Arts Alive San Antonio

By JASMINA WELLINGHOFF, Editor

Laughter makes people feel good but making people laugh is no easy task. If you would like to learn how to use humor to entertain others, Gemini Ink has just the thing for you: a class called “Laughing Matters: The Joke Writing Process,” taught by San Antonio comedienne Tori Pool.

Largely self-taught, Pool performs regularly in comedy clubs, such as the Laugh Out Loud Club and the Blind Tiger Comedy Club, here in San Antonio, and has also served as the opening act for Mo Amer, Drew Carey and Tom Green. She has also been nominated twice for Best Standup by the San Antonio Current.

Pool discovered the power of humor as a young girl, growing up in a joke-cracking family.

“I come from a family of very sarcastic people,” she explained. “I grew up watching my family members interact with each other and making each other laugh. I was jealous of their ability to do that and I wanted to emulate them. I remember trying to make them laugh with no success.  But then, one day when I was like six years old, I made a joke, actually it was just me being silly. I said, ‘How am I going to pass the driver’s ed test?’ And they all laughed. I was like, I want more of that!”

So, she took every opportunity to entertain her mom and mom’s friends, competing with her older brother who, she says, was naturally funny. It seemed to help him make friends and his little sister decided that she, too, wanted to be as likeable and funny. Often, TV comedians provided learning material, sometime to her mother’s great displeasure due to what she deemed “Inappropriate language.”

Though she became good at making people laugh at parties, the first time Pool performed for an audience, was four years ago, when she joined an open-mic opportunity at the LOL club. “I have a video of it,” she noted. “It’s horrible, it’s embarrassing. I also have a video of showing that video to my son who said ‘I hate you, Mom.’”

What finally helped her develop her comedy routines is finding out who she wanted to be on stage. The first step was to develop jokes about herself and her personality. Since she worked as a teacher, she also riffed on bad teachers, but discovered especially fertile ground by commenting on all the talk about giving guns to teachers in our schools to fight the bad guys.

In the upcoming Gemini Ink class, she will begin by showing different comedic styles, from Rachel Feinstein-style of using her own life to generate laughs by impersonating different characters, to Mark Norman-style which involves a joke setup/premise, followed by the punch line. Her own routines are a combination of setup/punch and storytelling.

The students will learn the elements of joke writing and do some prewriting of their jokes-in-the-making. In the second half of the class, the focus will be on writing using English classroom techniques such as the Socratic method to trigger higher order thinking. Or to put it simply, each participant will have to choose an initial premise or opinion. The Socratic process will hopefully generate questions about the premise, leading to a better premise.

“It’s during this process of questioning where the person will let his/her guard down and hopefully be naturally funny,” she stated. Then as a group, the class will ask questions about each writer’s topic of choice and “hopefully drag laughs out of them or trigger memories that may lead to more writing.”  

Ultimately, the course is designed to help budding comics to write, rehearse and deliver their “first five minutes of comedy in a voice all (their) own.
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Virtual class “Laughing Matters: the Joke Writing Process,” July 13, 6:30 – 8:30 p.m.; $135, Gemini Ink members $115, students $75; online comedy show for students and friends July 29. To register go to https://geminiink.org/events.