Comedians

Comedy Schools: Is Funny Teachable? – A Study of Comedian Success

Learn what comedy schools teach, whether humor is trainable, and the limits of classroom instruction for developing comedians.

By Written Facts StaffJune 5, 2023Updated October 8, 20268 min read

You've probably told a story that got big laughs one night, then told it again a week later to dead silence. Same story, same words, but something in the delivery was off. Moments like that are the best case for comedy school, because they show that being funny depends on things you can learn: timing, structure, reading the room. So can funny be taught? Partly. Research shows that a sense of humor can be trained, and comedy schools have produced many famous comedians. But underlying ability still matters, and no classroom can stand in for performing in front of real audiences.

The evidence that humor can be trained

The best evidence comes from psychology. In 2018, Willibald Ruch, Jennifer Hofmann, Sonja Rusch and Heidi Stolz published a study in the journal HUMOR that tested the 7 Humor Habits Program, a training course developed by Paul McGhee. Its seven habits are:

surround yourself with humor
cultivate a playful attitude
laugh more often and more heartily
create your own verbal humor
look for humor in everyday life
take yourself lightly and laugh at yourself
find humor in the midst of stress

The study included 110 adults. Two groups took the eight-week training: one did extra "Home Play" exercises and one did not. These were compared with two control groups. One was a placebo humor group and the other was a waiting list. Everyone was measured before the training, right after it, and again two months later.

The researchers concluded that sense of humor is "malleable." The trained participants noticed the change in themselves, and so did the people around them. The placebo group did not show the same change. The trained groups also reported more cheerfulness and higher life satisfaction.

This study did not measure whether anyone could hold a comedy club audience for ten minutes. It measured everyday humor: noticing what's funny, playing with words, not taking yourself too seriously. Still, it challenges the common belief that you are either born funny or you aren't. At least some of it is a habit you can build.

The part that's harder to change

The other side of the debate also has research behind it. In a 2011 study in the journal Intelligence, Gil Greengross and Geoffrey Miller tested 400 university students, 200 men and 200 women. The students took tests of abstract reasoning and vocabulary, then wrote captions for three cartoons, which raters scored for funniness. Both general and verbal intelligence predicted who wrote the funnier captions. In this sample, men scored slightly higher on average.

In later studies, Greengross compared those students with 31 professional stand-up comedians. The comedians scored higher on verbal intelligence and on humor production. Their personalities weren't what you might expect, either: compared with the students, they were higher in openness but lower in extraversion, agreeableness and conscientiousness.

These are correlations, so they don't prove that funny is fixed at birth. They do suggest that people start with different amounts of the raw material, especially a quick command of language. Training can build on what you have, but you aren't all starting from the same place.

Where comedy schools came from

Comedy schools started out teaching games. Viola Spolin, a social worker during the Great Depression, invented improvisation games to help immigrant children socialize with each other. She later taught her theater games to University of Chicago students led by David Shepherd and her son Paul Sills. In the summer of 1955, that group formed the Compass Players.

In December 1959, Sills co-founded The Second City in Chicago with Bernie Sahlins and Howard Alk, building its work on Spolin's games. Its alumni include Alan Arkin, Joan Rivers, Gilda Radner, Dan Aykroyd, John Belushi, Bill Murray, John Candy, Martin Short, Mike Myers, Steve Carell and Tina Fey.

Other schools grew from the same idea:

The Groundlings (Los Angeles): Founded in 1974 by improv teacher Gary Austin and made up of members of his workshops. It helped launch Phil Hartman, Lisa Kudrow, Jon Lovitz, Paul Reubens, Conan O'Brien, Will Ferrell, Melissa McCarthy and Kristen Wiig.
ImprovOlympic, later iO (Chicago): Founded by Del Close and Charna Halpern. Its teaching put a strong focus on finding the "game" of a scene.
Upright Citizens Brigade (Chicago, then New York): Formed out of iO in 1990 by Amy Poehler, Matt Besser, Ian Roberts, Matt Walsh, Adam McKay, Horatio Sanz and others. The group moved to New York in 1996, and its training center now teaches long-form improv, sketch and writing based largely on Close's ideas.

The alumni lists of these schools are strong evidence that comedy can be taught, at least improv and sketch comedy. The method itself teaches you to listen, agree, build on a partner's idea and spot the pattern that makes a scene funny. Those are concrete skills, and they're practiced in front of audiences week after week.

Stand-up is the hard case

Stand-up is where comedians are most doubtful. Oliver Double is a stand-up comedian and comedy scholar who has taught stand-up in the drama department at the University of Kent. He has summed up his fellow comedians' view: "Most comedians think it is a waste of time, vaguely fascinating or a bit sad." His course was popular anyway, and enrollment grew from 16 students to 35. He argues that even students who never perform professionally gain skills they can use elsewhere, such as public speaking. But stand-up depends on live audience reactions, and a classroom can only partly provide them.

Teachers of stand-up don't claim more than that. Brad Trackman, a stand-up with more than 20 years of experience, founded the Philadelphia Comedy Academy. He admits there's a "bad stigma sometimes that you can't teach stand up comedy." He says Jim Gaffigan took stand-up classes for years "just to get that foundation and that confidence before you go out there." Trackman also says what a class can't do: "You can't guarantee anybody success with their art, but what you can do is teach them fundamentals… that will escalate the process immensely." His workshops last one month. Students build a five-minute set and perform it at the end.

Matt Besser of UCB put it most simply on a panel with Lisa Kudrow and Demetri Martin, where all three agreed that comedy can be taught: "You have to do comedy to learn comedy."

What a class can and can't give you

Putting this together, here is my view of what a good comedy class gives you:

Structure. You learn how setups, premises and scene "games" work, so you understand why a joke works or fails instead of just guessing.
Repetition with feedback. A class makes you write and perform regularly, in front of people who will tell you what isn't working.
A deadline and a stage. A showcase set at the end of the course makes you finish material and perform it.
Peers. Many comedians come out of classes with the people they'll keep working with. UCB itself started this way.

And here is what a class can't give you:

Enough stage time. Even a good course gives you only a few minutes in front of a real audience. Most of your development happens at open mics after class ends.
A point of view. A teacher can help you find what's distinctive about your outlook, but can't supply it.
A starting level of ability. The research above suggests that verbal quickness and personality affect where you start.
Success. Even the people who run these schools say they can't promise it.

The verdict

Funny is partly teachable, and the evidence for that is solid. Controlled research shows that sense of humor can be trained, and improv schools like Second City, the Groundlings, iO and UCB have trained many of the best-known comedians of the past 60 years. What can't be taught is the starting ability and the years of stage time that turn a skill into a career. Think back to that story that killed one week and died the next. A good class will help you understand why it happened. Making sure it doesn't happen again takes a lot of time in front of audiences.

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