How did I go? How well did I do?
Which jokes went well? Which ones did I screw?
Why does this rhyme? I don't really know.
So, I went to two open mics last week, testing material for a comedy competition I'm doing tomorrow. How was my first open mic performance, my first stand-up performance in over two years? Rusty. Very, very rusty :P
After walking down to the train station, I got my ticket, and ended up running into someone from high school who I hadn't spoken to in ages. We were catching the same train, so we ended up reminiscing about high school and discussing comedy for the whole trip--a surprisingly cool way to start the journey!
I got off the train, and had no clue where I was, cos I'd never been in Central alone before. I ended up walking all the way around it before I got to where I wanted to go, allowing me to orient myself in the direction of the venue. The GPS on my phone was proving very useful; the fact that Google Maps doesn't save street names for offline maps was not at all useful. A map without street names is nothing more than post-modern geometric art. I walked down to the venue, arriving earlier than I expected. My friend turned up not long after, so we started chatting.
It was at this point that the nerves started. This is normal, particularly when you consider I haven't performed in two years--just part of the deal, as I've come to learn. I went upstairs when sign-ups began and put my name down, before going to sit down near the front and going over my lines. The others sat more towards the back, though the room did pretty much fill up by the time the show started. The room seemed to fit about 40-50 people in it. One guy who was sitting behind us, a guy who'd seemingly been there before, spoke to me a little. I asked him how the room was, and he said it was a good room: the crowd was accepting, and though a performer may or may not do well (especially considering many will be trying out new material), there's no animosity or heckling or anything.
Not long after we spoke, the show began. The running order was determined by lucky dip; I was up towards the end of the first half. This started the Anxiety Countdown Timer™ in my head, meaning I was getting progressively more nervous until I was due to perform (but again, that's just how it is). Despite my nerves, I was confident I'd do well, even though I hadn't performed in a while. I wasn't certain I'd do well; I just believed the material was reliable.
In the meantime, I watched the performers before me go up. The audience is pretty much entirely comedians going up to perform, save a few people there to see their friends. The performances were alright--nothing special, but again, it's an open mic, so you're not expecting perfection. It wasn't horrible, though! I chuckled at most of the people who went up before me. I wasn't laughing my ass off, but I wasn't bored or anything either. Thing was, though I was chuckling at the material, many people weren't. It seemed borderline impossible to get anything beyond a slight laugh from the crowd.
That didn't faze me, though. As nervous as I was, I was fairly sure that when I got up there, I'd do reasonably well. I mean, my jokes were at least partially tested--each one had been posted to reddit in written form, and had done well there--so I wasn't going up totally blind, right?
My name was eventually called, and I went up. I had two openers to test: the first one didn't get much of a response, and the second one kinda got a response, but it was a delayed response (it's one of those jokes that takes a while to figure out, thus not really a prime candidate for 'first joke in your set' :P). Usually, when I perform, the first laugh I get is what relaxes me, but I didn't get laughs for my opening jokes, so I wasn't able to chill out. The joke I did after that got almost no response. One person started to clap (it was one of those jokes that tries to make a point; he must have liked the point I made, even if the joke was shit :P), but nothing beyond that was given. The jokes I did after that got a fairly mild response at best.
After I sat back down, I didn't feel angry or regretful; what I felt was confused. I thought "what happened? Why did the performance go that badly? Some people who went up before me went worse, so I wasn't totally awful, but I felt like I could've done a lot better than that." I would have to wait until I got home to review the tape and figure things out. The room didn't get much easier for the others after that, either. I can thing of three or four performers out of the thirty-or-so who performed who did what I'd call 'well' in terms of audience response (and one of them was only funny cos he was rambling while smashed, so... yeah :P). I left the venue determined to figure out what the hell happened when I got home, as well as working on improving the one joke that got almost no response (that's gotta be the quality of joke, not the room).
When I got home and reviewed the tape, it became clear that I was hella nervous. I can be on-stage and not feel nervous, but still look and sound nervous, which is annoying, but also helpful to realise. I was nervous during the lead-up as I always am, but that never subsided once I started performing. This basically meant that while the other performers were 'loose', I was 'rigid'. The good performers that night were calm, acknowledging bad jokes, interacting with the audience, and able to improvise. I, on the other hand, was nervous as hell, moving past bad jokes almost immediately, hardly acknowledging the audience at all, and sticking to my script like glue. Bad stage feel, yo. Stuff like moving past bad jokes is actually what I'd been taught to be proper form (in Drama class, I'd always been told to keep going on-stage no matter what happened), but the rest was all on me.
This didn't explain why the others didn't get a good reaction, though. I discovered one of my openers wasn't delivered correctly, which screwed it up, and the jokes which got borderline-zero reaction probably just aren't good jokes, but the other jokes were delivered properly, and they got about as much reaction as many of the other comics did, even the ones I thought were good who just weren't received well. Could it be that the room's just difficult? I believed so. If it'd been only me and a few others who'd done mediocre, it would've made sense to blame the performers, but heaps of people seemed to do worse than they deserved. That's not to say the room was shitty or mean-spirited, but it suggests that something beyond my control was interfering with my performance.
So, I found a new opener, touched up the joke that didn't work at all, substituted tested material for untested material that I wanted to test, and went up to the second open mic on Sunday. I wasn't fazed by my performance on Wednesday; in fact, I was glad I went up, cos it meant I was able to fuck up there rather than during the competition. This venue was smaller, but there were also less comedians, and the performance was far shorter--most of the audience were there to actually watch rather than perform. Some of the people who I saw on Wednesday were here too, which was cool. I didn't really speak to anyone other than the guy managing the show, although one of the people I saw on Wednesday said he recognised me.
Once the show started, it was revealed I was on third. I liked this: intead of having to wait through ten performances to get the nerves out of the way, I only had to wait through two :P The nerves were definitely there, but they were far less intense than on Wednesday. The audience was actually responding well too, which was good to hear. There was one guy who was heckling the MC rather incessantly, and I was scared of being heckled cos I haven't really been heckled before, but I knew I'd only be able to react to him as he heckled, and thus there was no point worrying about it in advance.
Eventually, I went up. I noticed the first performer was an adult, and the second performer was more of a young adult, so being the 15-year-old-look-alike that I am, I opened with an improvised line about the comics getting younger and younger, which went OK. The original opener followed that, and also went OK. The re-written version of the joke that totally failed on Wednesday was, again, not fantastically received (I'm determined to make that motherfucker work :P). The jokes after that, however, went great! It wasn't the best performance I've ever done or anything, but the jokes were getting good laughs, I was reacting to the crowd, I closed pretty damn well, and I was comfortable throughout the entire thing, even at the beginning which was a tad shaky. I sat back down with a sense of satisfaction, as I now knew it wasn't the jokes that were bad; it was, at least in part, my delivery.
After I sat down and the next act was introduced, the MC walked past me, patted me on the shoulder, and said I did well. That was confirmation to me that, yes, this was a good performance. One or two of the other comics who went up before the halfway mark gave me thumbs up as well. During the break, an audience member came up to me and said "keep doing what you're doing, cos you kinda remind me of a young Bill Hicks". And that was the dude who was heckling. I got complimented by a fucking heckler. That was a pretty cool compliment. I know I'm nowhere near Hicks in terms of insight or providence, but to even remind someone of him is pretty bad-ass.
The rest of the show made a second point clear: the room on Wednesday was, indeed, a tough room. This room was way more appropriate in terms of its reaction to jokes. I mean, there were less people in the audience on Sunday than there were on Wednesday, but the Sunday audience laughed way more! The comedians were definitely getting the laughs they deserved, and the audience seemed way more into it, probably cos they weren't all there just to perform. When I emailed the organiser earlier in the week, he mentioned that when they organised performers on the day (like the place on Wednesday) rather than in advance, the quality of the performances was far lower, so it seems like organising them in advance is definitely the way to go, as the audience enjoys it more, and the comics get a better crowd.
When I left, I was again told I did well by a few people. The guy who said he saw me at the Wednesday venue (who was the MC on Wednesday, in fact), said I did well, and actually suggested that I apply to the organiser at the Sunday venue to perform for their Monday show, a show for established comics--he clarified I might not even get a response, but that it was worth a shot). I dunno if I'll do that, but if I do well in RAW, then that'll get me a name for myself, and I can use the extra rep to apply for that show, cos I'd love to play that room again. Even if I went back on a Sunday, it'd still be great to go back. I said the MC did better here than on Wednesday, and he said "yeah, that room's a hard room". And I'm like I fucking knew it! So yeah, I'll probably go back there eventually too, but I'll know what to expect next time :p
The only other thing to talk about was transport, which was actually pretty easy! It is a little disorienting, being in a foreign place and having to figure out where to go on your own, especially when you walk past where you're supposed to go and you have to double back, but you don't know that you've missed something, so you keep going, and it takes far too long for it to dawn on you that, yes, you fucking missed your turn and you have to go back you stupid fuck--that happens a little too often for me :P But I know where these places are now, so I'll have no problem getting there in the future. I'm also becoming more familiar with the train stations and platforms too, as well as now knowing that there are actually quite a few people on trains at 10-11pm, so that was way less scary than I thought it would be. It's not the barren wasteland I expected it to be. I know you've still gotta watch your back, particularly in Sydney at night (so many unlit streets, Jesus fucking Christ), but the trains are relatively safe, it seems.
So yes, I'm getting back into this shit now, for realz. I'll be doing my competition performance tomorrow, and I'm fairly sure I'll do well. The one joke that hasn't worked the first two times has been almost entirely re-written, and my mum laughed at it when I told her, so I'll have to hope the audience's sense of humour mirrors hers. I want that joke in there cos it makes a damn good point, and if I can convey that point in a way that's actually funny, I know it'll go down well with the crowd.
So yeah, that's been my week. Shall make a post about some other stuff soon enough :)
EDIT: One thing that did annoy me a bit was that most people who were invited to the Sunday performance didn't respond for some reason. I didn't understand that. It's not that they didn't go; it's that they said literally nothing in the lead-up to the performance date, so I had no idea if they'd even seen or understood the invite, much less if they wanted to go. And if they're busy, or just don't wanna go, that's totally fine, but they should still tell me that. They don't even have to provide an explanation! I don't care why they aren't going; they just have to decline the invite, so I'm not sitting there at the train station wondering if people have responded at the last minute perchance. Not a fan of flaky people.
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