Last night the crowd at LL was pretty good, to begin with. I was lucky enough to go up 4th, and I broke a cardinal rule; I opened with new material. Sunday I was driving on 270 and I saw a Ferrari with tinted windows, and I came up with a premise for a joke. Basically all I had was a rough idea on where I wanted to go, and a couple lines that I wanted to use. Well, Wednesday while waiting for the show, I developed the joke more fully, and felt confident enough to take it on stage. And since I couldn't fit it comfortably anywhere inside my dating material, I opened with it. Just in case it bombed, though, I was going to follow it with my usualy opener to try to recover. Turns out I didn't have to. It worked, and I did the joke exactly how I wrote it. That made me pretty happy. The rest of my set went really well, though I've been wanting to try out a new bit, and I keep forgetting, but oh well. I had the crowd laughing and got through the material I wanted and I bailed at just under 4 minutes. Keep them wanting more, as they say. Ken Jr. said I should stick around as he'd probably pull me into the top 5. Well by the end of the night, the top 5 became the top 9. Out of 18 comics. During the "audience voting" I didn't get the responce I was hoping for, but I did go on at least an hour and a half prior to that, and much of the audience had shifted around, and possibly left, only to be replaced by other audience members. The 9 got dropped to the top 2, between Mark Faegenbutz and a girl who was a first timer. Faegenbutz won. I would have liked to win, mainly to pay off the 25 dollar parking ticket I got for parking down the street, but that's ok.
I'm really happy to have been doing so well as of late, especially since I'm coming off of a dry spell, but I've been doing a decent amount of writing (admittedly, it's not to structured) and I've got 4 or more new bits, all but one of which I'm doing on stage now, and it doesn't seem like I'm gaining any time. I haven't done an extended set in a very long time, and it's weird because it's like I don't know how much time I could do. I have a dozen or so full bits that I haven't done in months, but it's hard sometimes keeping track of them all. I know I'm moving more quickly through my material, but that's because I haven't found a way to keep the my pressence and pace myself. It's frustrating because there are so many dimensions I need to keep track of, just when one starts to improve I realize I've been neglecting another. Chad Huff used to tell me fairly often, that I was too hard on myself, and that I think about stuff too much. I know I'm hard on myself, my theory is, if I'm not hard on myself, who will be. I might as well demand as much out of myself as possible, that way when bookers and clubs demand a lot of me, I'm used to it.
I have no segua for this, but it's been on my mind for a bit;
The scariest thing right now to me is the Wheel of Fortune. Not the game show, I rock at that. Who buys vowels, seriosly? What I'm talking about is the Greek/Latin idea that those who are on top of the world will sink to the bottom, and those on the bottom will eventually get lucky. Everything's cyclical. I'm just afraid that my luck will run out before I can really hit a breakthrough in stage pressence/timing. Then again, being at the bottom only makes one appreciate the top that much more.
/me knocks on wood.