I would like to capture my current energy and overall enthusiasm for comedy. In a few hours I am headed out to Jokers in Richland for my first ever feature weekend at a club. That is part of why I am excited. Last night I did a ridiculously long set at an open mic and it felt amazing. I felt like a real comic. I was quick on my feet, I was in the moment, I brought a perspective, I took my time, I had a ton of confidence, I owned the stage. And for all of that, there is SO MUCH MORE to improve, so many things that I can see that can get so much better and THAT is why I am excited. Every night is a new chance to be a better comedian; to be more in the moment, to connect with an audience, to riff a new line, to develop perspective.

John Roys comedy class project

Assignment One: Find out where the open mics in your town are. Find out how many you can go to this week. Write five minutes of material and perform at them. What sort of material? This is up to you. Think of what you may have said that made your friends laugh. What additional info would strangers need to have to laugh at that? There’s a joke. Don’t spend more than five hours writing this material. Don’t prolong that first performance. That will only make you more nervous. It very well may be nerve wracking. Best to rip the band aid off. Your fear will be much diminished once the experience is no longer a scary unknown. Do this same five minutes at your first three open mics. Don’t adjust anything yet. Ask yourself the following questions in a notebook or Notepad file. These questions will remain the same after every three open mics. So get used to them, you will be answering them a lot.

thats charming, the thought that I might spend five hours writing five minutes. If only I had that kind of dedication! Anyway, Im gonna write some jokes here and try them out next week. Some of these are gonna be variations of stuff I was trying last week.

  I have a facebook friend who keeps inviting me to like things, which is almost as obnoxious online as it would be in real life. "Hey, do you like snowboarding? No? Maybe you should" Its like that, only more self serving, because theyre inviting me to like pages that they made. "Hey, do you like everything that Ive ever created or been involved in? No? Maybe you should". I like a lot of different things, for a lot of different reason, but the one thing that it all has in common is that nobody had to fucking tell me to like it.

 I dont like magic. It seems dumb. If I was actually magical I would do something more useful than link and unlink metal rings. I cant think of a single application for that in real life. Even sawing a woman in half seems pretty useless unless you can get two fully functional women out of it. Magic is just a bunch of simple tricks that I dont understand because theres a group of assholes who refuse to explain it to anyone. Congratulations magic, I dont understand how my car works either, and there are books explaining it. Imagine if all of the car mechanics formed a guild and insisted that cars were magic and that human laws no longer applied to them? They would rule the world.

Thats pretty much what investment bankers have done. I thought I knew what money was, it was pieces of paper that I could use to get candy. It turns out that money is a lot more complicated and scary. Money is a mysterious force, and sometimes there is a great disturbance in the force and then its important that the government gives a lot of money to some very evil rich people or otherwise our entire society will end up in flames, and I wont be able to get candy anymore. It worries me that money seems so fundamental to our culture, and the smartest people who study it cant agree on what it is or how it works. We dont understand money the way we can understand chemistry, because chemistry is in everything, and money is a big fake thing that we all pretend is real so that we can have houses and cars and jetskis, which are all just adult candy. 


I was thinking of going into poker, and how its useless and fake in the larger scheme of things, but I ran out of juice. I think that thats about two minutes of material there, so maybe Ill come back and write more later. I get a free pass from doing a new five because a lot of the mics that I can do wont give me five minutes. So maybe Ill bang out a new three. Ill also do the second part of the assignment soon: watching Greg Giraldos special and answering some questions. Im losing focus for now

collected wisdom

clearly this is just for me. Metaphors and not similes. Every joke has a victim. Build with tags and dont finish with them. Speed, volume, pacing, confidence

today in bjj i learned

this is not about comedy, but it is something i want to write down for later. Today in bjj i learned two sweeps: a pendulum sweep, and a hipbump sweep (remember to plant your hand down on the hip bump). In both cases i need to work on pulling my opponent further forward. I also learned a guard pass, stacking the opponent and moving to side control, and then a pass to mount.

Stay in the Pocket

I was at an open mic a few weeks ago, and this local comedian Brad Brake came in. This guy is a headliner, has been doing comedy for years, and is crazy and unpredictable. Hes known to take his pants off a lot on stage, do crazy audience interaction shit, whatever. Anyway, he came into this thing, and he was yelling at comedians to "stay in the pocket". I couldnt tell if he was drunk. At the time, I just thought that this was something ridiculous he was yelling. The more i think about it, the more i like the metaphor of comedian as quarterback, staying in the pocket. To me, this means you take your time with your jokes. You dont get desperate. Eventually you get the metaphorical ball to your receivers; the audience. Sometimes no one is open, and you take a coverage sack. But you dont force it, you dont scramble unless you have to.

Audience Participation

I was at TCC last night. The first comic up was this super sweet, super weird guy named Skippy. His sets are manic and high energy and scatterbrained at the best of times. They almost always involve him yelling "ram it in skippy" with no context while slapping his own ass. Yesterday was apparently his one year anniversary in comedy, so he put on a gladiators costume, giant gloves, an afro wig, had somebody blow bubbles, and made a giant penis pinata full of candy that he had somebody break open with a handled penis dildo. He played music in the background, and he had a blow up doll that he left in the front row. A large part of comedy is preparation. There was a couple in the back, and the woman was yelling at him to get off the stage for a decent part of his performance. She kept loudly saying "this isnt new york city". It was odd that she was saying that, because the only place in the world that i can think of where its acceptable to yell a comedian off stage is the apollo theater in new york city. I came over and talked to her a bit and she calmed down, and was (mostly) quiet for the rest of the show. The vast majority of audience members at these shows are quiet (ish), and sometimes attentive, and on rare occasion they even laugh. However, some people try to be a part of the show. I did this when i was going to my first open mics. I felt engaged, so i figured that i got to be a part of it, especially if i had something funny to yell. Thats just not how it works. As an audience member, youre like an extra in a movie scene. Your job is to be quiet in the background. The comic has a (rough) script of how their set is going to go, and if you decide to give yourself a speaking part, you are deviating from and derailing that script. Its great that you want to be funny, but ultimately its the comedian who is responsible for how entertained the audience is while he is on stage, so even if what you say cracks everyone up, youve quite possibly fucked up the rest of the time that he is on stage. We have a term for people yelling things from the audience. The term is heckling. That doesnt just apply to yelling negative things at the comedian, its anything at all. Dont do it.

ego, continued

I talked to some comics at the open mic last night. Its a little unusual for me to ask people for advice, but thats exactly what ive been doing. If youre in comedy, and i respect your opinion (and sometimes even if i dont) i want to hear what you have to say to me. Some of it was bullshit ("there are no bad audiences. Its your job as a comic to get their attention and make them laugh, no matter what"... yes. thank you) and some of it was really useful. Some of the stuff that stuck was that its REALLY important to make a connection with your audience, to get them to like you. The thing that was most useful to my current situation is that its not always a good thing to advance faster than youre ready for, because if it goes poorly, you dont get a chance again for a long time. Talked to a guy named Jeremy Whitman, who has been doing comedy for 10 years. He said that somehow or other he got into SICC after two years and just wasnt ready. He was all cocky, and got his ass kicked. So that helped me put things in perspective a bit. A number of people talked to me about patience. Im starting to think that maybe i dont need to go to the bad open mics. I can probably get by on 3-4 open mics a week instead of 7. Parker asked me how missing open mics would help me get better, and i guess that the answer is that in the long run it helps me get better by keeping me enthusiastic about comedy, and my place in it.