Last night we barely had a show at the Bone because the audience was really small. We ended up starting a half an hour late, and when Matt asked me to keep time, he told me to light people early. Because of the shorter sets, the show moved along at a really good pace. Brett Clawson hosted, which was interesting, to put it mildly. He pulled people up with some of the weirdest intros, butchering peoples' names on purpose and basically shocking the crowd into paying attention. Thankfully he left me alone as I tried some more new material. I only did a couple of "old" jokes, mainly because Derek, one of the door guys requested my Animal on Animal porn joke. My new stuff got laughs and has promise, so I'm pretty happy about that. My newest trick to writing (it's not my trick necessarily, but I just started using it) is helping out a lot. What I do is, I take two ideas and list out things that I think of when I think of each. I'll use an actual example from my set: my pet Scorpion and my girlfriend (ok, hypothetical girlfriend).
Scorpion:
has a stinger
has claws
glows under black light
external digestion
eight legs
cold blooded
Stereotypical Girlfriend or Ex-Girlfriend
Psycho
Manipulative
Sex
Cheated on me (or) Cheated on her
Eating habits (too much / too little)
Anyway, through my list I came up with this... (there's more setup, but I'm sure you don't need it to get the point of the excercise (or the joke, either) ).
My scorpion reminds me of my ex, mainly because every time I try to touch it, it freaks out, gets pissed off and tries to stab me. The only difference is, my scorpion throws up before it eats...
{[5/8/2006}
I half-forgot/half-didn't want to write about Thursday's show. I'm not sure why; I did well, got laughs with new(er) stuff and had fun, but I started my set with the scorpion joke (see above) and I felt that I had to deliver is a certain way for it to come off as "real" so my set started a little lower key than I prefer. I think I can get away with mellower stuff like that jokes (where people actually believe I got dumped) but I didn't do as well as I had hoped. I got a call from Springfield today, and I'm booked for this weekend, which means, including the Comedy Forum on Wednesday I should be performing almost every night this week. Dreams do come true.