So tonight I was on the same bill as a famous comedian.
Regular readers will know that my general choice of gig usually includes at least two of the following elements:
- audience of less than 6 people
- audience casually eating food unaware of comedy happening, sometimes celebrating anniversaries
- compere’s begging people to not leave, or compere’s begging to leave
- eerie silence broken only by the clinking of glasses being collected and the coughs of an asthmatic in an adjoining room.
So imagine your surprise when I tell you that tonight I did a middle ten for 200ish people, in Stoke, who weren’t eating, had deliberately attended the gig and all had great lungs.
Of course you’re reading this wondering who the the famous comedian is, and I’ll come to that soon, the main point of this blog is to analyse how I did for future gigs. I’ve not been quite as nervous about a gig for a while, literally because it’s been a while since I did a gig. I was chatting to Colin Havey (always excellent) and he mentioned the challenges as a new act of getting gigs and it’s very true, there are so many brilliant acts out there, I could comfortably take 50 in my facebook friends list alone who are in the same boat and I regard as better than me.
I also have confidence issues in applying for gigs which doesn’t help, hence why I’ve not gigged for nearly 3 weeks. I listened to Desert Island Disks last week with Jimmy Carr and one thing struck me and rang incredibly true. He mentioned that he was never depressed but instead just quite sad. I can relate to that, I have periods where I feel just a bit sad and it’s a little crippling creatively. Usually it comes in batches of 4 weeks then starts to ease, where I need to cry occasionally and demand hugs indiscriminately (Louise bares the brunt of this). The area it hits most is my confidence to apply for things and also to write (although bizarrely not comedy songs which clearly sit in the non-emotional part of my head). I think how Jimmy described it, as feeling sad, rather than depressed, rings true too. It’s not that bad, it’s not a chemical imbalance or anything deep seated I think, it’s just, well, there and it happens.
Anyway, back to the gig. So I was nervous as shit. Made worse by the lack of recent gigging and the arrival of famous comedian about 2 minutes before I was due to go on. Then a curious thing happened – a sense of calm, of almost serenity – that moment where you know you can’t go back so, well, fuck it, you might as well try to enjoy it.
I opened with “now are you ready to rock”, counterbalancing it with a quiet, excessively polite opening that throws people quite nicely. It got a nice response but importantly I paused for laughs, took my time and slowed my speech to allow myself to ad-lib. Next up was beasteality which was an easy laugh. Finger up my Bum has turned into a sleeper hit that is my get out of jail card at the moment (a man came up to me afterwards and told me the “finger up bum” song was “class”). 70s TV star worked nicely as did the Wedding Song, and I tried a brand new song, about being 64 to close (I gave the audience the option and they chose it!) and it worked possibly better than my usual closer. I missed the 70s TV star reprive though which I was annoyed about.
What didn’t work? I lost the crowd with the racism song. I asked them to wave phones and lighters as I’d done at hot water comedy club and it distracted people too much with lots of people trying and failing to remember how the torches worked which you could tell from the murmuring in the room. It’s an odd song as I need it to change the tone but it needs phrasing better to make it punch in line with the rest of the set as it’s gone from being one of my strongest bits to one of the weakest in laugh terms.
I got a nice response for my set generally, still a bit annoyed about the middle where i lost 40% of people for a few minutes. The guy running the gig said I should ask the famous comedian for a quote as apparently he enjoyed my set. I feel a bit weird about that to be honest and felt very shy talking to them (although I had a massive sugar crash so was feeling a bit dizzy which didn’t help), it was more useful to know they enjoyed it. I’m always unsure when I see people put those quotes on their stuff – i mean sure they’re great, but there’s no sense of context – and yeah I give references for people I know in a day job context, but I’ve generally got a sense of whether they’re consistently good or whether they’ve fluked it because the MC was so good and the crowd was so nice.
Drove home listening to Richard Hawley, getting annoyed with the lack of drive thru KFC in East Cheshire and discovering that a 1999 Nissan Micra can bully me into pulling over to let them past on the A51. It was a gig I really needed I think and while I am my natural usual cynic, I think I did okay too. Which is nice.
And the comedian?
Tom Stade
(Click here if you’re not a comedy geek and need info)