Dear Marcus Is Funny Dot Com, Gabe made fun of me today, and it hurt my feelings... It all started last night when I stopped by Maggie O' Brien's on Market Street (very near Union Station). Tom Milster was already there, Gabriel Kea and Anthony Joplin showed up after a bit. Nick Kousamano was there setting stuff up, and guy named L.C. was there hosting. There were also a couple others, including a guy with a white ZZ-top "neck beard" and a guy named Joe who went first, drank what may have been alcohol (possibly gasoline) on stage, kept talking about how unfunny he was and got some of the mystery liquid on my shirt. Then he left because he "has a day job tomorrow". There were less than 10 non-comics in the room, and that always spells awesome set, especially when no one laughs at the first guy up. I thought I was going to follow Joe, and I was going to say "That's the quality of comic you get when you have free grab rangoon in the back (oh yeah, they had free crab rangoon, it was fantastic). Tom Milster had to follow Joe, or in actuality, he had to follow L.C. who did probably 5 to 10 between each comic. In any case, the crowd wasn't exactly "pumped". Plus L.C. kept talking to "Santa" (the guy with the neck beard) who kept responding. The guy gave Tom some lip and Tom gave a "Shut up, Uncle Jesse" in return. I almost fell out of my chair. I followed Tom (or L.C., or both) and according to my DVR, I did about 8 minutes. I tried the old "How are you guys doing?" [Pause for audience] "You guys can do better than that, this is my Make a Wish" line. However right when I said "You guys can do better than that" they did, and the audience stepped on my punch line. I'm not too upset, though because they seemed kind of riled up.
I also tried a new approach, which was saying that I was a clean comic. I'm trying to get a joke out of that so I can lead into the subject, but the bit I tried last night needs some work. After that, I noticed Gabe was in the back talking to some girl. On September 9th Matt Wolff did a similar thing at the Red Sea, so I started talking about Gabe (briefly narrating what he was doing, really). Anyway, I think I opened up Pandora's box on that one, because Gabe got me back when he was on stage. But we'll get to that. I tried a new approach on my 'dumped in email' joke, and instead of going into fat jokes, I tried to make myself more of a victim ("she could have just told me the day before when I had driven three hours to see her") so the audience would sympathize with me more. I'll have to work on that a bit more.
I went into my dating examples, and one of the audience members noticed I used the word "damn", which I don't consider dirty. While talking to the audience, I threw in a joke about my initials ("MR") that I've been playing with. I ended my set and hung around for a while.
Anyway, when Gabe got up, I don't remember how it went down, but he plugged my website. Gabe didn't tell jokes, really, on stage, he just played. At one point, I think he started doing an impression of me typing in my blog, and it involved my Blog being theraputic, almost like a psychiatrist. You kind of had to be there, but it made me laugh. Afterwards Gabe apolozies, we hugged and went to get ice cream and search for Jesse James' lost fortune.