So... I was back at the Shaskeen in Manchester last night, for Nick and Brad's Open Mic Comedy Night - in this case featuring neither Brad nor Nick hosting (but with a special guest performance by Nick) and it went... all right. It's my third time which you'd know if you've been following (but judging by my follower list on here that'd be made up of a group of... me. It feels like mastablogging at the moment, but oh well) you'd know and you'd also know that the first time was pretty good and the second... not so much.
This time it was a lot more like time one than time two. Similarly to the first time I didn't use my entire time but I got some laughs and was generally fairly comfortable on stage and little went wrong. Like the second time I had some level of not going on exactly when I might have chosen - namely last. I personally was trying to view it as headlining but it's hard to do when half the crowd leaves before you go on. And when several of the people on before me were far better (not to mention polished) than I.
So, I enjoyed the whole night of stand up, saw Jenny Z and Louis Bercelli, among other do their thing (and do it well in both cases) and was able to have that lovely 'I'm about to go on' feeling in the pit of my stomach last a whole two hours. It's difficult because I've been getting by on my memory and on practice to do my sets, but after a few hours of not practicing (because I was watching everyone else) I was getting worried I'd start forgetting things - this did not happen, thankfully.
In the meantime I chatted with a local comic and had an experience I'm thinking you probably have had, of being a few minutes in conversation with someone before you figure out 'oh man - we are never going to be friends' based on a single comment. In this fellow's case it was that he wanted to appeal to everyone and that his role model in comedy was... Jay Leno. Ouch. There are few, if any people I can think of that would make me repulsed more than Jay Leno, as the end of that sentence. Hitler, maybe. We can maybe get back to this another time.
My act, last night was a bit of a composite of my first two bits. Or at least it had at least one joke from each, cast in a new light-
The topic at hand (and I'm really attached to the idea of having a single topic - this might be a flaw or it might be good, time will tell) was that I had decided that I should embrace failure and live a failure based life style, because when I thought about it: the only thing I've ever been very good at is failure.
I related this back to a recent break-up and retold a joke from last week (namely that when a girl says she wants to be friends and means it it basically means "I like you being around me... just not INSIDE me") and back to my first bit, with my older sister telling me to shut the fuck up and that I wasn't funny.
What I found in going up and doing this is a few things -
1) I should really do this in front of friends and family before I go up - because I find myself, after lots of practice thinking, on stage 'shit I don't want to say that' and cutting things, which likely I'd do when doing it for other people
2) To follow my instincts more on cutting things, because instinct is what I'm running on, on some level on stage and if I never like something before I get onstage, even if I say 'oh we'll see how it works' well... no, we won't because I'm likelier to just not say it.
3) If I don't do these things I really need to stop timing myself - because 5 minutes without editing turns into anywhere from 3 and half to 4 minutes with it, on stage
That all being said - I think it went as well as it was going to. Only time #3 - I feel like I'm getting more comfortably on stage and that I'm getting a better idea of the sort of stuff to be saying and racking up a few new jokes that work each time.
I am trying to not overwhelm people with long drawn out posts, so that's all for now. Click the little button and follow me! Or comment! I'd appreciate it! You can tell how much by the exclamation marks!!!
Thursday, August 5, 2010
Thursday, July 29, 2010
You can tell my attention to detail...
I managed to name the site and make the url a different name.
Lovely.
For what it's worth, this is officially 'This Better Fucking Work'. Not 'This Fucking Better Work' as the url would lead you to believe.
Lovely.
For what it's worth, this is officially 'This Better Fucking Work'. Not 'This Fucking Better Work' as the url would lead you to believe.
Introduction: A Tale of Two Shows... (this is a bit of a novelette, so get comfortable)
Hello all - and welcome to my third attempt at a blog.
My last attempt was the ill fated buriedinspace.blogspot.com which was supposed to be a music blog and which I could never seem to bring myself to add as much content to as I would have liked. This blog is going to be slightly different: the main focus is, as of this moment, my attempts to try and start doing stand up comedy, which at the moment has me doing small open mics and I'm pretty sure that's what I'm gonna be doing for some time now but I think it'll be interesting enough that I'll actually write about it and interesting enough that hopefully some people will read.
That being said, I also intend to sprinkle in comments about music, movies and my life in general - sometimes taking the form of something resembling a joke or bit, sometimes just because I want to write about the subject in question. So hopefully this will have some variety and some followers. I'm planning on putting some actual effort into this, so as the title says - this better fucking work.
And with that let's get you up to date:
I'm Ryan - I'm 25, in Southern New Hampshire and I've been a big stand up fan for many years now. I remember growing up watching Comedy Central and seeing comics, be it on Comedy Central Presents or something like Dr. Katz and really enjoying it but it's probably in the last 5-6 years I've gotten heavier into stand up through acts such as Patton Oswalt, Mike Birbiglia, Paul F. Tompkins, Marc Maron (who inspired the name of the site - it's the title of the first track on his first record), Louis C.K. and Todd Barry.
In the last couple years I've had it in the back of my mind that I might like to try it out and I've been slowly figuring out how one goes about that. For a while I thought it was one of those things that was somewhat impenetrable, especially in kind of the middle of nowhere in New Hampshire. I didn't know of any open mics and I certainly knew there was no way to get just randomly hired for gigs and such. So I was at a loss.
It was about a month ago now that one day I went online and I thought to myself 'hey, you know how I could find some of this stuff out? The internet'. At which point I Googled 'open mic comedy new hampshire' and got several links and had a lead on some place that would both fit my schedule and seemed like a fine choice to begin trying this out. I think, in retrospect, I must have had something going in my head not wanting me to do it, because it really did not take much effort to figure out where I might be able to do it.
The place I ended up was at the Shaskeen Bar in Manchester, New Hampshire in the soon to be re-named Nick and Brad's Open Mic Comedy Night. The first time I attended just as a spectator and I enjoyed what I saw - it seemed like a low pressure room and while the quality wildly varied it seemed even the people trying to figure out what they were doing (some of whom certainly seemed to be failing) were not judged particularly harshly and the crowd was never what I would consider hostile. Having seen the show I decided to talk to the hosts and set up myself to perform the next week.
The week between the two shows I worked pretty feverishly to figure out just what I was going to do. At a certain point I decided that I might as well take this chance to do a bit I could really only do once: a bit about being a first time stand up.
The basics of the bit were this: I would come out, admit to my first time status and then talk that I was slightly nervous due to the fact that I had heard many famous comics talk of their first time on stage and it was never a heart warming story, it was always a disaster of epic proportions.
I then told an entirely fictional story, as an example of the sort of thing I would hear them say, wherein the comic comes on stage ready to conquer the world and slowly, through a first failed joke... then another... loses his confidence. Just as he's about to get to joke #3, he beings to get heckled, being told that he sucks and thinks 'you know, I think they might be right' and then is told 'get off stage' and he starts to think it might be sage advice. Moments later he ends his act, unceremoniously when the heckles turn to boos and he leaves the stage only to get smacked in the face with a projectile - bizarrely a AA battery (hecklers throwing batteries is, best I can tell, an idea that came to me entirely from The Simpsons, for what it's worth) and goes back to his seat where his half empty drink is now entirely full... of some guys piss. He tells his date maybe they should go and she agrees he probably should but says that personally she thinks she'll take a ride home with the guy who peed in the drink.
When I was actually on stage, for no particular reason, I decided to cut the piss filled drink and girlfriend bit - I think in the moment I felt the point was made. Additionally I had been doing the bit all week long and it kept coming up as being somewhere between 6 and 7 minutes and I knew I needed to be cutting things if I wanted to get into my end bit at all and so there it went.
From there I comment on how, in interviews when a comic tells that story it seems to invariably end with the interviewer saying that certainly they must have improved quickly, at which point the general response from the comic seems to be something of the sort of 'yeah, it got better, I only had to deal with that sort of crowd for 2 or 3 years' which is a bit dis-heartening for someone who hasn't even started week one of those hundreds of weeks of failure.
The thing was, however, I would then say, that I didn't mind years of failure because I had been numbed to comic failure from years of living with my family. I then recounted a common scene when I was younger, at the dinner table with my mother and older sister, wherein I would randomly decide to make what was admittedly terrible jokes at the dinner table and my older sister would generally reply with sage advice, to the tune of something like 'shut the fuck up Ryan, you're not that funny'. At which point, the really hurtful thing was that I would turn to my mother, assuming she would admonish her and she'd more likely be nodding along at the assessment.
This bit went over really well, by my thinking - I got a good bit of laughs, a hearty bit of applause, was asked by the host if it really was my first time and when I confirmed it I got a bit of compliments and a second nice bit of applause. I left that night feeling pretty good about what I'd done.
That being said - a lot went into that bit. I practiced it incessantly for a week, timing it and rewriting it in my head all the while. Also: on my way to the show I impulsively went to the mall and bought myself a new outfit to wear on stage, nothing fancy - just replacing jean shorts with a solid pair of jeans and adding a light flannel short sleeve shirt that complimented my t-shirt to what I was wearing. Looking back, it really helped to feel confidently that I looked pretty decent.
That brings me to last night. Last night I had, well, a much more troublesome time at the same venue. I applied to go on a little later and was a little less sure about the material I was performing. I was full of nerves my first time too but I knew I could do what I was setting out to do and this time I was not so sure.
My plan was to start with something mentioning how it was my second time on and that my first time up I thought I got a bit of sympathy, what with my entire bit reminding people every moment that I was new and that that can be intimidating - so, with that said I would still gladly take sympathy laughs.
This got off to a poor start once I saw my place on the line-up - I was following a disabled man on a motor scooter. It occurred to me that appeals for sympathy might be a little harder to try for, following that. What's more... he was good and some of his material sort of touched on themes that I was planning on exploring later in my act.
The lesson I learned from what then occurred is that I really need to make my act a bit more malleable - I need to be able to cut something and have different opening and less of a closed mind about what I am planning on saying. And that did not work out well when I went up after the aforementioned comic, especially not when I was introduced as 'somewhat of a regular' which unknowingly undercut my opening bit.
That being said - I tried the bit, altered to note that perhaps it would not work so well considering who I was following which seemed to be received a lot more awkwardly than I would have thought. It may have also been a case where my delivery of it was a bit nervous, because... I was.
The whole thing fell of the rails moments later, when, still slightly rattled by the awkwardness in the room I started in on my main bit. I had intentions to start this bit by making a bit of fun of the genericness of my opening line but I blew past that to just get to the meat of the idea.
The bit started 'So - I've been single for a while...' which lord knows is a pretty generic thing to be said by a mid twenties male stand up to start a bit, thus why I planned to undercut it with a bit of a joke but when I did not, it apparently mixed with the awkward feeling in the room in such a way to burst one of the co-hosts in to ridiculously boisterous laughter, which started to throw me off my game even more - I tried to get out a 'that really wasn't the joke' line in between my own awkward bit of laughter but he just got louder and the mostly silence from me got more and more awkward.
I somewhat recovered from it to do the rest of my bit, but most certainly I never fully recovered my footing. The bit I did revolved around the futility of getting with an ex-girlfriend. I'm not going to go as full detail on it, because frankly, it wasn't really top shelf material. The most salvageable part of it, which I might try to work in later on was a joke regarding girls who say they 'still want to be friends' after breaking up.
The joke is, basically that there are two ways that can go: either they are full of shit and you never see them again or, perhaps worse is when they're serious. Because if they seriously want to be friends afterward then the problem is clearly not you being around them, but rather you being INSIDE them. As long as no mouths or genitals are involved, apparently you're a perfectly good time. That got a laugh and I might work on it, as I said.
Otherwise I think largely bombed. I got ragged on a little bit by one of the hosts (which is fine, I can taking a razzing) and the next comic. That being said I'm looking at it as a learning experience. From here on out my current goal is to figure out more material and have it at the ready, so I can call audibles on what I'm doing any given time on stage.
I'm hoping to go up again and give it another try this coming Wednesday, so if you're reading this and around I'd be glad to see you - the Facebook page of the show is near the top of this post, by all means come check it out - it'll likely be a good time either way.
So - if you've made it this far in this post I'd be glad to have you as a follower - click the button! And additionally I'd also love to get some feedback - it's one of the things that hurt my earlier blog - no one ever commented so I often felt like no one was really reading.
And with that out of the way - thanks for reading, I'll be back soon.
My last attempt was the ill fated buriedinspace.blogspot.com which was supposed to be a music blog and which I could never seem to bring myself to add as much content to as I would have liked. This blog is going to be slightly different: the main focus is, as of this moment, my attempts to try and start doing stand up comedy, which at the moment has me doing small open mics and I'm pretty sure that's what I'm gonna be doing for some time now but I think it'll be interesting enough that I'll actually write about it and interesting enough that hopefully some people will read.
That being said, I also intend to sprinkle in comments about music, movies and my life in general - sometimes taking the form of something resembling a joke or bit, sometimes just because I want to write about the subject in question. So hopefully this will have some variety and some followers. I'm planning on putting some actual effort into this, so as the title says - this better fucking work.
And with that let's get you up to date:
I'm Ryan - I'm 25, in Southern New Hampshire and I've been a big stand up fan for many years now. I remember growing up watching Comedy Central and seeing comics, be it on Comedy Central Presents or something like Dr. Katz and really enjoying it but it's probably in the last 5-6 years I've gotten heavier into stand up through acts such as Patton Oswalt, Mike Birbiglia, Paul F. Tompkins, Marc Maron (who inspired the name of the site - it's the title of the first track on his first record), Louis C.K. and Todd Barry.
In the last couple years I've had it in the back of my mind that I might like to try it out and I've been slowly figuring out how one goes about that. For a while I thought it was one of those things that was somewhat impenetrable, especially in kind of the middle of nowhere in New Hampshire. I didn't know of any open mics and I certainly knew there was no way to get just randomly hired for gigs and such. So I was at a loss.
It was about a month ago now that one day I went online and I thought to myself 'hey, you know how I could find some of this stuff out? The internet'. At which point I Googled 'open mic comedy new hampshire' and got several links and had a lead on some place that would both fit my schedule and seemed like a fine choice to begin trying this out. I think, in retrospect, I must have had something going in my head not wanting me to do it, because it really did not take much effort to figure out where I might be able to do it.
The place I ended up was at the Shaskeen Bar in Manchester, New Hampshire in the soon to be re-named Nick and Brad's Open Mic Comedy Night. The first time I attended just as a spectator and I enjoyed what I saw - it seemed like a low pressure room and while the quality wildly varied it seemed even the people trying to figure out what they were doing (some of whom certainly seemed to be failing) were not judged particularly harshly and the crowd was never what I would consider hostile. Having seen the show I decided to talk to the hosts and set up myself to perform the next week.
The week between the two shows I worked pretty feverishly to figure out just what I was going to do. At a certain point I decided that I might as well take this chance to do a bit I could really only do once: a bit about being a first time stand up.
The basics of the bit were this: I would come out, admit to my first time status and then talk that I was slightly nervous due to the fact that I had heard many famous comics talk of their first time on stage and it was never a heart warming story, it was always a disaster of epic proportions.
I then told an entirely fictional story, as an example of the sort of thing I would hear them say, wherein the comic comes on stage ready to conquer the world and slowly, through a first failed joke... then another... loses his confidence. Just as he's about to get to joke #3, he beings to get heckled, being told that he sucks and thinks 'you know, I think they might be right' and then is told 'get off stage' and he starts to think it might be sage advice. Moments later he ends his act, unceremoniously when the heckles turn to boos and he leaves the stage only to get smacked in the face with a projectile - bizarrely a AA battery (hecklers throwing batteries is, best I can tell, an idea that came to me entirely from The Simpsons, for what it's worth) and goes back to his seat where his half empty drink is now entirely full... of some guys piss. He tells his date maybe they should go and she agrees he probably should but says that personally she thinks she'll take a ride home with the guy who peed in the drink.
When I was actually on stage, for no particular reason, I decided to cut the piss filled drink and girlfriend bit - I think in the moment I felt the point was made. Additionally I had been doing the bit all week long and it kept coming up as being somewhere between 6 and 7 minutes and I knew I needed to be cutting things if I wanted to get into my end bit at all and so there it went.
From there I comment on how, in interviews when a comic tells that story it seems to invariably end with the interviewer saying that certainly they must have improved quickly, at which point the general response from the comic seems to be something of the sort of 'yeah, it got better, I only had to deal with that sort of crowd for 2 or 3 years' which is a bit dis-heartening for someone who hasn't even started week one of those hundreds of weeks of failure.
The thing was, however, I would then say, that I didn't mind years of failure because I had been numbed to comic failure from years of living with my family. I then recounted a common scene when I was younger, at the dinner table with my mother and older sister, wherein I would randomly decide to make what was admittedly terrible jokes at the dinner table and my older sister would generally reply with sage advice, to the tune of something like 'shut the fuck up Ryan, you're not that funny'. At which point, the really hurtful thing was that I would turn to my mother, assuming she would admonish her and she'd more likely be nodding along at the assessment.
This bit went over really well, by my thinking - I got a good bit of laughs, a hearty bit of applause, was asked by the host if it really was my first time and when I confirmed it I got a bit of compliments and a second nice bit of applause. I left that night feeling pretty good about what I'd done.
That being said - a lot went into that bit. I practiced it incessantly for a week, timing it and rewriting it in my head all the while. Also: on my way to the show I impulsively went to the mall and bought myself a new outfit to wear on stage, nothing fancy - just replacing jean shorts with a solid pair of jeans and adding a light flannel short sleeve shirt that complimented my t-shirt to what I was wearing. Looking back, it really helped to feel confidently that I looked pretty decent.
That brings me to last night. Last night I had, well, a much more troublesome time at the same venue. I applied to go on a little later and was a little less sure about the material I was performing. I was full of nerves my first time too but I knew I could do what I was setting out to do and this time I was not so sure.
My plan was to start with something mentioning how it was my second time on and that my first time up I thought I got a bit of sympathy, what with my entire bit reminding people every moment that I was new and that that can be intimidating - so, with that said I would still gladly take sympathy laughs.
This got off to a poor start once I saw my place on the line-up - I was following a disabled man on a motor scooter. It occurred to me that appeals for sympathy might be a little harder to try for, following that. What's more... he was good and some of his material sort of touched on themes that I was planning on exploring later in my act.
The lesson I learned from what then occurred is that I really need to make my act a bit more malleable - I need to be able to cut something and have different opening and less of a closed mind about what I am planning on saying. And that did not work out well when I went up after the aforementioned comic, especially not when I was introduced as 'somewhat of a regular' which unknowingly undercut my opening bit.
That being said - I tried the bit, altered to note that perhaps it would not work so well considering who I was following which seemed to be received a lot more awkwardly than I would have thought. It may have also been a case where my delivery of it was a bit nervous, because... I was.
The whole thing fell of the rails moments later, when, still slightly rattled by the awkwardness in the room I started in on my main bit. I had intentions to start this bit by making a bit of fun of the genericness of my opening line but I blew past that to just get to the meat of the idea.
The bit started 'So - I've been single for a while...' which lord knows is a pretty generic thing to be said by a mid twenties male stand up to start a bit, thus why I planned to undercut it with a bit of a joke but when I did not, it apparently mixed with the awkward feeling in the room in such a way to burst one of the co-hosts in to ridiculously boisterous laughter, which started to throw me off my game even more - I tried to get out a 'that really wasn't the joke' line in between my own awkward bit of laughter but he just got louder and the mostly silence from me got more and more awkward.
I somewhat recovered from it to do the rest of my bit, but most certainly I never fully recovered my footing. The bit I did revolved around the futility of getting with an ex-girlfriend. I'm not going to go as full detail on it, because frankly, it wasn't really top shelf material. The most salvageable part of it, which I might try to work in later on was a joke regarding girls who say they 'still want to be friends' after breaking up.
The joke is, basically that there are two ways that can go: either they are full of shit and you never see them again or, perhaps worse is when they're serious. Because if they seriously want to be friends afterward then the problem is clearly not you being around them, but rather you being INSIDE them. As long as no mouths or genitals are involved, apparently you're a perfectly good time. That got a laugh and I might work on it, as I said.
Otherwise I think largely bombed. I got ragged on a little bit by one of the hosts (which is fine, I can taking a razzing) and the next comic. That being said I'm looking at it as a learning experience. From here on out my current goal is to figure out more material and have it at the ready, so I can call audibles on what I'm doing any given time on stage.
I'm hoping to go up again and give it another try this coming Wednesday, so if you're reading this and around I'd be glad to see you - the Facebook page of the show is near the top of this post, by all means come check it out - it'll likely be a good time either way.
So - if you've made it this far in this post I'd be glad to have you as a follower - click the button! And additionally I'd also love to get some feedback - it's one of the things that hurt my earlier blog - no one ever commented so I often felt like no one was really reading.
And with that out of the way - thanks for reading, I'll be back soon.
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