My stand-up comedy debut was still five days away, and already I was envisioning “bombing,” as they say in the business.

When I’d signed up for a comedy class a few months earlier to learn how to be funny, I wasn’t trying to land my own sitcom or an appearance on David Letterman’s show. I was more interested in answering the question many people bring to a course like this: If I can make my friends and family laugh, does that really make me funny?

Actually, there are plenty of other reasons to take an adult-ed course in stand-up – to learn how to tell jokes well, to write with more zip, or even to be a better public speaker.

But that’s not enough to make the class appealing to everyone. Tell people you are trying stand-up comedy and they say things like, “I could never do that,” “It sounds like torture,” and my personal favorite: “I would rather bungee jump.”

That didn’t keep me and my 12 classmates from exploring the world of comedy each week with a funnyman named Steve Calechman. He’s been doing stand-up in the Boston area for a decade, more recently teaching his craft to wannabes who’ve decided to see if they have what it takes.

What he knows, we learned: It takes a lot of work to make what comedians do look spontaneous. Thus started my quest to learn to be funny and witty.

Throughout the six-week class, we were guided by an observation he made early on about the difference between an amateur and a professional: One makes you think, “Yeah, that’s right”; the other, “Hey, I never thought of it that way.”

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