Emailling it in

Last night I was at Laughs; I went up first which wasn’t a terrible thing because there was a pretty decent sized crowd. I did a similar set to Tuesday’s, starting with my skiing material and going into my new coming out (or “Pro Homo” as I like to call it) material. That was followed by my high school stuff (I even added a little bit) and then some standard material on dating ([Nervous], [Advice and Math] and [Email]). I felt like I had a decent set, though one thing I know I need to work on is laughing-at-my-own-material. Last night I seemed to chuckle at least a little after almost every joke. That seems like I am trying too hard. Janine’s told me that before, and last night Mikey Manker pointed it out, so that’ll be something I concentrate on for a while. I typed out a joke or two and need to paste it into my Myspace blog. I linked to that blog below (and I used proper grammatical English). That’s reason enough to give it a click.

"It's enough"

Last night I went up third at the Funnybone. Dano Sullivan emceed, Gabe Kea led off, Jeff Wesselschmidt went next, then me. Before my set, I asked Matt Behrens if he’d watch my set as I spent about an hour in Starbucks working on the high school material that I work-shopped about a month ago. He said he would and that he’d grab Greg Warren as well. Though the crowd wasn’t the absolute best they were alright, I led off my set with my skiing material, and moved into a new bit about how coming out at Thanksgiving can cause you to get weird/bad presents at Christmas. Next I did my high school stuff, I didn’t have much of a segue (truthfully, I didn’t have one at all). And the high school stuff went alright; it needs some tweaking, some work and some memorization; but both Matt and Greg said that it was worth working on. After the show I did some karaoke, badly and then went home to watch some Josh Wheden’s Firefly.

Check out my MySpace blog for jokes on which I'm working.

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LYRICS

Christmas Jam

Last night was the Christmas Jam at Laughs. It featured the beginners and intermediate classes from Bill Chott’s The Improv Trick and appearances by many members of many different troupes from the St. Louis Metropolitan Area. I only got to play in a handful of games, because some of them required a level of experience I haven’t reached yet. The games I did play in, though, were fun. Probably the best news of yesterday is that I got a new laptop bag from work and it holds all my comedy junk (laptop, pencase, index cards case, voice recorder etc). All I need is to hook it up with some sort of padding so my video camera will be safe and I’ll be good to go.
Oh yeah, if you’re reading this, please don’t steal my laptop bag. Thank you in advance.

Check out my MySpace blog for jokes on which I'm working.

Visit RooftopComedy.com. Watch videos. Laugh. Feel warm and fuzzy.

better never than late

Janine and I left Milwaukee after the third show saturday (so, at about 1:30am) and we got to my place at around 7:00 at which point she went to her place and I passed out until noon. The entire trip this week was awesome. Friday's went well and I found a combination of jokes that 1) are pretty funny and 2) I can do in almost exactly 10 minutes (we're talking down to the second here). I got the first friday show and all three saturday shows on tape and will put at least one on my website. Joey Kola headlined Friday and Saturday and was really cool, he gave Janine and I advice, encouragment and genuinely seemed to enjoy talking with us after the shows. The crowds were all amazing (and except for the last show Saturday, they were all sold out or 95% capacity), but I still had a lot of butterflies in my stomach before the performances.
I waited to long to talk about the trip,so I can't remember too many specifics.

That's too bad.

Check out my MySpace blog for jokes on which I'm working.

Visit RooftopComedy.com. Watch videos. Laugh. Feel warm and fuzzy.

Need more holiday jokes...

Last night I was at the Laughs on the Landing Improv Jam; the show started at 8:00 instead of 9:00 and I (and a few others) was (were) hoping it would still run until about midnight. We got done at about twenty after eleven, but the show was really good and I had a ton of fun. One of my "characters" wasn't as "good" as i had hoped; I started a scene where coffee (I think) was the theme and tried to appear jittery and jonesing for caffeine. I had some other good scenes, but you always concentrate on the ones that didn't go as well as planned.

Today, Janine and I drove to Milwaukee to work the week at JD's Comedy Cafe. The drive in was alright, and only took about six hours. We got to the condo and met Hector Rezzano who was going to headline tonight since Joey Kola wouldn't be in until tomorrow, and was going to feature the rest of the week. We got settled in, grabbed some groceries and headed over to the club. Somehow I though we were going over at 6:40 (more than an hour before the show) but we ended up there at 5:40. Eventually, we were briefed on what was going on and how much time we were supposed to do. It was Janine, myself, a Milwaukee native, James Berry, whom I've performed with here before. Jeff LeFleur and Tony Miller were co-featuring. Janine did really well with the announcements (there were a ton of them) and did five minutes (which was good as well). James went up and then I went up to do 15 minutes. I had some trouble getting my stop watch started, and I blanked once or twice on stage (but it was in the middle of a chuck so I had time to plan out my next bit or bits. I had to look at my cheat sheet once, which bugs me, because I didn't need it in Mason City. Admittedly, I was really nervous tonight. After my set, JD asked that I clean up my set a bit (The "bloody mess" line that I closed on got a pretty big groan) for the holidays. I think he was talking about that, as the pornographic material I did was pretty well received.

After the show, JD took us out to Pitches, a restaurant that stays open for him on Thursdays. He fed all the comics (steak and shrimp) and the food was amazing. I didn't finish my steak (I was unable to last time here also) but I got a doggie bag and it will make for a great lunch tomorrow. It's 12:45am and I'm going to bed. I will cut and paste this in tomorrow.Check out my MySpace blog for jokes on which I'm working.

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Professionally unkempt

Last night was the show at Lloyd and Harry's. I worked blue and basically just tried out a bunch of new stuff. I did a couple faux shots with Clayton (his were fully loaded) and got at least one person to wonder if I was off the wagon. I hung out for a bit afterwards (I was pretty late as the workshop ran long), but Clayton understood. I'm trying to rework my old spanish idea and have to write 60 to 80 lines of dialouge to find 5 good ones (that's my final goal). As soon as I am done with my bread bowl from Panera, I'll get on that. I'm also working on what I call a "pro homo" joke; where I almost-defend homosexuals. It's really a joke about coming out, but I lampoon the outcome enough where I hopefully won't offend anyone. I've run it by a couple friends of mine (who are gay) and they're alright with the idea so far. Hopefully it'll turn into something instead of just falling flat.

Check out my MySpace blog for jokes on which I'm working.

Visit RooftopComedy.com. Watch videos. Laugh. Feel warm and fuzzy.

Less ups than downs

Last night I went over to Fairview to catch Andy Woodhull and Rahn Ramey in action. I was kind of hoping to get a spot light or emcee the show; but Anthony said Dave would prefer to keep that kind of stuff limited to Wednesdays, Thursdays and Sundays. The audience during the first show was pretty stingy with their chuckles, and before the show, some guy asked if he could propose to his girlfriend on stage. The club staff didn't want to let it happen, but they eventually agreed to it. When it came time, Rahn called the guy on stage and the guy proposed to a dude named Mike. He said that they met in the army, and I was kind of impressed, doing that in public. Then it turned out that Mike wasn't gay and it was abig hoax. Some sort of initiation, another audience member said. Needless to say, Rahn wasn't happy about it. Between shows, Anthony said that I could emcee that one, and Chad Huff showed up and Rahn had him to a guest spot. My set could have been better, but I got through it ok and I feel I did a good job on the announcements when it was time to do them, especially since no one told me what to say; I heard Andy do them first show (because he had to do that since it was a 2 man show) so I knew what comics to plug and the website/comment cards are a given. But then I also had to do the Kilo Diabetes Foundation announcement, which I usually stumble over. I did it last night though and did well enough that I'm not beating myself up over it...
Anyway, that was last night, it was fun and i got to work with Andy and Rahn.

One thing I remembered last night was: the last time I worked in Fairview was with Andy and Rahn. So last night was like a small reunion tour.

Check out my MySpace blog for jokes on which I'm working.


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50% off.

I didn’t have a chance to get on the internet after work last night so I didn’t have a chance to write about Wednesday’s Improv Jam at Laughs on the Landing. Like last week, there were way more improvers than audience members, but we had more improvers so I didn’t have to participate as much. I’m really enjoying the improve, I just don’t want to “hog the stage” and since I’m not as polished as some of the others, I don’t want to annoy people by throwing them off. Mikey Manker showed up a bit of the way through, and during a couple of exercises/games he would pull me on stage; which circumvented the me-hogging-the-stage theory.
Last night I was at Laughs again, for their open mic. I went up about 9th, and the audience wasn’t real pumped up. Mikey and Kevin went before me and had good sets though, so that helped me out considerably, especially since I was trying a bunch of new stuff. The audience was pretty responsive to my set; I opened up talking about the Christmas party at my new job, and how we were allowed to drink on the clock for about five hours. I told the story about how a booker thought I was black (because of my name) and the story about me getting “cigarette-raped”. I really wanted to work on my Disney stuff, so I did my skiing material (and since it was cold, it kind of fit it) to serve as a lead-in. The blind-skier joke got an almost-applause-break. I say almost because it wasn’t during one of my “final” punch lines, it was right after I said “the next thing you know, I’m going down hill, with no one around, yelling out ‘DARIN! THIS ISN’T FUNNY ANYMORE”. I just thought of the “this isn’t funny anymore” line on stage last night. I like it and I think I’ll keep it. Sadly I didn’t get the set on video or voice-recorder. I thought about taking my camera, but didn’t want to mess around with it. I wish I would have because I like to know how I did some of the new jokes/bits.

Check out my MySpace blog for jokes on which I'm working.

Visit RooftopComedy.com. Watch videos. Laugh. Feel warm and fuzzy.

My car didn't blow up on the way!

I got a call Friday to feature Saturday at Mason City Limits in Illinois. The club's run by Chris Spreyrer, a comic I've worked with before, and I've been up there a couple times. It's a sweet room, a little small, but comfortable, even with smaller audiences. I was working with Greg Lausch, and the first show we had consisted of 6 people. But they laughed like 8 people, so it was fun. Greg and I swapped stories, and he beat me saying he once performed for a married couple, whereas my smallest audience was 4 at the Red Sea on the St. Louis Loop. The second show saturday, I did 20 minutes to an audience of about 80 people. The show went really well and afterwards, Greg said that my blind skier joke was written perfectly. Compliments are always really motivating, but compliments from headliners are in a class of their own, needless to say I was pretty happy. We stayed up until about 3 at the apartment above the club with Chris and Ryan (the bartender/jack of all trades (who made me a dvd of when I featured for Henry Phillips)). It was a good time, and they booked me to come back in February. I'm pretty excited, and really want to get another 3 or so minutes before then...

Check out my MySpace blog for jokes on which I'm working.

Visit RooftopComedy.com. Watch videos. Laugh. Feel warm and fuzzy.