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 didn’t practice as much as I usually would, because I was trying to make things seem fresher and less canned than before, which I think is partially why I bombed so hard at the Laugh Resort. I got laughter, more as time went on, and a few other comedians then referenced me in their acts and said they liked it after, which was the best thing ever – they actually remember what I said!
I think the main reason I got laughter here is because I had fallen into a character, exaggerating my personality trait of focusing on the minutia of mundane things and believing they revolve around me.
Some bits did fall flat, but I didn’t have to use my cheat sheet for the first time. Early on I accidentally went into a punchline too early, which broke that bit, and I didn’t even HAVE a punchline for my ending – but by using it I thought of a new one after the show.
This was my second performance ever, and I had just come back from holiday and was feeling great, and really happy to be back, and suntanned and relaxed with brand new material. Almost everything hit just like I had planned, except something at the beginning.
I did make some beginner mistakes, not moving the mic stand, and forgetting my set list twice (although some people said it was “better” because the set list was way smaller using keywords instead of the whole thing printed out), and holding the microphone with both hands.
I wasn’t very confident, I forgot my set list twice, and some of my jokes didn’t hit, but God damn it if the audience wasn’t nice enough to laugh anyway because I had put so much love into the material, and lots of it was genuinely funny. This is one of my favourites and has some of my funniest and most original personal observations.
