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Comedy is a profession, and a tough one to master with any kind of success. For every Jay Leno, Ray Romano, Jerry Seinfeld, Bill Cosby and the recently-departed George Carlin, there are thousands of stand-up comedians out there trying to make it from the $25-a-night club gigs in Nowhere City to the multi-million dollar contracts for sit-com and Las Vegas stardom.

For example, this oft-used quote may be from Shakespearean times, or even further back to ancient Rome when there were stand-up orators in the original Caesar's Palace. The scene is an old actor on his death bed, and a young man from the troupe asks the venerable one if he feels pain in his last hours. The reply is, "Dying is easy; comedy is hard." Those who choose a career in comedy should realize that their road to success is not easy, and can be a very rocky one. Chances are very high that it will lead to a dead end.

We'll soon travel to Las Vegas to see a very close relative perform stand-up for a week in a major hotel comedy club. He could be a model for anyone who wants to become a professional comedian. He began to hone his creative skills as a writer for his high school newspaper, where he covered news and sports. From the start, he always used humor to tell his stories, and by the time he was a senior, he began to consider he would become a stand-up comedian.

For his first summer before starting college, he worked as an announcer for a local FM station. Although he put in long hours, and rewrote much of the regular news articles that came in, his pay was less than he would have earned flipping burgers. However, he used those months to start his portfolio of his writings, an absolutely necessary tool for any budding comedian or comedy writer to build. While in college, he worked, also with piddling pay, at a PBS TV station, where he wrote and did on-air reporting and commentary. His college major was communications, which emphasized writing to deadlines, correct grammar, news and feature writing. It was an excellent base for a future in becoming a professional comedian.

In college, he joined the debating club and participated in campus stage productions. He wrote many ten-minute stand-up scripts and performed them on open mike (amateurs performance) nights at local comedy clubs. He believes his considerable real-life experiences while in high school and college were at least as important as classroom studies. He says it is the best preparation for a career that requires both prepared and ad lib

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