Reddit reviews Getting the Joke: The Inner Workings of Stand-up Comedy (Performance Books)

It's a bit tricky to explain, but here goes:

I'm in my third year of a 4-year Drama & Theatre Studies masters course, so you have 3 years to get your standard bachelor's degree and then an extra year that upgardes it to an 'MDrama'. The final year has always offered stand-up comedy as an area of specialisation, where you do weekly gigs in front of a student crowd (with new material each week) as well as going into London to do open mics.

Up until now the third year had a module that was all about stand-up theory, but they changed it for our year so that it became half theory, half practical. The first six weeks we studied academic stuff on comedy (all the way back to Freud), the history of stand-up, comic devices, personas, etc etc etc. We had to write an essay about a chosen comedian, analyse one of their routines and explain why it was funny academicly.

That all set us up for the last six weeks which was purely practical. Weekly workshops where we'd be set different tasks (like, write some surreal material or instant character stuff or audience participation) and do it in front of the class. Then we took our best stuff and crammed it into 5 minutes, which we performed in a show on the last day of term (hence why I was asking about warm-up rituals for 10AM comedy). The focus was on getting us to produce something that we could easily take to open mic nights if we wanted to, and also to give us a taste of it to see if we wanted to do the specialisation next year.

The guy who teaches the course was on a BBC documentary about stand-up the other night, and he's also written a few books and journal articles about teaching comedy.

This one here has got some stuff about teaching stand-up: http://www.amazon.co.uk/Getting-Joke-Stand-up-Comedy-Performance/dp/0413774767

Hope that helps!