§ PODCAST / PEOPLE

Alice Fraser

Guest

"Every harmless story is the shell of something that I’m then going to pack with gunpowder and give back to you. And you will accept it because you’ve held it before as a harmless shell. Either building up the strength of the audience, building up the trust of the audience, or building up these reference points for the audience to understand these stories retrospectively."

— Alice Fraser | DZ-83: A Very Thematic Stand-up Special!

2021

DZ-83: A Very Thematic Stand-up Special!

What can screenwriters learn from the storytelling techniques used by stand-up comedians?

Listen if you want to understand how stand-up comedians grip audiences and build emotional arcs (and what narrative tools screenwriters can borrow from comedy)!

⏱ 2h 31m

8 Sep 2021

Character · Theme · Audience

▶ More Info

Standup comedians can keep audiences gripped to their every word for over an hour, and often bring them to emotional climaxes by the end. So how do they do it and what tools can apply to scripted narratives… →

Films: Nanette (2017) , Baby Cobra (2016) , Inside (2021) , It's The Fireworks Talking (2007)

Character: Character Authenticity , Audience Complicity , Character Agency , Character Introductions

Theme: Theme , Emotional Truth , Rhetorical Triangle

Audience: Audience Sympathy , Anagnorisis

"You can absolutely change how a character, if a character is a villain or a hero, by bringing in someone higher status or lower status than them and having the way that they interact with that new person change. So you can have someone who’s seemingly lovely and then they treat a serving person badly and you know they’re a villain. Equally, you know, you can have somebody who seems in control and is very reassuring and comforting and then someone comes in who’s higher status than them and you see them behaving as a sycophant and you immediately lose respect and they can never regain that status."

— Alice Fraser | DZ-83: A Very Thematic Stand-up Special!