Whenever you are speaking in front of a large audience, or really any audience whatsoever you may find that a certain, often relatively large, amount of your script will elude your capacity for recall. Often the larger the number of people in the audience, the more real this cost of anxiety on cognition is. The real reason for this is because a certain amount of cognitive energy that, in private, was used for the recollection of jokes stored away in synapses is now being used to suppress your anxieties and prevent overstimulation and the fight or flight response.

There is one and only one legitimate cure for this rather unfortunate fact and that’s rehearsal. The more times you rehearse these things in your mind, the more you are able to burn something into your memory to the point that it becomes as natural and mechanistic as driving your car. As a matter of fact, if you mentally transport yourself to the first time you drove a car you will recall how difficult it was the first time to perform even the most mundane tasks, but now that you have been doing it for years it feels nearly as natural as breathing.

The less conscious energy you have to pour into delivering a script the greater your capacity to excel in front of even really large, and challenging audiences will be. This can only occur after pain-staking, exhausting rehearsal has transpired — much like those first few rides in that car of yours.

However, often speaking in front of groups of people isn’t as necessary to every day life as, for example, driving a car is. Most often it’s an act of true self-actualization. It requires more determination on the part of the presenter. A good test for a man or woman’s mental preparedness when delivering is whether or not they can keep eye contact with members of a smaller audience for any reasonable amount of time while delivering their comedic script.

Try this with a a number of friends, preferably a few that bust your chops regularily, before doing stand up in front of a large audience. Do you have a habit of looking away when cracking your jokes? If so, then you’ve not rehearsed your jokes enough in private. Find new ways to expand your boundaries and run through your routine and deliveries quickly. Chug coffee if you must, find a peaceful, quiet place, and bring a tape recorder. Make an audio recording of yourself delivering the routine (perhaps read from script), and then attempt to race against yourself to recall your own punchlines more quickly than you said them on the audio recording.

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