It's days like today that I hope noone reads my (this) blog. I write about shows here so I can remember what I've gone through, but also to get through that stuff in the first place, and what I don't want/need is people saying, This dude whines too much. In any case, my set tonight was far beyond sub-par in my opinion, partially due to the following factors:
I'm trying to quit smoking (AGAIN), and I may be a little of edge because of it. I didn't smoke Monday or today; and yesterday was easy enough because I wasn't around anyone who smokes, but tonight I was at the club, so though I didn't consciously want to smoke, the urge in the back of my brain may have affected my mood.
I went to Star Bucks to write today and tried flushing out some modifications on my Mia Wallace joke and my Sams club joke, since there isn't really a way to do BOTH jokes in one four minute set, so I wasn't sure what I wanted to do during the show. I go on stage a lot of times without knowing exactly what I am going to do, but I usually have a general idea, and in the rare cases where I completely wing it, it's usually during a set where I have more than four minutes. Tonight I had no clue at all.
The first joke out of my mouth was the one about me getting fired in August. Now before I got fired, I posted a joke on my Myspace about me asking for a trophy for the mistake I made, and when I picked up my final paycheck, my boss referenced it, and I genuinely felt bad. Maybe two months later, when I had finally written a joke about my getting terminated (a joke that neither mentions his name nor the company's name) I told him about it, as I was proud that I could take something as negative as loosing a job and make light of it. He told me that he didn't want to hear the joke, and that I should never do the joke in his presence. Since he was there tonight, though not directly in the audience, I know I did not deliver the joke with the same amount of confidence as I normally do, and since it was my first joke, it was a bad start.I looked bad to the audience.
That part and this next part kind of segue into each other. Since I take myself seriously as a comedian I live in constant fear of pissing off the comedy clubs in town. If I bite the hand that feeds me, so to speak, and cut myself off from being able to perform at open mics, how can I get better? I'd have to move cities, obviously, which does not seem fun to me. I've seen what happens (or doesn't happen, I should say) to guys who only perform at one club regularly, they simply don't progress as quickly as the guys who jump around (I feel), and though it might sound kind of arrogant, especially in the middle of a performance slump like this, I think I'm progressing quickly and headed in the right direction. This "segue" was longer than I expected, and rightfully deserves its own paragraph, which is weird because I don't know how to start the next paragraph...
Again, without sounding tooarrogant or pretentious, I consider myself above crap in your pants jokes. Jokes where the humor is entirely based on one crapping their pants or simply the result of that belong solely on the playgrounds of the youth of America. That is my opinion, that no educated adult would laugh at the paraphrased song "if you're happy and you know it crap your pants. My problem, which I am positive is completely psychological, is this; how can an audience who laughs at the crap-your-pants-aren't-prostate-exams-wacky guy be anywhere near able to laugh at the mundane goings-on in my like such as getting fired from a job, loosing my virginity to a married woman who then solicited me to murder her husband?
Lastly, and thus has almost nothing to do with anything stated previously; I am sick of people asking how I'm doing. Bad, I'm doing bad. I haven't had a job in three months, my rear defrost in my car doesn't work, and I can barely force myself to sleep less than 10 hours a day. But I'm not allowed to say that, I have to say "good" or "staying out of trouble" or something cutesy and clever like that. It's not that I don't appreciate the general interest of the asker, it's that I can't bare to lie to another person, but if I tell that person that my life's not exactly where I want it, the way I want to, I'm going to freak them out a bit because chances are, we aren't close enough to be that candid.
I sincerely hope no one reads this, or at the very least they don't mention it to me personally.
Check out my MySpace blog for jokes on which I'm working.
Visit RooftopComedy.com. Watch videos. Laugh. Feel warm and fuzzy.
Thunderhorse