It's not even the fact I wanna meet people, or at least not just the fact that I wanna meet people. I do wanna expand socially, and I see performing as a way to give me the self-worth that will make such expansion possible, but even if I already had a social circle, I'd be busting a gut to get this shit started. And to perform in these fields only to gain popularity is a sure path to failure: you need to be invested in it to succeed. Dedication to your craft is vital, and people will notice if you're without it. I've not stopped writing jokes since I started over four years ago, so I've got the material; I just need a stage.
I've been posting my jokes to r/standupshots since May last year, but seeing as I'm only posting the written version of each joke next to a picture of my face, sans verbal intonations and comic pauses, it's hard to gauge the audience's reaction. That's not to mention reddit's predominately American audience leading to some jokes flying over their heads cos they don't get what I'm referencing, and some jokes I can't tell cos they're about Australian politics. It's helpful to get a rough idea of how a joke performs, see if I can get suggestions on improving it, but ultimately, the only way to properly evaluate these jokes is on a stage, before a live audience.
I have big dreams here, too. I do wanna get in touch with the Film and Performance Society and see if I can hook up with them, get some dates organised at the UniBar or something, but I want it to be so much bigger than that. I'd love to have a section of the FaPS dedicated to comedy of all forms, so we could have a lot more comedy going on. We could have an open mic night once a month. We could get travelling comedians in to perform, if I can get the connections. We could get a group together for improv, do our own version of Whose Line is it Anyway? (I'm dying to do that. oh my fucking god). We could even teach stand-up/improv if we got good enough at it. We could get in touch with the theatre people and have some comedic plays written or performed, get other writers/performers involved. It would be soooooooo cccooooooooooollll.
But what is there now? Nothing. There are no comedians performing, nor anyone I know of seeking to organise anything I've just listed. As wild and out-of-character it sounds, I'd like to spearhead the movement, maybe manage it myself if it got big enough. I'd love to be 'that guy who got comedy at the University of Wollongong started', not just for the prosperity of the title, but for all the good it'll do me in practice. I'd get leadership and organisational skills, I'd meet people of all sorts, I'd get connections into the outside comedy world (hopefully), and I would have an incredibly fun few years of uni to boot, doing what I love to do. It's insane to think any of this would actually happen—maybe it'll crash and burn, go nowhere, end up dead and buried in the ground—but I could try, goddamnit :P
Starting with stand-up nights would be the best, I think, seeing as I already do that. I figure that if I perform solo, and other people want to perform, they'll see or hear about me and go "oh, you can do that? Cool! Where do I sign up?", and either find me after the show to talk about it, or find the FaPS on their own and sort it out with them. If enough people express interest, we could have some pretty interesting and varied comedy nights ahead of us. If the word spreads around enough, and there's significant interest in comedy at the uni, we might be able to pull bigger names in, though I don't know how booking venues at the uni works for that sort of thing. I know comedians have performed at Orientation Weeks before (:O I should email the guy from FaPS about performing at some point in O-Week for the new people! :D), so it's definitely not entirely foreign to have big names perform there, but I haven't heard of it happening recently.
And as I've mentioned countless times, doing improv at the UniBar (or at a dedicated stage, whatever works) would be the fucking bomb. I'd need to first find a group of players, seeing as doing improv alone is basically doing stand-up without a script, but I figure that if I do stand-up, I'd soon meet people who'd be interested in that, maybe people studying Theatre. Might need some improv musicians too for musical games, if we wanted those. But it would be incredible to get that started. Doing all the TheatreSports games, the Whose Line? games, maybe have a host, maybe bring guests on stage for certain games—soooooo much fun to be had! I'm not too sure of my own skill (or that of anyone else who'd be interested), cos while I've watched a shit ton of Whose Line?, I have little-to-no technical experience (I might end up learning off the Theatre people, lol), but I'd still be willing to give it a shot and learn the ropes.
My biggest dream (well, biggest remotely-achievable dream :P) is to tour around to different unis during their break periods, doing stand-up, improv, or both. That would be a great experience. I'd obviously need 30-45 minutes of solid, undated material, and/or a troupe of experienced players who could make an audience laugh consistently in a wide array of situations. And I'd need connections with a whole bunch of other unis willing to host us, maybe even contribute performers of their own to open for us. But if I pulled it together, it'd be an incredible milestone. It'd take lots of work—lots of writing, lots of performing, lots of training—but it'd be worth it in the end, I'm sure. I'd get to tour without having to worry about a passport, or not having stuff to eat.
It all seems so utterly insane given that, right now, I have not performed at uni even once, and have no connections whatsoever. But it'd make me so happy to get this shit happening. I don't do anything extra-curricular so I usually have a lot of spare time: I'd rather use that time for something awesome like this, rather than just going home and playing video games all the time. There's, like, no negatives here apart from the effort I'd have to put in initially with meeting people and getting things established. Once the snowball starts rolling, while it will still take work, it won't be quite as hard cos the foundations will already have been laid. You know, the foundations... you use to build snowballs... fuck off, you know what I mean :P
Another thing is the question of demand: does anyone actually want comedy performances at my uni? I dunno. There aren't any there, so maybe not. But perhaps if there are performances to watch, people will go watch. It's not like I'd be charging money or anything for people to watch: they could just drop by the UniBar, or whatever other venue, and see what's happenin'. I'm not 100% sure how I'd get word out either, seeing as I'm utterly hopeless with the whole networking thing, but the FaPS could probably handle that side of it as a group, I guess.
For the sake of
And to make them bigger, just click on them (I had to shrink them to get them to fit on the page).
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