how to set up jokes to be funny - that would help the social aspect of working with business clients."

Alexander said he saw the stand-up assignment as a challenge for him in this course.

"Dr. Self said six people dropped out of the class after the first day, but I stayed because I saw it as a challenge," Alexander said. "It's something I've never done before and just because it's hard doesn't mean I'm going to run away from it. I see it as something I can take on, and if I'm successful with it, it will be another accomplishment under my belt."

Alexander said the theme for his stand-up stemmed from being a minority in most of his classes. He said he knows that many comedians, including Dave Chappelle and Chris Rock, deliver their comedy from a minority stand-point, but he is going to relate it to living in Kirksville and attending Truman.

"I'm not nervous yet," he said. "I probably will be that night."

Junior Katibeth Lee said she took the JINS course because she saw the Fall 2007 students' stand-up and wanted to take a fun class.

She said analyzing comedy has made her much more aware of jokes and humor. She developed her main theme around herself and her experiences. She will be talking about "gay speak," which builds upon terms known and used within the gay community, she said.

"I'm going to give my own spin on gay speak, so it will be a little lesson for all the straight people in the audience," Lee said. "I've had really good responses with what I've done in class so far. It is a comedy class, so we are all talking about personal issues and telling funny stories from our lives and everyone is really open."

Although the class has been fun, Lee said she realized only recently that she might be nervous.

"It does make me nervous," Lee said. "I just realized that [tomorrow] I have to do stand-up, which kind of terrifies me, but I also think it's a great experience, and it will be a lot of fun."