As the founding director of The American Comedy Institute, a dedicated student of standup, and someone whose tutelage has bolstered the careers of Lena Dunham and Jim Gaffigan, Stephen Rosenfield is an authority on the complicated craft of standup comedy. And in his new book, Mastering Stand-Up: The Complete Guide to Becoming a Successful Comedian, he makes an otherwise terrifying art form – Americans reportedly fear public speaking more than they do death – remarkably accessible to both the layman and the comedy buff. Rosenfield spoke to the Guardian about the finer points of standup, from structure to subject matter, that are included in his book.

Format, not content, is key

“The language of standup is very technical. It reminds me of iambic pentameter in a way, but it’s designed to sound like regular speech – that was the triumph of iambic pentameter. Comedy club audiences have an educated ear; they don’t know they do, but they do. And they expect upwards of four laughs per minute. In order to make that happen, material needs to be formatted and set up in punchline format. Sometimes new comics think that set-up and punchline has something to do with the content, but it doesn’t. Learning how to write in that format is how one learns to write material that’s going to work in a club. You could be writing jokes about Immanuel Kant and still set up a punchline.”

The subject is you

“I give my students a list of the subjects of standup comedy. Number one is how you feel about your life now, and how you feel about the way it happened. The second subject is how you feel about everything else that engages you, like politics or pop culture. Interestingly, if you look at other art forms, the list is similarly short. This is saying something really crucial, which is that the subject of standup, just as the subject of any other art form, is you. What accounts for originality is your take on what you’re talking about.

Stephen Rosenfield Photograph: Ben Rosenfield

“When 9/11 happened, we stopped for a while. It was hard to figure out what to do. And after about six weeks we started up again. I had this wonderful young woman in that workshop who was going to NYU. She was really offbeat, genuinely eccentric. She gets up and – this is around November – and said: ‘I’m not proud of this, but I think Osama Bin Laden is really cute, those high cheekbones and that gorgeous beard.’ We had all obviously been traumatized by 9/11. But that was successful, because who was thinking in those terms? What an original piece of standup. With really good comedy, nobody can tell it as well as the person who created it.”

Joyous communication

“This is what I consider to be the most important aspect of performing standup: audiences feel what the person on stage feels. You tear up or laugh heartily in a movie, even if you were totally bummed out 20 minutes ago. That insight is key to performing standup really well. It’s what I call joyous communication, which doesn’t mean that it’s joyous, because a joyous comedian is obviously a contradiction. It means that you are taking joy in the opportunity to talk to your audience.

“A great example is Louis CK; you can see joyous communication so clearly, because he is so filled with angst everywhere, but when he’s on that stage at the Cellar, you see that he’s having a ball talking to people about how pissed off or depressed he is. It’s something that hopefully we have in our personal lives, when bad goes down and you can’t wait to get someone on the phone to say, ‘you won’t believe what’s just happened.’ That’s joyous communication. If joyous communication is not there, no matter how good the material is, it’ll be a tepid performance compared to someone who has found that zone.”

Study the comics you love

Jay Leno in 2005. Photograph: Mario Anzuoni/REUTERS

“I ask students to study the work of the comedians they adore, because people have different tastes. There’s a thing that Ian McKellen said, which I thought was fabulous and that I pass on to my students: when he was young, he decided he didn’t want to study acting, he wanted to study great acting, because he didn’t want to be an actor, he wanted to be a great actor.

“Having said that, because the form is important, late-night comedy is a great example of observational standup. And I urge them to look at not just the people who are alive and working today, but to go back and look at the Carson or the Leno monologue. Leno was never the beloved figure that either Carson or Letterman was, but he was No 1 throughout his run and his monologue was the reason why. The Leno monologue is incredibly well-written, and he wasn’t particularly good at interviewing people, but he locked people in by the power of his monologue. It’s also a good to see how late-night comics spin today’s events into standup. They all talk about the same things but they’re completely different.”

Embrace your nerves

“It’s normal to get nervous before you get up and perform, and you may not overcome your nerves. When I started the workshop, I realized that people’s debuts went incredibly well. And I wanted to try to figure out why that was. What I realized was that part of it had to do with their nerves. Nerves do three very specific things to performers: one is that they give you energy. You could not sleep the night before your debut performance, and you may be feeling many things, but fatigue will not be one of them. Number two is that they give you a degree of focus: you’re not up there contemplating a post-show snack. You are connected to your audience and you are connected to your work. And No 3 is, to a degree that is hard to believe, people can’t see your nerves. They can’t see butterflies in your stomach. They can’t see sweaty palms. If you care about sweat under your arms, you wear a sweater or jacket. If your hands shake, there’s a microphone stand. The only part people see is the excitement. And that’s joyous communication.”

Don’t be afraid to call an audible

“Perfection has nothing to do with a successful performance. Your goal is to entertain, not to be perfect. Johnny Carson might be the grandmaster of this: you can get laughs when your jokes work and when your jokes don’t work. Sometimes they don’t laugh not because they think your punchline is lame, but because they didn’t realize it was a punchline, in which case you just keep going.

“However, if you’re out there for a minute, doing your opening joke and getting nothing, then you need to call an audible and switch up the material. And if that doesn’t work, it’s really guerrilla warfare, and it’s time to start talking to individual people, to do crowd work and engage specific members of the audience in conversation to get one guy to smile or laugh. The rookie mistake is to start going fast; what you should do is what Chris Rock does, which is slow down. Most comics do the opposite because they just want to get it over with, in which case you might as well just thank them and leave the stage.”

Mastering Stand-Up: The Complete Guide to Becoming a Successful Comedian is available on 1 November