right: I wasn’t ready. I still knew nothing about the art of comedy. The problem was not Keith’s slowness. It was my impatience. I recognized that I had a lot of work to do to get to that level. Instead of thinking about getting on stage in New York, I needed to think about removing, rewriting, reconstructing, shifting, and shaping every phrase in my set, examining every nuance from my tonality to my gestures. One of the comics who had this perfected was named JB Smoove. He was very animated, and before he even opened his mouth, audience members already knew they were going to have a good time
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