Funny is Funny
Comedy Death March, pt. II…I Can’t Count
Great show!!!
This show was a classic illustration of what I was talking about in the first post of this series and the nature of tipping points in audiences. In this case, the tipping point was divorced from the size of the audience, which was small, about 17 warm bodies. The key to this crowd was the presence of more than one alpha laugher. I love these guys because they show no hesitation in laughing at a joke in a demonstrative manner. This has the very desirable effect of breaking the widely held cultural barrier against loud demonstration in other members of the audience. In effect, the alpha laugher gives the other audience members permission to laugh.
It should be noted that alpha laughers can be a tremendous asset to a show depending on their level of alcohol consumption during. The line between alpha laugher and drunken heckler can be pretty damn thin at times.
There is also another branch of the alpha laugher family, which is the earth mother. The opposite of an alpha laugher is somebody who doesn’t laugh at all. The earth mother is very similar to the alpha in most respects except for his/her effect on the audience. This person pays too much attention to the emotional content of a joke and applies his or her (more frequently her) moral litmus test to the bit…and responds accordingly and loudly.
If a joke involves conflict, pain or discord…and by the way, they all do…the earth mother will respond with an echoing response of sympathy for the slighted party. A series of sad sounding “Awwww’s” and “Oh Dear’s” will place an enormous erect penis up the ass of a show in a hurry.
The earth mother is, in effect, telling the other members of the audience that if they laugh at the joke, they are big uncaring assholes who should be ashamed of themselves.
A lot of comics react to this as though it were heckling, which is a BIG mistake; because, while this behavior may be insidious and show-killing, it’s not heckling. They’re actually enjoying the show. They’re not trying to hijack it. This is simply how they respond to jokes. So when a comic goes heckler-DEFCON-2 they’re actually responding inappropriately and the audience will, rightly, turn on the performer. I’ve found that the best thing to do is to gently point out to them that this is what they’re doing.
BTW, the same rule of alcohol consumption applies to the earth mother as to the alpha laugher.
But…I digress. The show was great. One of the comics, who had a good set, brought a friend, also a comic. The friend was hoping to get a set, but as the show producers don’t put up blind acts (performer’s they’ve never seen), they declined to put him up. He then proceeded, in classic open-mic’er fashion, to insult the room to the producer’s faces.
One of the things that make putting up with asshole comedians possible is the self-regulating nature of the business. The turnover rate is indeed a blessing and he’ll be gone soon enough.
In any event, I’m going nowhere and live to perform another day.
Comedy Death March, pt. II
Not a Heck of a lot to say about this show except to say that sometimes it rains, and sometimes the sun is out. The crowd was both small and surly so it was a hard work show.
The good news is I survived and frankly, that’s always the truth.
I know comics who beat themselves up or take hard shows a little too hard. But the truth, as I see it is that, ultimately nobody dies or gets hurt. In any field of human endeavor, that’s not a bad benchmark of success.
On a plus note, aware of my physical bad habits, I was able to take control and mostly eliminate them. The video shows a few that slipped by me, but by and large, being aware of them made it relatively easy. Now, don’t get complacent.
Comedy Death March, the Awakening
I filmed my set last night. Any comedian will tell you that watching video of themselves is, at best, painful. Last night was a particularly neat example of this. Fuck, fuck, fuck!
Because frankly, I can see how much the recent hiatus from stage has hurt my act; and in front of a crowd I should have killed. The stage was at Castagnola’s in front of an audience of 40, which is a recipe for success usually.
Most rooms have a tipping point where the size of the audience guarantees a minimum of success. This is usually based on the size of the room vs. the number of audience members. A room that seats 12 people will be good with an audience of seven. This is an indication of a trend, not a hard and fast ratio. The trick is that the room has to seem large enough for audience to feel anonymous and thus more comfortable laughing. There are of course flukes and exceptions that can go both ways. An audience of five in a room that seats 50 can be good if you’ve got a serious alpha-laugher in the room; and you can have a room seating 100 people with 100 people in attendance but it’s the second show and the air conditioner is out and everybody’s hot and slightly pissed.
The point is that last night was not a fluke and it should have been a crush but it was only okay.
I went up first after the host who had a fair set. She got a few laughs but definitely did the job of taking the bullet for the show. I had accidentally double booked myself at Mojito’s so I didn’t get to see the rest of the show.
After the host, I went up and pulled off a 6.5 (1 to 10 scale), and should have pulled an 8. Along the way, according to my trusty Flip camera, I managed to display an awesome variety of bad stage habits. Dominant amongst them were: 1. Mistaking speed for energy; 2. Hem-haw-osis, still getting my mouth around the new material (a huge improvement over last Saturday, I must say); 3. Forgetting what to do with my hands (the answer, usually = NOTHING dumbass).
The hands are what’re killing me. They were flapping around so much I’m surprised I didn’t fly over the audience. Geeeeze!!!
Which gives me a goal for Wed night. Lose the sign language.
Comedy Death March…Why?
As you may but probably do not know, over the last six months my status as a working comedian has been strictly confined to dabbling. The major reason for that is a significant realignment of my living quarters and the conditions therein. But, there is also the fact that I’d gotten spoiled. As an instructor at the San Francisco Comedy College I had regular access to the stages at the Clubhouse. It’s sudden, sad demise left me with a gaping hole in my booking schedule and illustrated that my entire booking mechanism had passed into the moribund stage without my really being aware of it. Oh, also a huge tragedy for the SF comedy scene.
In an effort to rally, I have subsequently ramped up my efforts to get booked and like any kid comedian got a little greedy. Offered the chance to get on stage, I took a booking situation that can be described as unkind to my 40 year old physiology. A straight Tuesday through Saturday run with a show every night which, ten years ago, would have been fabulous. Between work and other responsibilities, I may not make it out alive.
Hence, my Comedy Death March. During this week, I will blog for every night, commenting on shows, comedians, conditions, audience and a critique of my set. I shall spare nobody’s feelings.
Unless they can get me stage time.
Going Public With a Great Show
In the space between the rat-tat-tat delivery of standup comedy and the pretentiousness of solo performance there is a world of story and nuance and humor that neither art explore. Joe Klocek has found that space and is currently running for mayor on the strength of his show ‘Previously Secret Information (PSI)’. More than simply recommending that you go see it, though, of course I do and we’ll get to that, I would like to talk about this show as a show.
The idea is that a series of performers tell a story, or set of smaller stories from their life. There are already a few shows like this in the bay area, a well-deserved backlash against the ubiquitous LOL-verse (he blogged). What sets PSI apart is that the performers are all standup comedians.
Nobody is boring who will tell the truth about themselves.
–Quentin Crisp
This isn’t to say that standup comedians are likely to be better story tellers than the average person. In fact, almost the opposite can be true. The tempo of standup comedy and the expectations inherent to the art form from the standpoint of both comic and audience typically winnows out the comedians with story-teller tendencies or, just as often, trains them away from the extended story towards shorter and shorter delivery.
Another important factor is environment. A comedian spends an ungodly amount of time telling jokes in sports bars where the television directly above the stage has been turned down, not off and some young woman’s imbibed her weight in tequila and is shrieking in apparent agreement with jokes that haven’t been said yet. In effect you’re fighting for attention, so shorter is rewarded and longer is discouraged.
Comedians who
refuse to give up the long setup format eventually either drop out or enter the entertainment ghetto of the elite known as solo performance, where shows are ‘important’.
What makes this Previously Secret Information a baby bear (juuuust right) is that not only do you get to hear a story, but you get to hear it by a veteran performer who is, more or less, out of his or her element. You get to see a man who spent years honing a craft which is the most word-centric of all performance arts suddenly unable to find the edge of the world. It adds a certain drama.
Last Sunday I got to watch Samson Koletkar, Will Durst and, of course, Joe Klocek toe the line at the edge of the world and it was quite a show. Samson told about attending Jewish Camp in India as a teenager; all the while digressing on what it was like to grow up Jewish in India and how very different his experience was from, say, growing up Jewish in America. Durst told several anecdotes about the hundred plus jobs he’d held over the years before he became successful as a standup. Joe told a story about road comedy and loss and cows and bottoming out as a performer and, ultimately, finding something good and strong at that bottom.
Each one, a comic, had a story uniquely slanted by the fact of being a comic. Because comedy is a uniquely isolating artform. If you’ve never been on the road as a comic, you can’t possibly have experienced what Joe experienced in quite the same way. Unless you’ve been a comic, you’ve probably never dressed up as a tomatoe to pay rent like Will. But each story, told humanely, resonated with the audience as humans. Because we all have a story to tell. Because in the end the stories are the show and so long as the stories are interesting, which they were, and most importantly honest, which they were, it can’t help but be a great show.
Go see Previously Secret Information.
