Andrew Rudick: Stand-Up Comedian

Andrew Rudick performs in rooms where stand-up happens in real time and the room answers back immediately. A national headliner with specials on Dry Bar Comedy and Amazon Prime, and the producer behind Cincinnati’s Don’t Tell Comedy shows, he’s spent years learning how crowds signal what they’ll tolerate and when they’re about to turn. We talked about how jokes are tested, how silence gives things away, and the small adjustments that decide whether a set holds or collapses.

---

When a joke works, most of the work happened long before the punchline. What’s the part of your process the audience never sees but decides whether the set survives?

Everyone has a different process for joke writing. Some people riff onstage. Some people sit in a room every day with pen and paper. Some people use voice memos when something funny happens. My process is mostly severe anxiety about how I never sit down to write enough, until that anxiety forces me to grab my laptop or a pen and stare at a blank page for 45 minutes. That usually turns into a spiral about writer’s block and imposter syndrome. Then I’ll go to a coffee shop to continue the anxiety spiral publicly, hoping I overhear something funny the barista says that I can try onstage.

No matter how funny an idea feels in your head, you never really know if it works until you try it in front of a live audience. So a lot of my set comes from testing and tweaking in real time. I usually sandwich something new between two tried and true jokes so if it fails, I can get the audience back quickly. That used to happen mostly at open mics, but now I try new material in front of paying audiences, which is pretty common. I know some comics who do all their writing onstage and never sit down to write, and I’m very jealous of them. My process ends up being a mix of all of this, plus an unhealthy dose of anxiety.

You move between high-energy delivery and small, quiet beats. How do you decide which moments earn volume and which moments stay almost unnoticed?

I think a lot of these decisions happen at a subconscious or even physical level. During every show, things are tweaked slightly, and some higher part of your brain is paying attention to those subtle changes and adapting. Kind of like when you have a bad gut reaction to meeting somebody for the first time and they turn out to be a really bad person. In the same way our bodies know something on a deep level before our conscious minds do, we as comedians learn to process what works and what doesn’t and adapt accordingly. Watching video of yourself performing and studying it can be very effective too.

On stage, a crowd can turn fast. What’s the first microscopic signal that tells you a room is shifting?

This is an easy one: silence. And it’s not a microscopic signal at all. The silence is deafening. One of the best and worst things about live stand-up is the instant feedback you get from an audience. If you’re killing, the laughter is so loud and long that you have to add pauses just to get to the next joke. If you’re bombing, your instinct is to speed up, which you shouldn’t do because it messes with your pacing and telegraphs nervousness to the audience. While individual audience members can sometimes be dumb, crowds collectively are extremely perceptive.

If the room goes silent because you’re bombing, you start to hear sounds you’d never notice otherwise. If I can hear someone stirring ice in their glass or the A/C kick on, I know I’m in trouble.

Comedy looks improvisational from the outside. What’s actually mapped out in your head during a set and what’s left to chance?

This varies based on the comic. I have friends who don’t write anything down and don’t go onstage with any plan whatsoever. They just go out and improvise on whatever is happening in the room, do crowd work, and play around, and sometimes those people are the funniest. I try to go in with a plan, but make sure it’s flexible and that I diverge from it when necessary. Sometimes the crowd sucks and they don’t like any of your jokes, so you have to pivot to crowd work and actually talk to them.

I’m trying to get away from being so regimented onstage and feeling like I need to hit every joke I wrote down on my set list. Being present in the room can make a huge difference. Sometimes you can tell a comic is just going through the motions when their jokes aren’t working and they aren’t pivoting at all to address the vibe in the room. I want to have more fun onstage and be looser. A lot of times for me, the best jokes come out of just messing around onstage in the moment.

When you watch another comic, what invisible choices are you paying attention to that most people miss? Mostly structural things like pacing and delivery, but also how they use physicality and acting in their set. If I know the comic and their material well, I’m usually paying more attention to the audience, especially if I haven’t gone up yet and I’m trying to gauge the room. If it’s a comedian I love, or someone I’ve never seen who’s making me laugh really hard, I try not to analyze anything and just experience it as an audience member. If I’ve seen the set before and love it, I’ll study what they’re doing right. And if it’s someone I dislike, I’m analyzing their set for hackiness and quietly rooting for the audience to go silent or start heckling. Just kidding. Kind of.

---

When Andrew talks about stand-up, he’s describing a live exchange that never stops moving. Every set is shaped by timing, silence, and how closely you’re paying attention to the room. The invisible work lives in those small adjustments that decide whether the set keeps its footing or starts to slide.

Learn more about Andrew at:

• IMDb

• Website