Open mic experiences

[nixonjames]

I'd say the initial obsession for something that engaging is new for most things, whether it's a new interest, religion, or comedy. But there will constantly be those falling away. Some make it a couple months. Some a couple weeks, some 2/4/7 years. I've had real life getting in the way and feel like I'm dying only getting 15 minutes each week. I'm probably not going to be home next week now that I'm finally free... I've got a chance to get a lot done and a ton to work on. So I'm trying to cull about half a dozen solid free writes into a bits and hoping I can get 1 or 2 to be worth continuing to work on. Focusing on honest n clean and now have a better idea of my bar I'm aiming for so got my work cut out for me. Doin the first run on each bit in august. I like a challenge.

[KeithTalent]

I'm having so much fun lately. My sets keep going way better than I expect them to. Much more experienced comics who I respect have been giving me compliments like "I wish I'd written that joke" and "It's annoying how quickly you're getting good". Next weekend I'm doing ten minutes on a show where I'm the newest comic on it by at least a year and a half. I think I might be kinda good at this. Now if you'll excuse me I've got to get back to panicking about my precarious subsistence.

[funkyrhino]

I've been having more fun writing than anything lately. The open mics the past two weeks have been very uninspiring. Last Weds we had two people show up to the open mic. Two ladies in their 50's sitting way in the back. After the 3rd comedian went up to echos, the MC looked at me and goes do you even want to do this tonight? I said no and then left and went to Steak and Shake and wrote jokes.

[funkyrhino]

I miss this thread and all the people that used to be involved in this thread. That's all I have nothing to add just like Tuesday night open mic with 6 people in the audience...

[nickyp123]

Random observation: I've been doing stand up for a while and never taped my sets, but recently I've started taping sets and I've noticed my voice doesn't sound the same as it does in my head.

How does one learn the tone of their voice to assure the best delivery?

[SeanX3]

I'm working on this too—I feel like I have to really raise my voice, practically shout, just to sound normal; makes me very uncomfortable.

[nixonjames]

I miss this thread and all the people that used to be involved in this thread. That's all I have nothing to add just like Tuesday night open mic with 6 people in the audience...

Yah I was noticing this thread has died off. I choose to believe it's because all of us started just working on our acts and talking about it less.
Or quit doing comedy XD

[drieux]

re: Speaking voice onstage. I do some voiceover work occasionally and the stuff I've learned in doing that recording has helped with some of the performance stuff. I've noticed that since applying it onstage it has helped my sets become better and people act like I'm good or something.

#1 is sloooooow down and concentrate on your breathing. Work on a steady, paced delivery instead of a rushed and frantic one, which will also cause you to breathe erratically and affect your voice. This doesn't mean you can't speed up, or go into a frantic bit if that's what the bit calls for, but you should still be attempting to talk like a normal person, or at least as normal as somebody who wants to talk about farts for a living can be. Slowing down and proper breathing will lead to a more rounded, comfortable tone.

#2 Keep the mic at a comfortable distance from your lips and learn how placement, movement, etc. affect it. For instance, if you place the mic against your lower lip but angle it between 45-90 degrees, you can up the volume without grabbing every breath or sputter from your mouth and also enhance volume (if you're performing somewhere with a subpar sound system). If you place the mic dead-on straight at your mouth and close up, you'll get a bigger, bassier response that can help blow up the end of a bit, but if you do it the whole set people will become exhausted by it. I grew up with a father who played in bands and we had P.A.'s and stuff so I could dick around with microphones from a young age, but even if you just have a USB mic from Rock Band, plug it into your computer with a sound recording program and headphones and play around with it.

#3, re: your own volume, if you're shouting the whole time because that sounds better to you or that seems to be the only way people respond to your comedy, you're going to exhaust most audiences quickly and more than likely yourself. Not to mention, if you have to shout the whole time then you're probably writing jokes about being angry, and then you have to be the "angry guy," and I can't imagine a worse fate, unless you really want to talk about people's driving skills, the government and the DMV for your entire life. Learning how to use the microphone to your advantage and controlling your pacing, timing and breathing will allow you to do a variety of jokes about a whole slew of topics and you'll look all professional and junk.

Or, you could be the guy I saw at a show once who literally spent seven minutes screaming his face off about cole slaw. Nobody was laughing, but you couldn't hear the silence over the deafening roar about cole slaw.

[SeanX3]

Good tips, I'll try those. I'm definitely not Angry Guy and agree it's a terrible fate. Definitely, slowing down is a big help. (I get nervous, I speed up, it's always shit.) I have trouble speaking slowly and clearly in real life, so this would be good for me to fix both on and off stage. Thanks.

[ErikNielsen]

Good tips, I'll try those. I'm definitely not Angry Guy and agree it's a terrible fate.

Thanks for your sympathy, guys. But I'm managing.

(Is this a bad time to point out that I've actually done more than one joke about cole slaw? Neither of them lasted more than 1-2 performances, but still.)

[drieux]

Oh, Erik. I think what you do is different than the standard "Angry Guy" character. I was thinking more along the lines of somebody like a Lewis Black, who now seems frustrated and exhausted with that persona, or Denis Leary, who rode it as far as possible and now always has to act as though he's pissed off. Even George Carlin, in some of his later material, seemed boxed in by being "The Angry Guy." I think what you do feels more like a character's reaction to the world not understanding him, as opposed to the guy in the leather jacket smoking and shouting about how everybody is an idiot.

And I never said a joke about cole slaw couldn't be funny, just that this particular guy probably didn't need to spend seven minutes shrieking at an audience about his favorite cole slaw.

[ErikNielsen]

Oh, he LIKED cole slaw? How is THAT supposed to be funny?

[drieux]

Because of life and other crap, I hadn’t done a set in almost a month until last night. I stopped by an open mic and then went to a booked showcase that I had done before. The open mic was jammed so I hung out for a while and then left, and then at the showcase two of the five comics didn’t show up and I ended up doing a little over 22 minutes, which went surprisingly well. I wrote two new jokes yesterday that I hadn’t intended to use, but with that much time I assumed I may as well sandwich them in between more practiced and tested stuff. One went over like gangbusters, the other fell like a stinky turd. Guess which one I tried to close with, like an idiot?

Getting back onstage was a lot of fun, and I have a goal in mind – I’ve been booked to do 45 minutes at a fundraiser in July. I typically haven’t worked to build material beyond 30 minutes in my rotation, because I haven’t gotten to the point where I routinely do more than 15-20 regularly. So it is nice to set a schedule with that goal in mind.

The other thing that shocked me last night was at the open mic – I didn’t know 99% of the people there. When I started to get busier with my “real” job and some other work, I was hitting 2-3 mics a week at most but I recognized a lot of faces in the rotation. It was a reminder that the turnover on the open mic scene happens fast and furiously. And I admittedly made no effort to learn any newbies’ names, because by the next time I swing by they will probably already be gone again.

[KeithTalent]

I keep chickening out of doing new bits when there's a good crowd at the open mic. Obviously those are exactly the crowds I should be trying new stuff on. I tend toward longer bits so if a new thing doesn't work it could be a good half my 5 minutes and I'm a little hesitant to risk being the one person who has a shitty set that night. It's a really bad habit, I'm posting about it to force myself to stop doing it.

Now that I'm thinking about it...it might also be sort of an excuse for me not being prepared. When it's just a bunch of comics and four drunks in the room I don't mind going up with a bit I haven't really thought out that well, even though I'm not at the point where "writing on stage" is very fruitful, because the stakes are so low.

Another part of it is this one new bit I want to do is political and I live in the south so I'm just being a pussy.

[drieux]

It's way too easy to get comfortable doing the same five minutes for years, I've found. I won't see a particular person for 6-9 months and then stop by an open mic I haven't done in a while and there they are, still doing the same old shit they were the last time at the same open mics. There are times when running older, tried-and-true bits is valuable for practice, but there's little chance that some drunk sitting at the bar at a Tuesday night open mic turns out to be a producer at Comedy Central who's going to step up after your set, twirling his mustache with one hand and fanning himself with $100 bills in the other exclaiming, "you got IT, kid!" Go ahead and give yourself permission to try new stuff AND fail occasionally. It's a lot more freeing than thinking the five minutes you wrote 18 months ago is the lasso you're going to use to grab the sun and pull it down and put it in your pocket.

[ErikNielsen]

Go ahead and give yourself permission to try new stuff AND fail occasionally.

Or give yourself "permission" (huh?) to try new stuff you're actually excited about, and NEVER go into a set thinking failure is a possibility or an option. Slogging through underwritten material that you're not even motivated to do the first time is bad for your morale, it's bad for your quality control, and it's bad for those bits. (Who knows -- maybe if you hang on to them until they're finished, they'll actually be something you want to do and the crowd wants to hear. Chop your way through them when they're not ready, and they'll never be ready... or at least the process will be set back.)

If you feel the joke's not ready, it's not ready. Don't do it. Let that be a lesson to you the next time you have time to write. You have to develop the foresight to know what you need to do before the show, and the work ethic to actually sit down and do it. (Comedians, most of whom got into this line of work because it didn't require a work ethic, tend to struggle with this. I am no exception... if you look at my actual writing process, this whole post is hypocrisy. But I know my writing process could be ten times better.) If you don't have new jokes to do, why not skip the open mic and stay home to do the work for the next open mic?

The bottom line is, if you have to give yourself "permission" to do a new bit, are you really going to be able to go up there and deliver it with absolute confidence? A bit you can't deliver with conviction is a bit you should never bring anywhere near the stage. You need to go up there thinking, "this is great, I'm going to kill", and deal with the possibility of that not happening only after it has failed to happen. Audiences can sense diffidence, and it always, always, always ruins a set.

[drieux]

Oh, Erik. I think you and I are almost always about 90% towards being in agreement, with you taking specific phrases far too seriously and me not thinking anybody would ever take that particular phrase that seriously. No, nobody should ever go onstage - even at an open mic - with a sloughed-off, half-assed bit they don't give a shit about. My point is, the goal should always be to building more and more GOOD material, and the process of that means inevitably there are going to be some stinkers in the batch, which you should be prepared for as you're writing and testing it out. A lot of newbies will have a bad set or two - or a LOT of them - and take that feeling of failure to heart, so much so that when they finally get four or five decent minutes, they cling to it for far too long and then five years go by and they wonder why they haven't broken through with their bit about Snuggies and Shake Weights.

[funkyrhino]

How do you all feel about working through adversity through tragedy? I had a friend die in the motorcycle accident a few days before a big Roast that we did (Star Wars: The Roast of Darth Vader) and I was going to cancel because I wasn't feeling it but then on the last day I told them I'd do it. I had a pretty good set/roast and it went well. Now yesterday I found out my cousin died and I'm supposed to do a show tonight but I honestly do not feel like going through those motions. I read where Weird Al got noticed of his parents death from their fireplace (carbon monoxide) a couple of hours before a show and he went on with his show. I don't think I could've done that.
I think everyone is different though.

[drieux]

Hey Funkyrhino - sorry to hear about your losses. You are correct, each person is different and each case is different and you should follow your gut. In some cases it might be a helpful distraction and in others too much to take on. In my own experience a while back I got a call from family that my grandfather was diagnosed by doctors as not having long to live, including not long enough for me to schedule a flight to see him one last time, right before a competition set. I did the set and advanced. In another case an uncle passed away and I found out the day before a big set and I was overwhelmed and begged off. The odd thing is, I was closer to my grandfather than my uncle. Do what you feel is right, it will be the right thing. The people involved in the second instance were very understanding and accepting.

Condolences again and take care of yourself.

[KeithTalent]

You're absolutely right Erik, although sometimes it seems to help to do a bit at least once and have it peter out toward the end to really get the gears turning on how to improve it...I've never gone up with a premise I wasn't excited about and didn't have at least a couple punchlines for, it just might not finish as strong as it starts.

Another interesting thing I've noticed is that since I tend to be more explainy than jokey, whenever I write a one-liner I'm so excited to have written a one-liner that it takes like a month to realize there's tons more to mine in that premise. My favorite thing I'm doing right now started as a one-liner that's basically a pun (and didn't even really do that well) then like a week or two later I realized I could make fun of the cliche I use in the punchline...and then it somehow took another month to realize I could also flip that cliche backwards and make fun of that. After that happened I made a note to force myself to look at that more...but then just last night I realized I've been doing a one-liner that totally begs for more elaboration. Each time this has happened I've felt like an idiot for not noticing it sooner...it's this weird blind spot, because when my friends tell me their new jokes I think I'm pretty good at spotting where there's room to add stuff.