The Resume

So I wanted to write about this Resume Writing, like…educational, I guess you could call it, because throughout the semester writing a resume was one of the weirdest, hardest, most frustrating things I have ever done in a class. By no real fault of the class though, or Dr. Sharma, I want to make that very clear. What the real issue was just constructing a somewhat normal, interesting, context/content rich resume for a comedian.

First off, there are no resumes in comedy, as far as I know, I have never seen a comedy resume. I have never been asked for a comedy resume, nor have I ever heard of anyone else being asked for one, or anyone even touching theirs up or making one, regardless of whether it was a necessity or not. So when I started researching the first thing I found out is that entertainment resumes are slightly more prevalent than first thought, but still not entirely necessary, what is really important is a tape or audition, and what is even more important than that is legitimate representation proportionate in size and scope to the line of work or venue. It was also really weird seeing that not a single resume or example was the same, they all had different styles, ideas, organizational and structural approaches, and the way information was prioritized was inconsistent among examples as well. It really made me feel like there was no structure for anyone to follow, and that meant that no one really took the time to care about it having strict requirements.

What jumped off the page for me was the listing of performances and gigs and all the work done in between. This was a sad realization on two levels, the first was that I had done nothing in the two years I have been doing stand up. I just simply don’t have the time in comedy to have gathered the experience in order to gather the work to write something noteworthy. It is weird and slightly depressing, but ultimately the truth. The following thing that jumped out at me, and this could just be because I was looking at examples online, was the amount of content and experience was gather from the amount of years active. What I am saying is it took a very long time for most resumes to get something even remotely decent, because, given that these resumes we in fact real, some of them were very sparse.

So I wrote exactly what I thought was important to me, and everything else was either unimportant, unrelated, or what I thought to be unhelpful. I wonder if I will ever find myself using that resume in the future?

One thought on “The Resume

  1. I remember talking to you about this more in one of our discussions and thought it was really interesting how you don’t need resumes to get more work. It was understandable that you wouldn’t need a resume to get an offer since the resume wouldn’t show how funny someone could be. However, I think that a resume can still come in handy even for you since your resume can still show how many shows you performed, which can, in a way, demonstrate your humor. If you weren’t funny, you wouldn’t have been offered all those jobs. Even if you don’t need it now, it may be useful later on, maybe if you ever want to write comedy for a movie or something!

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