Cody Konior

I’m the 75th most viewed Australian Comedian of the day on YouTube! Kind of sad if you think about it, but I’ve never done that before, so thanks everyone!

Update: I am now the 65th most viewed Australian Comedian of the day on YouTube! How high can I go? My YouTube link is http://www.youtube.com/user/codykonior.

Update: I am now 54th!

This is my new, must-see show!

Notes

As per my previous entries, I struggled to come up with a set this week, and ended up putting together a sick deadpan sarcasm show, which is probably my favourite kind of humour. It went awesome! I think this is my most successful night so far if you were to measure it by loud, consistent laughs throughout the whole set, and comments from the audience and other comedians after the show.

But it was also more difficult. It didn’t all fall together until the day before, so I didn’t have much time to practice. And despite being a similar length and word count to a normal set, it had 3x as many bits and tags, which made it hell to memorise, especially given my nervousness to perform it.

Amazingly the last bit was the funniest, which I felt was the bit most likely to fall flat. Only 2 or 3 one-liners fell flat, but the next laugh was so close around the corner nobody noticed except me. On the downside, I normally learn a lot of things to improve, and after this performance I didn’t learn much except that it worked great as is.

I’d like to perform this one again soon and see what happens with a different audience. I was talking with Ardun Ward about doing a street show. If any other comedians want to join in, let me know.

As for my next official set, I’m not sure if it will be deadpan too, because I can’t work out if this set have worked if I had done it normally. Was it that funny, or was the deadpan what sold it?

Gallery

Coming soon… just like the last one…

I had put together a set list for tonight but it just didn’t flow like my previous acts and because so much material was related to porn, I felt like it didn’t represent me properly as a comedian or a person. So I scrapped it.

I started working on a second set list based on a retrospective of my life now that I’ve turned 30. I got half way through and I liked it but it sounded more like a biography than something funny to act out on stage. So I scrapped that too.

But somehow I managed to mix the two together into a coherent sequence of thoughts and, by accident, worked out a way to deliver them as deadpan. Up to now I’ve only delivered the odd tag as deadpan, but this is taking the whole set list to the extreme.

While I was practicing last night I broke out into laughter because I imagined people laughing and thought it was that hilarious. That doesn’t happen very often (repetition makes it lose the spark)!

I feel so excited to go try this tonight, whereas before I was really dreading going up. I feel like this humour reflects more of my true personal thoughts and opinions, which is exciting for me because I’m trying hard to make my comedy more authentic to my natural sense of humour (if I have one).

With that said I’m now terrified it’s going to bomb completely, because it’s so different to what I’ve done in the past and people who’ve seen me before might be lost and not be able to cross that gulf with me. Deadpan brings with it (in my head, at least) the risk of being boring. I’m imagining a few people leaving through the set right now.

But I think (and hope so bad) that some people will get it. Here goes everything!

I was speaking to a friend I hadn’t seen in ages, and was excited to tell him that I was still continuuing as a stand-up comedian and that I’d done over a dozen shows now and that it was going good, even though I often bombed.

His response? “Everyone’s a comedian.” He was serious, as if to say this is nothing out of the ordinary. I just wanted to kill him, but I’ll give him the slowest and most excrutiating death of all – old age.

I have a spot on Tuesday at Shapiro’s which means a night of all new content. I haven’t finalised my set list yet, because I’m struggling with something.

I have lots of (new) normal material to run. But I have double or triple that amount in obscene, socially unacceptable, or just plain stupid stuff that I WANT to do but don’t because I’m afraid I really want to do a couple shows based on that and see what happens, even though I’m worried about an audience revolt.

So likely my next show is going to be about butterflies and pedo’s.

I’ve also read so much weird news lately that I really want to bring up on stage and just talk about. But I’m not sure how to make it funny, aside from reading it and letting the audience feel like, “Hey that’s insane” and laugh by themselves. Maybe some one-liners? But I feel like that cheapens the real laugh, which is the story itself. (Or they might not laugh at all, cannibalism isn’t to everyone’s taste).

I feel like this will be the biggest crash and burn of all, but I have to do it, and I always feel like that anyway, and then come back at the end of the night and say, “I actually learned one or two bits that are funny and that I can work on.” At the worst, I’ll learn never to do obscene humor again. For a while.

If you’ve seen my stuff before, skip to the middle

Notes

I got an email from a comedy club manager on Tuesday asking me to come in and do 5 minutes for Thursday night. I was really surprised because I’d just taken a 2 month sabatical and only resumed comedy last week, and suddenly I had another chance to take to the stage at a professional non-open mic venue! So I jumped at it!

The first half of my set I use the cat/vet story. I’ve used this 4 times so far, and the only great reaction I had was on the very first night I used it, and since then it has gone down further, and further. I feel sad about that and can’t quite identify why except maybe I’m just not passionate enough about it anymore?

Then I went into my new Transformers bit I started last week (but couldn’t record back then). I’d retooled it a little and made it longer, then came up with a great tag just a few minutes before going on stage. It worked a treat! It’s my new favourite bit.

And finally I finish with a mix of new and old coffee bits. I have a lot of stuff about coffee and this was the first time I tried to chunk them all together. The result was pretty good, though I skipped a few beats and the very end needs tightening up.

Overall I realise I went way too fast, and yet, finished exactly on 5 minutes! So, I’m happy about that. And I didn’t forget anything! The audience took a while to warm up but I’m pretty sure they liked me at the end. Compared to the other performances of the night, I was in the middle of the pack – a few didn’t fare so well, and others blew me out of the water. Which is good, because the audience wins!

Sometimes I wonder if I’ll ever be able to be a “great” comedian. I definitely have trouble converting some of my ideas into stuff that is funny, and even more problems working out how to perform them on stage. But it’s still early.

I also heard last night about a competition called Green Faces. I couldn’t work out how to enter the Perth rounds, but I might like to give it a try with a mix of some of my lesser known and newest material (definitely not the cats bit anymore, for now).

PS: If you have any advice on how to take better video under stage lights, I’d love to hear them.

Gallery

(Coming soon, the pictures from the video won’t be very good).

I hadn’t done a comedy show in two months, and for the past month I’d been waiting for my turn to come up at Lazy Susan’s. I spent about a week preparing but despite having written lots of little bits in that time, I couldn’t find any funny way to string them all together.

So I wasn’t sure, do I go up on stage and say what I have to say in the off chance the audience finds it funny, and for the experience, and to get myself back into the swing of things? Or do I cancel. And I prefer not to cancel, because it might give me a bad rap next time I try to get a spot. (As fate would have it a lot of people cancelled at the last minute).

I decided to go on anyway. Which is lucky because by the end of Tuesday I’d really refined my set-list into something I thought was good enough to try out.

And I was wrong! Haha. Okay I knew going in things would probably suck, and reality confirmed my suspicions. But with that said, out of the dozen or so bits, the audience found 2 or 3 funny, which means I can refine them for next time.

Unfortunately the event wasn’t taped, which is really sad, because I have stage amnesia and can’t remember which bits the audience liked and didn’t like. I’m not sure what I can do about that.

Topics covered include:
- What’s weird about prayer
- Suicide in the morning
- What’s hard about being fat (this is probably too complicated)
- McDonalds Coffee (a new one, there was a laugh in here somewhere)
- Men and Women
- Sex (this got a big laugh)
- Transformers (this got a big laugh)

Some of my routines were based on Christian ideas, though I’m not Christian. It’s just that I listened to a Best of Christian Comedy 2000 CD a week ago and it was so bad, it wasn’t funny at all, and I thought I could do better. Woops.

I also forgot my set list part-way through which sucked. It was caused by nervousness rather than not preparing.

Overall I’m satisfied, and wanting to do better next time, and that’s that.