The Comedy Group Book
This step-by-step guide demonstrates how to easily create a successful comedy group. By following the techniques in this book, actors will be able to do an end run around casting directors by casting themselves in their own group’s productions. Create a Comedy Group is filled with practical advice, production information, resource guides, tips, short cuts, and amusing war stories culled from the author’s fifteen plus years of experience in running her own group. By covering every aspect of...
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This step-by-step guide demonstrates how to easily create a successful comedy group. By following the techniques in this book, actors will be able to do an end run around casting directors by casting themselves in their own group s productions. Create a Comedy Group is filled with practical advice, production information, resource guides, tips, short cuts, and amusing war stories culled from the author s fifteen plus years of experience in running her own group. By covering every aspect of forming and running a comedy group, this book shows how to develop a profitable acting career by writing, touring, and selling stage shows as comedy product for Cable TV, Network TV, and for film. The author s own experience of creating a group led to her winning a New York Critic s Drama Desk Award for starring in her group s Off-Broadway show El Grande de Coca-Cola, which was televised as an HBO comedy special. Next, Bullshot Crummond was televised by Showtime and then produced as a feature film by George Harrison s HandMade Films under the title Bullshot. Based on her own experience, the author also explains how an actor can go on to leverage a successful solo career using the exposure and experience gained from creating a comedy group. Ben Malczewski - Library Journal The motivational how-to/self-help book formula seems to require offering promises and good lines, reciprocating empathy, and purporting to ameliorate the "condition" with enthusiasm and exclamation. Actor, writer, and journeyman White's guide to running a successful comedy group is no different, but it isn't empty, either. There is good step-by-step information here, from writing and marketing to business plans and budgets. Given its valuable universal applicability, this may have served better as a general showbiz career guide than a specific promotion of comedy groups as the vehicle for a successful start. The book occasionally suffers an identity crisis. White has an affability about her that those wanting more how-to may consider superfluous. Every detail is elaborated with stories from her experience-she regularly lapses into memoir-and the formula gets tiresome. Distracting from her strengths in resourceful organization and streetwise instruction, the book often seems to plead for White's career legitimacy with the proclamations of a padded résumé (Why the photo section?). Success is relative, but White's sustainable, 30-year career speaks for itself. With useful references, resources, and a glossary; marginally recommended.
\ Library JournalThe motivational how-to/self-help book formula seems to require offering promises and good lines, reciprocating empathy, and purporting to ameliorate the "condition" with enthusiasm and exclamation. Actor, writer, and journeyman White's guide to running a successful comedy group is no different, but it isn't empty, either. There is good step-by-step information here, from writing and marketing to business plans and budgets. Given its valuable universal applicability, this may have served better as a general showbiz career guide than a specific promotion of comedy groups as the vehicle for a successful start. The book occasionally suffers an identity crisis. White has an affability about her that those wanting more how-to may consider superfluous. Every detail is elaborated with stories from her experience-she regularly lapses into memoir-and the formula gets tiresome. Distracting from her strengths in resourceful organization and streetwise instruction, the book often seems to plead for White's career legitimacy with the proclamations of a padded résumé (Why the photo section?). Success is relative, but White's sustainable, 30-year career speaks for itself. With useful references, resources, and a glossary; marginally recommended.\ —Ben Malczewski\ \ \
