Still Standing…Up
Last week I made my stand-up debut at 37th and Zen’s weekly open mic night and this week I went back for seconds. And, once again, Travis was cool enough to video it for me. This time he managed to get it in focus:
I guess I felt a little more comfortable this time than I did the first time, but still, very, very nervous. It didn’t help that the whole mood of the place was completely different; there weren’t even half as many people and the folks that were there didn’t seem very inclined to laugh. One of the other comedians, Derek Williams, told me about an open mic he was at a few weeks ago where there were six comedians and two audience members. So, I guess it could have been worse.
Now, obviously, I wasn’t as funny this time as I was the last time. One thing that I don’t think mot people realize about stand-up comedians is that they perform the same material pretty much every time they go out. Sure, they’ll come up with new stuff and work it in and dump some older stuff gradually, but for the most part they’re doing the same bits over and over again. JoAnna was definitely surprised when all the comedians were doing the same jokes they did last week. But, even though I know that the Friend Zone bit I did last week would get laughs, and that it’s probably the funniest thing I’ve thought of so far for the stand-up stuff, I chose not to do it because I really want to force myself to try to come up with new things and to have to be continually funny. This isn’t to say there won’t come a point where I’ll do the same stuff over again, of course I will, but at least for a little while I feel like I need to be writing stuff and trying things out and figuring out what’s funny.
For instance, while there were some laughs in what I did last night, the reality is that the vast majority of it is too personal to me and not universally relateable, which is never as good. Ideally you want things that everyone can hear and say, “I know how that feels” or “I do that too”, but I didn’t have that element in what I was saying. So while some stuff was funny, I need to keep that in mind for whatever I do next week. I also cursed a lot, which was just weird. That sort of snowballed. I don’t really care, it was just kind of odd.
Travis and JoAnna said they were going to go up this week and both turned out to be liars. Travis worked about seventy hours this week, so he didn’t feel like he’d had any time to prepare to go on. That’s fair. Of course, he’s had the several months we’ve been talking about doing stand-up to prepare, so it’s also bullshit. Hopefully he’ll go up next week. The day after JoAnna said she would go up she changed her mind, but, she did actually end up getting on stage. Ken Phillips, who teaches comedy classes at The Muse, needed a volunteer for an improv bit during his act and JoAnna, completely ignorant to what she was volunteering for, jumped up on stage:
It’s funny that because JoAnna is a musician she took the choosing of the songs way too seriously. Most of us would just sing whatever song first came to us and go but she was working through her mental rolodex to find just the right song. Still, she was great. And it’s funny that the song she chose was a reference to our most popular (to date) short:
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