So you think you're funny?

On the night of the show we were nervous, but we managed to hold it together for the friends and family who showed up to cheer us on.

Diane Raymond, an associate dean at Simmons College in Boston, was prepared for the worst as she settled in to watch the show. "I had imagined that it would be a very painful, slow evening with lots of bad humor," she says. Instead, "the time flew by. I was impressed with the level of the humor, the intelligence of the comics."

While Ms. Raymond was watching, her friend in the class, Erica Cohen, was busy sweating. "I sweat places I didn't know I could," she joked later. "I wasn't nervous about going up on stage; I was more nervous I would forget everything."

That was true for a lot of us, including Ms. Amitay. "I went in the bathroom and did my whole routine before hand," she said afterward.

But once on stage, she experienced what many first-time comics do: "It was just such a high.... I just wanted to keep going." Amitay plans to continue doing comedy. "I just have way too much material. My life is one big joke," she quips.

Dave Drellich expected to be nervous, but wasn't – either beforehand or on stage, which he credited to the comfort zone created by our teacher and the class. "And man, having all those people laugh at your act feels dangerously good. It could be addictive," he adds.

Others had a different reaction. Jon Whitney had spent time on a stage before – but always with actors or musicians. "You're all alone and the spotlight just floods you. It's a surreal kind of feeling," he says, adding, "I probably wouldn't do it again. It was the mountain that was there that I wanted to climb, and I climbed it."

We drew numbers for our order that night, and I went last, the spot usually reserved for the headliner. It wasn't exactly the pressure-free position I was hoping for (but at least I wasn't first). As I waited and watched the show, it was obvious how far we had come from the first time we tentatively sidled up to the mike in class.

What we agreed on in the end was that the course didn't make us funnier – if anything, the labor of it made us question at times our ability to be humorous. But it did provide us with a structure: We now knew how to put together five minutes of material and stand in front of a crowd and deliver it.

Perhaps it was all those exercises to loosen up our creativity that helped me write one of my best original lines just an hour before the show. Like my classmates, I was sure I would forget everything. But when it was my turn, even the new line came back to me. "I just turned 35," I joked in a bit about being an aging Gen-Xer. "That's like 80 in marketing years."

After five minutes on stage, I'm not ready to hit the road just yet. But at least my palms have finally stopped sweating.

When you're performing for the first time as a stand-up comic, you spend most of your energy trying not to forget your material. But you've also got to figure out what to do with your hands.

Much of that gets sorted out naturally as you practice. If your routine requires you to pretend to be on the phone or driving, you are probably going to leave the microphone in the stand. It's easier not to have to fuss with it.

Steve Calechman, a local comic and teacher of stand-up in Boston, made the switch to leaving the mike in the stand a number of years ago, and says it has allowed him to perform better. "I talk with my hands, and now I could act things out with both of them, like riding a horse ... or typing on a keyboard. I just had more options."

Jon Whitney (pictured above) was fairly animated during his turn on stage at the culminating performance of a recent course. His experience as a thespian was obvious, but he did try his gestures and facial expressions out on friends first. "Bring things up randomly," he suggests, "not as a 'routine,' and judge by how those things go."

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