Soooo.... how'd that work out?

There's this phenomena that I experience every time I get off stage of... how to put it gently... utter disappointment. I don't know what it is, if it's my body coming off an endorphin high or just the product of a freshly crushed ego, but I always get off stage thinking I did an absolutely atrocious job. I usually can't shake the feeling until I've listened to the audio back at home and hear some of the laughter that somehow didn't quite register while I was on stage. That said, my immediate impression of myself is always much worse than the actual performance, but even still, it's a humbling experience to put yourself through that on such a regular basis.

Now, I'm not going to pretend that my set last night brought the house down or even was near the top of the showcase list. In fact, it was quite the opposite. I was one of the last comics to go on, and it was nearing the end of a full 2 hour show that went through 5 or 6 showcase comics, then the headliner, Edwin San Juan, and then 5 more showcase comics. The comic right before me, though a good friend, got a little ranty and I saw the already waning post-headliner audience get even slimmer. I fortunately had a small posse of friends who stuck around to see me perform, but the crowd was limp and tired of laughing.

The saddest part of it all was that I gave what was probably my best performance yet (I know, I say that every time), but to a Monday night audience that had already given all it had to the comics before. Luckily, I've become an expert at finding the grins and nodding heads in skimpy crowds, and replacing them with belly laughs in my head. I'm not sure if I'm going to post the video from last night. A buddy recorded it, but didn't hit record all the way so the first 2 jokes (which, in retrospect, were probably not that funny) didn't make it on there. It's an embarrassingly quiet crowd, though, and since I occasionally point friends to my YouTube results to get a sense of my comedy, I might just leave this developmental step off of the public list. As painful as it may've been, I still walked away a better comic than when I came in.

A (slightly) new approach...

I'm going on stage at Club Deluxe tonight as part of their Monday night showcase. It's my third time appearing in their showcase, and although my sets there have gotten increasingly better, I'm hoping to make this performance significantly better than the rest. I'm not only pulling out some of my best jokes, I also carefully trimmed back the premise of each and isolated the punchline, keeping the least amount of premise necessary. This will allow me to tell more jokes, and use the momentum to keep the crowd going. Besides, I'm learning that if part of a premise can be removed without hurting the joke, then it's not really a premise at all, it's unfunny fluff.

At some point, I'll want to re-extend these jokes, as a few of them have become only a shade longer than a one-liner. However, for tonight, my goal is to get at least a couple eruptions of laughter without killing the mood with an interminable build-up. I'll be sure to update you on how it goes.

Tonight's Headliner at Club Deluxe: Edwin San Juan

Six Months of Open Mic

I've just recently surpassed the six month mark of doing open mic stand up comedy. When I started back in March, I told myself that I just wanted to give it a shot, and do it consistently for at least six months. Well, here I am, and in danger of being too immodest, I'm doing a lot better at it than I imagined. My delivery has improved ten fold, and my confidence on stage has really started to shine through. 

I think my greatest asset has been recording my shows (typically just audio) and reviewing them relentlessly. If something doesn't work, I typically blame it on my delivery and not on the crowd. For a while, if something didn't work, I would comment afterwords on how the crowd just wasn't into it. However, as I've done this more and more, I've brought the worst crowds out of a funk and had them laughing again, so I now try to avoid that excuse. Instead, I just meticulously go over my material, picking it apart and trying out new premises, punchlines, and transitions. 

I'm still making plenty of rookie mistakes, and my jokes still sometimes fall flat on their face the first time I tell them, but it happens less and less. I'm still learning and improving each time I go up, and soon, I think I will have moved up from noobie to novice. 

My Obama Set

So, although I've still been doing my weekly set at the Brainwash, I've neglected blogging these past couple weeks so that I could devote more attention to the fact that our country is asserting it's will to progress past these hellish 8 years that we've (surprisingly) endured.

Recently, I have been toying with the idea of doing my 5 minute sets on a single topic. If you look at your comedy albums (we all have a few, don't we?), they are broken up like a music album: 5-10 minute chunks, all with a clever name that alludes to either the premise or the punchline. Very rarely will you ever see an hour-long show filled with one liners or single laugh jokes. Instead, they are crafted stories that have many punchlines, ideally stacking one laugh on top of another until the crowd is rolling in their seats.

This is tough to do. Really tough. Especially for a short set, since if the joke isn't going the way you want it to, it's that much harder to bail and get to the next one. Nonetheless, open mics are made for screwing up and learning, so I've been pushing forward in acquiring this necessary skill. My set last Thursday was, easily enough, all Obama. Having one main topic made transitions easy and seamless, and there was plenty of material to go around.

It came off well, and I would say that I got as many laughs as I normally do so I was pretty happy with the experience. I probably won't do that every week, though. The thing I'm most afraid of is having too many jokes that seem forced because I'm constraining the subject matter. Instead, I'm looking through my current jokes and trying to group them together when I can. I then try to jot down a few more ideas, funny or not, that relate to it and see if anything comes to mind. It's going okay, but I've also been trying to evolve and improve my best material. I've managed to combine the two activities by taking my best jokes, partnering them with related jokes, and hoping that a couple of great ones will help carry the rest. We'll see how that goes.

Repeating Jokes ad infinitum

I understand that in the world of professional comedy, a comedian will typically have a set routine that they do night after night as they tour around. The jokes are well tested and proven to be funny nearly every time. You can't really expect anything else from them; it's not like we would be surprised to find out that a musician plays the same songs for their shows. A joke is much like a song, it's carefully crafted to produce a response, and timing, rhythm and tempo are just as important in comedy as it is in music.

For my purposes, however, it's a little painful. I'm not touring the country, I'm playing the same venue week after week. And it's not like we're pumping through audiences, either. The most likely audience for me is an audience of other comedians, they were there last week and will probably be there next week. My thoughts are to at least have enough material so that you're not repeating anything more than once out of four times at a given venue. Even then, I still think you should re-write it, tweak it, or add something that's going to make it funnier. Until I tell a joke that has people rolling on the floor the entire time, I'm pretty sure I'm not done with it yet.

That brings me to the flip side of the coin, which is listening to the same jokes from fellow comedians week after week. It's painful, annoying, and these aren't getting any funnier with age. You should of course try it out a few times since the mood of a given audience on a given night shouldn't be the final word on what's funny and what isn't. However, my thoughts are that if you're going to tell the same joke over and over in exactly the same way, it better be comedy gold. If it ain't, then keep working on it for your own sake and the sake of the audience. If it is, then put it in your back pocket for a while and try out new stuff. That's what we're all up on stage for anyway. Not to tell the same joke a hundred times until you find the right audience, but to tell it in a hundred different ways until you finally tell it just right.

Building a Set from Scratch

So, as a new comic, I've been working through a lot of material. Some of it good, some of it bad, and some of it really bad. I understand, however, that a big part of working through a joke is just running through it over and over. Testing it in front of crowds, tweaking it, taking parts out, switching up the order, etc. I've been hestitant to repeat jokes too often, out of courtesy to the few consistent friends who come to show after show, but also because it would bore the hell out of me. I don't want to tell the exact same jokes week after week. On top of that, I'm not working toward just the perfect five minute set, I'm eventually working toward, in theory, a killer 45 minute full set. Not to say that it will happen any time soon, but you may as well shoot for the stars in the hopes that you'll at least hit the moon.

Here's what I've been doing so far to achieve that. 

1) Never tell the same joke twice in the same way. I'll, of course, tell my best jokes more than once, but I try to understand what was funny about it and why. I slim it down over and over, taking out anything that doesn't build to the punchline. I also try to imagine what other punchlines could work, and see if I can work that in somehow to get additional laughs. 

2) Change the surroundings of a joke. I try to write transitions whenever possible, and I don't expect a transition to be hilarious, just effective. If it gets more than a chuckle than that's just a bonus. However, When you pair up jokes in different orders, then you get two potentially new jokes out of it: the transition into and out of the joke. Sometimes, just the juxtaposition results in new jokes that I wouldn't have thought of otherwise. 

3) Loosen up the timing. Oftentimes, I just am not pausing enough. Even if I go up with a joke that's practically unchanged from the time before, I try to change the rythm and add pauses where they weren't before. It often works just enough to get an intermediary chuckle during the buildup to the punchline.

Does anyone have any other ideas to try?

Slow the Hell Down

So I don't know if you've noticed from my videos, but I need to slow my delivery the hell down. I've gotten a million times better than when I started, but I still need to just take a breather and chill the hell out when I'm up there, and I need to do it in two ways. 

First and foremost, I need to give people time to laugh. If there's one lesson I'm learing over and over, it's that people won't laugh out loud if you're already halfway into your next joke. It's almost as a courtesy; they want to hear what you have to say next. On top of that, if you really lean into a pause, it not only gives people the chance to laugh, it also cues them to start laughing. 

Secondly, I need to slow down my rate of speech. I've always had a problem with this, and it's only amplified on stage. If it's not keeping people from understanding me, it's definitely keeping people from following a story. The faster I talk, the more people focus on the overall concept and less on the details. But the damn joke is in the details! 

I've been given all sorts of techniques for how to do this, but the problem is not just actually speaking slower. I've done public speaking for quite some time, and when I'm in front of a podium my words come out measured and clear. However, I'm not expecting a response until the end of my speech, and it's not likely that people simply won't applause. 

On the other hand, when I'm on stage doing comedy, naked and hiding behind a mic stand, I'm expected to make people laugh, loud and often. If you go more than 30 seconds without getting a laugh you start to wonder if people are still with you. If you're at a minute with no laughs, you better hope you've got a hell of a reward at the end of the long road you're taking your audience down. This sort of pressure can make me rush through jokes, and if I don't get a laugh, I start getting a little nervous which will make me go faster.

To get better at balancing this, I'm practicing my bit more before going on stage, and I practice pausing where I expect people to laugh. I can practically hear the laugh track in my head, and I keep that rythm on stage. Even if people don't take my cue, I look like I'm just having fun, and am totally confident in myself, whether they laugh or not. Projecting that type of image allows me and my audience to enjoy myself more. 

Bill Burr - Self Awareness on Stage

I saw Bill Burr at the Punchline last weekend. It was a truly great show. I had heard about him before, and think I've seen some clips of him on Comedy Central, but his stage persona really came out during his performance. I'm not sure how far (or close) it is to his normal self, but on stage he's a thin, mildly psychotic, conspiratorial stress-ball who looks like he's about to snap. His trademark line, and it worked every time, is "let's bring this back mainstream," and it typically comes out after a line or two about how the banking system is legalized loan sharking or how the world is controlled by only a few families. Not that I disagree with him or anything, but they aren't exactly "golden material" topics. Nonetheless, the awkward silence during which the audience contemplated and tried to digest his reality-tweaking comments were broken with bursts of laughter with his comment, and he would move immediately into lighter subjects.

It's not uncommon for a comedian to have a line they fall back to when they're not getting laughs. Usually, it's something like "didn't like that one so much, did ya?" or some self-referential comment like that. It breaks the audience out of their dislike for their joke, and makes them laugh at the fact that the comedian is "ok" with it. However, it's typically reserved for jokes that don't work. Bill Burr just uses his line almost to pull himself back into it as much as his audience. It's not that he tells a joke that doesn't work, he just goes with his material and sometimes gets lost in the weeds. "Let's bring this back mainstream" eases the audience's tension because because it shows that he's comfortable with his own awkwardness.

No comedian is going to be flawless, and having a way to bring yourself out of a hole is always a good idea. It won't save you if you're bombing, but if you can sense that you're losing the audience with a subject, it's a good way to transition into something completely different. I don't have a collection of phrases like his that I'm in love with, I just use something like "not so much?" More often than not, I just power through the joke and get to the next one. Hell, I'll only be on stage for 5 minutes, he's got to be there for an hour.

What the Hell am I Doing?

I got into Stand Up Comedy not because I thought that I was naturally funny or gifted, but rather because I thought I was funnier than 75% of the people I saw on stage at open mic night. Now, I know that "I suck less than those guys" is a bad reason to start doing anything, (although surprisingly not a bad way to run a political campaign), but it turns out I was half-decent and well on my way to becoming tolerable to listen to.

I started the process by just scratching down a short note whenever I thought of something funny, and then coming back to flesh out the joke when I had the time. ***Quick tip, that doesn't work so well because who the hell carries around a pen and paper. Shortly after starting that, I now just draft and save a text message to myself.*** Once I had a decent amount of material, I practiced it a couple times and signed myself up for the open mic at BrainWash Cafe, down in the SoMa district in San Francisco.

I should say a little something about my beloved BrainWash cafe. It's got... well... it's got character, let's say that. It's a laundromat/ cafe/ bar/ cultural hub of the SoMa district. They have an open mic something just about every night of the week, from poetry to music to what they're best known for: open mic stand up comedy, every Thursday from 7pm-11pm. Now, the laundromat is slightly separated from the sitting area, so it's not like you're talking over the dryer, however that doesn't mean it's the ideal place to find an attentive audience. BrainWash is open mic in the dirtiest, truest sense of the word. When I say open mic, I mean open to anyone, and sure enough, anyone does sign up. On top of that, there is a large segment of the audience who are just waiting for their laundry or grabbing a coffee, and they have no problem carrying on their own conversation while you're on stage. By stage, of course, I'm talking about the 2 foot by 2 foot platform raised 6 inches off the ground on which stands a lanky, hobbled together mic stand and all-too-often a wholly unfunny human being.

If you can manage to grab the attention of these patrons, you better be funny or else they'll turn their head right back to where it was, and do a spectacular job at ignoring you. This isn't a place to coddle new talent, it's a place to kick it's ass and make it want to quit. Now, I would like to think that I rocked the house the first time I got up there, but the honest truth was that I completely lost my cool. I've done public speaking for years, often in front of audiences in the hundreds, and maintained a strong speaking persona. The first time I got on that puny little fart of a stage, in front of a dozen people at best, I was nervous, I spoke too fast, and any concept of timing or interaction was thrown through the window. 

The next time was better, and the next time better still. I've been going at it weekly for a few months, and each time on stage is an improvment. I'm getting into the world of the Comedy Showcase, which is the next step after open mics, and I've already been seeing some sucess there. I don't necessarily plan on leaving everything I'm doing now to devote my life to comedy. I'm fortunate to have a job that I enjoy, pays well, and I'm good at. However, I'm also fortunate to live in San Francisco, which provides more than enough opportunity for a young comic to have fun and play around in the the scene. I'm not real sure what I'm doing or when I'll stop, but I'm having fun for now so I'll just leave it at that.

An Introduction Of Sorts

To all who have had the fortune/misfortune to stop by this blog/vlog/questionably worthwhile use of internet real estate,

This new-fangled e-lec-tronic thing-a-ma-blog is merely a self-indulgent sounding board for my hobby, stand up comedy. I'm still relatively new to the game, but would like to keep better track of the progress I'm making, and because I'm what marketers like to box in as part of the "young digerati", I want to share this experience with the uninterested public. I'll be posting my recorded stand-up sets here as they become available, and though I almost always record audio for my sets, I try to only use video when I've really tightened up the material.

Besides the video, you can expect to see a decent trickle of musings, mumblings, and occasional nonsensery. When I do post videos, please comment freely and honestly. I want your feedback (regardless of the fact that your only qualification to pass judgment on me is that you have a keyboard and minimal spelling abilities), even if it's that I "suck nuts" or "don't understand humor." I totally promise to not look up the IP address of the commenter only to track them down and make them tell me what they think to my goddam face.

Thanks for stopping by. Enjoy!

-Jesse Nichols-