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This thread was really hard to find, I've seen at least two closely related threads about standup, so if anyone sees any more, it might be helpful to refer them to this thread. I have also written a mighty wall of text, so if you're in a hurry, skip to the bottom where I uploaded a couple of my semi-recent open-mic sets. And if you're really in a hurry, you shouldn't in this thread at all. It would actually be very cool if everyone would start posting their sets and workshopping. == I would say that for comedians at all levels the best thing you can do is record yourself when you go up every time so you can find when the laughs are coming consistently. Making notes is good, and having a smartphone is really helpful, because you can write and also record on it. The other huge thing is don't steal jokes, ever. And if you and a famous comedian have an identical joke, you have to stop doing it unless you can document not on ly that you were doing it first, but that they saw you do it and stole it from you. Since that's not what happened, you probably won't be able to do it. There are only so many things that are funny and there's a lot of parallel thinking in comedy, but you're gonna look like you stole it--I don't scour the earth to make sure no one's done a joke about dicks before, but I have had someone tell me after a set that they've heard a bit similar to mine from someone really famous, and I looked into it and decided to stop doing my version because they were uncannily similar and there was no way to take in a different direction. Bits are important, but so is the energy in the venue. Every open mic venue is different every night, and sometimes you can go up with the best material in the world and deliver it flawlessly but you're still gonna bomb. This is because the audience can be horrible or simply non-existent, and other comics who have heard thousands hours of bad comedy are often not going to be listening at all. I have a few standby bits I use rarely that work pretty much every time, and if even those get a tepid response I just experiment and go out of my comfort zone since I'm already bombing. A good rule of thumb is to do a bit three times and if bombs all three times retire it or rework it. I often don't follow that rule because I get bored and want to try all new stuff every time, but my reputation suffers for it. When you get any kind of showcase or non-open mic gig, you should have a more or less decided setlist and polish every day you can until the show. Anyway, theory is good but practice is better, and the only real way to test material are live audiences. == These are two recent sets I did for audiences of less than a dozen people, but that's normal. It was the first time for almost all of the bits both times and they're really rough and loose, but that is what open mics are for, and there are a few things that were pure improv that I like and am going to do again in the future. I also say "like" far, far, too often and I'm working on being nervous in a different way, but only a few english majors have come down on me for it in the past. http://www.sendspace.com/file/pb7toz http://www.sendspace.com/file/qciei4 Anyway, these are a few examples of what you can get away with on open mic without any polish. And obviously, my ego would be curious to hear critiques and if anyone thought any my jokes that silently bombed for that crowd are actually funny.
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Dec 18, 2012 09:42
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I have a notebook where I write down all potential ideas, then the more refined stuff gets typed up more or less how I'd like to say it, then I email it to myself and make condensed version out of pretty much just key words to help me remember it. Then I look at the key words on my phone right before I go up and record my set, and then go back to my notes after to add/remove things based on the recording. Honestly though, standup comedy is the most free-form thing and everyone has their approach to how they like to organize their material, so as long as you're getting laughs, you're doing it right. I should clarify that the sets I posted are just audio--I like to have a video recording if I'm doing a showcase but for open mics audio is good enough, unless you feel like you need to work on your body language and physical comfort, of course. If people want to put stuff here I think that'd be great, but I'd say the bare minimum to be really helpful is an audio recording, even if it's just you in your room talking. Written and spoken comedy are two different animals and some of the funniest spoken jokes can fall flat when they're only written down.
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Dec 19, 2012 01:50
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Standup is kind of a solitary journey that many people don't find rewarding because the concrete circumstances are kinda ugly and repetitive. So I guess it's not too surprising this thread hasn't really taken off, but it's still a shame. Other than generic drunken redneck crowds and a couple of comic friends who have the same sense of humor as me, there's not a lot of opportunity to get people to listen to bounce ideas off, or just listen to my stuff and see if it's funny to strangers. Anyway, hopefully a few people got inspired to get started and are putting work in--reading and preparing are great, but at the end of the day either you go up or you don't.
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Dec 28, 2012 09:10
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Yeah, you have to post audio or video--no different from any music thread that requires the same. And the audio pretty much needs to be live to really judge it, but I suggested before that people could just record it in their room if they didn't have access to an actual club and we could listen to it. It's 2012, very easy to record audio and video, very easy to download it. I totally agree that text is very, vey limited, but I don't see why we're limited to just text in the thread. The redneck crowd is a bit specific at first but after a bit of trial and error it becomes really easy, because beer is cheap and they like to laugh: the number of times they've cracked up at just a facial expression or a non-laugh line has surprised me, and you can never predict or repeat it. And really, this is not exactly a public forum, nobody cares that much, and the same risk for having material exists when you perform it, which should be constantly. If some guy steals my bit in an open mic 1500 miles away from me, no matter how well it lands, he's not going to get a sitcom off it. Plus I got timestamps if it should ever come to that, which it never will, ever.
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Dec 28, 2012 18:05
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I also grew up in a midsized town without many cultural activities and the nearest comedy club was two hours away and only had one open mic night every other month and you had to pay 10 dollars to do it and be 21. And then I didn't live in an english speaking country...so yeah, I got into standup a bit late too. It's also good that you have a fanatical level of devotion to doing standup--your level of commitment is really great/extreme. What I'd recommend you look into are regional comedy festivals: a lot of them are springing up everywhere and they're 2-3 days long and the better ones give everyone multiple venues to perform in and more than one chance to go up. Plus, you get to meet lots of other people doing standup comedy and that's valuable for a lot of reasons. They're not like "elite" events by any means: usually you submit a headshot and a video of you doing a set and if you're not awful you're in somewhere at sometime. As for posting sets, go for it--I'll listen and let you know what I think. I posted a few of my sets on the last page, so if you want to return the favor that'd be great. Hopefully we can encourage other people to post too and this thread can be more active!
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Dec 30, 2012 20:47
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Howdy Dick Holdem! Thanks for the critique--I've been working on slowing down in general, but your advice to pause before punchlines is not something I've heard before and I'm definitely gonna try it, because I may be losing people unnecessarily. Your set was good, some of it was a bit too canadian/regional for me but the crowd seemed to respond pretty well to it, and you delivered it confidently, so that's great. I laughed several times, and I don't think you're hacky. You talked about a lot of shopworn comedy topics and did it with a somewhat familiar perspective, but that doesn't mean it's bad, since they laughed and I laughed too. Also, you are much smarter than me, soundcloud is pretty convenient. I haven't been as active recently as I'd like, but here's a set of mine that went decently but I haven't revised since, and now I'm trying to figure out how to reduce the weird and increase the funny, plus I need to finish the last bit which just goes on forever: https://soundcloud.com/dickovitch/midnight-set-at-carlitos-12-20 My own theory is that at the open mic level it's a fine balance between telling the kind of jokes you want to tell that are uniquely from your perspective and jokes that are filthy/universal/easier to convey. If you do all of the first type, it's harder to get the crowd on the same page as you and you'll have to straight up wiff and bomb a lot more. If you do all the second type, it devolves into gross-out humor and cliche and you usually can't hold a crowd for very long or be very memorable. The jokes about being hairy and seeing your dad naked are pretty classic and your delivery for it was dead on, but if you can more personal (not more gross, but more specific to you and bits about things that actually happened or are plausible) I think you'll get an even bigger laugh on the punchlines. Even if you live in a village of 1500, you may want to consider starting an open mic night at a local bar. I've had success in the past by talking with a manager and asking them what their slowest night is and doing open mics then on a trial basis. If you can bring out 4-6 friends/family members/co-workers to come and do five minutes, and put up some fliers and make a facebook event, that's enough. They don't care if the whole show is 30 minutes, they don't care if it's just your friends, they don't care if it's not funny, they don't give a gently caress about anything else if you can get people to show up and buy drinks at a time when normally the bar is always empty. If you can't make the trek anytime soon and you have some new material you want to get some feedback on, I'd be happy to listen to it, crowd or not, but it's definitely a different dynamic.
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Jan 4, 2013 07:43
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Did a set tonight, mostly new material, it all got a pretty good reaction from a pretty small crowd. Once again, I say like far, far far too much. The Alice Cooper bit in its raw form is 10 minutes long, but I chickened out and didn't do an entire Alice Cooper based set. I'm planning on going to another open mic on Thursday and I'll probably try to do a more polished version of many of these jokes, so you can hear my editing process and also (hopefully) hear how laugh lines can move around in unexpected ways. https://soundcloud.com/dickovitch/carlitos-1-8-13-standup-set
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Jan 9, 2013 10:39
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Question Mark Mound posted:Are any of the other posters/lurkers in this thread from Northern Ireland at all? I'm hoping sometime within a month or two to finally memorise a few of my bits and try to find a 5 minute open mic night somewhere handy, like in central Belfast. Don't set artificial barriers for yourself because they can become excuses all too easily. Of all the people that posted in here who are interested in amateur comedy, I think only one other person has posted a set. We're like a fitness thread where everybody's talking about lifting technique but nobody ever goes to the gym or posts their fitness log. It's not the best thing in the world, but even really good open micers may refer to written down stuff on occasion. When I'm doing new material sometimes I keep my setlist on my phone and I'll leave it on the stool next to me. That way if I just totally blank, I can make a joke about being unprofessional or something and glance at it real fast. Obviously you wouldn't do that in a showcase or a paid gig, but those are very different from open mic nights. People shouldn't feel like an open-mic is a miniature version of a showcase, almost none of the same "rules" apply. Over-editing and over-memorizing can actually hurt your material and growth. When you have a good crowd reaction from a phrasing or ad lib you stumbled upon by accident, you're going to want to be able to plagiarize from yourself and consciously get that good reaction in the future. If you stick to the script, (or have a script at all) you can lose that advantage.
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Jan 9, 2013 21:49
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Logistics are a problem and I get it, but don't let fear hold you back at all! For real, there's absolutely no standard. If you have bits that you've worked on more than once for more than 5 minutes, you'll be in the top 50%. A big social tip I would give you is to not be visibly disgusted by how bad everyone else's set is. You don't have to force laughter, but you should listen politely. The golden rule of open-mic scenes is that you don't call people out for being crap, and it's the responsibility of the MC and the showcase bookers to talk to people about lifting material. Unless someone steals from you, just kinda take it in stride and make a mental note of it. The scary part of an open mic is usually not going up on stage and doing your set; instead, I find the biggest challenge comes from watching everyone else's set over and over again, even when it's the exact same unfunny five minutes three times a week for six months.
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Jan 11, 2013 00:52
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https://soundcloud.com/dickovitch/twisted-mikes-1-11-13 Set I did tonight, with about 40% of the same material as tuesday's. It's a nice example of how not studying the actual laugh lines on the first set made the second telling much worse because I focused too much on what I wrote originally and not on what people laughed at when I did it before. The crowd was a little less good and five of the six comics before me kinda sucked the life out of the room, but even if all things had been equal it's clearly an inferior set in large part because it's less compact, I wasted time for no reason, and I wasn't as enthusiastic about the older material. That said, it's not entirely a "what not to do" set. I could've easily eaten my balls completely but I managed to put in a decent set because I was unapologetic about my bits that bombed and I acknowledged/defended them in a way that didn't turn the crowd against me. A classic open-mic mistake is to ignore poor crowd reaction when the opening part of a bit falls flat and the tags can't save it--there's no reason to plow through when the crowd didn't find the initial premise funny, because you end up just digging yourself deeper in and making them less ready to listen to an unrelated bit that they might love. I'm doing a paid showcase in the next week or two and hopefully it will go well enough that anyone who's interested will be able to see the structural/philosophical differences between a showcase and an open mic. Basically I'll be corralling all my most reliable old bits into a single show and then building bridges between them, making a set order makes sense, culling weak tags, and doing my best to use the most reliable phrasing,tone, and body language for punchlines that have been temperamental in the past.
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Jan 11, 2013 07:43
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Dr. Magnificent posted:So glad to have stumbled upon this thread. I've been doing stand up for almost 2 years in Philadelphia. I haven't been doing it as much as I'd like lately because I've been getting more into sketch comedy stuff, but I'm hoping to start getting on stage again more regularly. I thought you put in a pretty drat good set here, generous amount of bridges, fairly polished, a reasonable number of tags, and your closer is hilarious because you took it in a really silly direction that was unanticipated. How much of that is finished material and how much of it was new/you're still working on? Either way, you seem really comfortable and natural with all of it and you made sure the crowd kept up with your pace. Has anyone here done any festivals recently/ever? I've applied to a few and got into one already, but I'm not sure what to expect and what the whole vibe is: I assume everyone does their most prepared/best material, but I'd also really like a chance to workshop with a lot of comics from different places on bits I've been working on for awhile but have never gotten quite right. I'd be interested in hearing about anyone's experiences.
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Jan 13, 2013 07:34
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Thanks for the sharing about your festival experience! I'm doing the Cape Fear Comedy Festival and I'm in the middle of applying to a few others, but probably the biggest one I'm applying for is the Bridgetown comedy festival. As far as I can tell being admitted into the festival can be a little bit random, and there are two schools of thought for the application. The first is to do a hyper-polished "tight five" video of your safest/easiest material and load up the crowd with friendlies to make sure everything lands. But since everybody does that and everyone knows that everybody else does that, I don't know how much you stand out when you do that. What I've tried is more naturalistic videos of me at open mics doing old and new material, ad-lib and improv, light crowd work, and my/crowd reactions to bits that just totally bombed. It's too soon to t ell if that'll pay off, but I feel more comfortable doing it that way. Dr Magnificent, I thought your newest material was your strongest, maybe just because that's how it worked out or maybe because you were more enthusiastic about it since it's new. Either way, you're a strong writer and have really smooth delivery considering it's new.
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Jan 15, 2013 00:09
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Zero Star posted:Both. This will be my first time on stage doing stand-up. Greek Tragedy posted:I am totally encouraging of comics, so please do not take this in the sort of assholish way it it will likely appear without tone of voice, but how did you get booked to do a show without ever having been on stage doing stand up? This is a totally fair question. It's very unusual to get paid without having ever done any open mics before, and if you want to go well I agree that you're going to need as much stage time as humanly possible. Workshopping with people you know and writing alone are absolutely not enough/ The only real test is the stage and the crowd. If you can go to 2 or more open mics every week you might be able to carve out a tight 5-10 minutes of reliable bits. If it's more than that you're gonna need to be quick on your feet and do crowdwork or something, because I can't imagine grinding out 20 minutes of tested, tagged, and reliable new showcase level material in less than two months, especially not as a new comic. Anyway, you better get started, so good luck and get going!
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Jan 17, 2013 05:12
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I've set aside about 100 bucks to apply for various festivals and then if I get in I'll figure out how to get there. My local scene is pretty hot right now (5 open mics a week in a city of 150,000) and about a half dozen local comics are doing the same thing. The guys out here are crazy dedicated and I know if more than one us gets in anywhere we'll roadtrip it. The main thing about standup that I've found that's unexpected is that lots and lots of advance planning is key, because places are up for whatever as long as it's far enough in the future. Some people here who went to a really far away festival submitted early and then used the time in between being accepted and the date of the festival to set up a four day miniature tour at clubs and bars at places along the way, which was a great way to offset travel expenses and work on their set a little more! I've got a set I'm working on that's been crushing fairly hard in the first half but the second half needs work. As soon as I get it worked out (or replace it with more reliable material) I'll record the video and submit to the world series of comedy. It's 50 bucks, but a few of my friends live in one of the Satellite cities that's not too far from me. Otherwise, I'm not sure I'd do it: their past winners seem kinda mediocre from a cursory glance. Smerdyakov fucked around with this message at 07:41 on Jan 17, 2013 |
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Jan 17, 2013 07:33
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If you're doing a 5 minute set with a signup, no pressure then, just enjoy! Write it out, practice it, edit it, and remember not to speak too fast! If you practice in the mirror twice and spend an hour writing and editing, you will not be the worst one, even if it's your first time. As for the comedy world series, what it comes down to is if I have enough money: if the choice is between it and two regional festivals, I'm going to pick the two regional ones, but of course I would like to do as much comedy as possible. Smerdyakov fucked around with this message at 20:23 on Jan 17, 2013 |
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Jan 17, 2013 20:20
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Greek Tragedy posted:Just submitted my applications to Cape Fear and Bridgetown festivals. We'll see what happens! Awesome Opossum! I managed to get some more funds for festival submissions, and I'm using a 5 minutes and 55 second version of this video as my submission: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z0Hrhg3KS9k A few festivals have indicated that they'll watch multiple videos if they're on the fence about you, so I'm trying to have a couple more videos floating around as well. Anyway, good luck to you!
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Jan 26, 2013 12:53
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Hey, I enjoyed your set but it's a little bit inside baseball--it's nice to be known by some/most of the crowd, and it's definitely nice to have a more friendly and comedy-aware audience to play with, but it can be a self-limiting style. You have good delivery and are comfortable on stage, but you may have difficulty winning over a cold crowd or being the opener. Maybe those are skills you're already confident about, but I find those to be the biggest sticking points. The sets I usually end up being most proud of are when I can put in a mediocre-to-good performance on a night where everyone else is bombing. Of course the high-energy sets with crowd buy-in are the most fun (and you definitely need them for festival submissions and video resume stuff!) but when everything's working, it's hard to see where the problems are. But yeah, nicely done!
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Apr 25, 2013 18:51
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E the Shaggy posted:So I released my first album, now up on iTunes and Amazon: "That's What You Get For Being Different" I've been thinking about doing an album pretty soon but I know a bunch of guys who have done it and they've all reported pretty rough numbers. It's definitely an accomplishment to have an album's worth of polished material out there, but the online market for comedy seems pretty cutthroat. The local scene godfather here has done 2 albums and just gives them away for free because he doesn't want to go head to head with famous comics filmed specials that are at the same price point. I wonder if he's right though, because if there's a local fanbase I can definitely see it working out, but this is all theory on my part--What's your experience been like for sales/promotion on your album, if you don't mind me asking?
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Jun 9, 2013 02:58
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That's actually really cool and I hadn't thought about it that way--it's definitely an advantage to be able to have something you can always plug after you have a good set, regardless of the size of the crowd, open mic or paid show, whatever. What was the lag time between submitting it on amazon/itunes, and are there any hidden costs or difficulties involved with that, or was it pretty smooth?
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Jun 12, 2013 00:10
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XIII posted:There's also a bar about 10min away that host a weekly open mic, but I think it's primarily music. I'm going to look into it and see about getting up in front of their crowd as well The most important piece of advice I got about doing comedy at an open mic that's mostly/all music is to keep it short and make sure everything is snappy--you may be able to close with a bit that requires longer setup, but if you don't make some people laugh within the first 30 seconds, you're kinda screwed. Even if they give you more time, do a tight five minutes. If you don't have a tight 5, do a tight 3. A music open mic isn't a good place to ruminate and work out tags, it's a place to cut the fat and sharpen up your jokes as well as get a sense for what kind of crowds are at the venue and what kind of material they want to hear.
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Jun 19, 2013 18:43
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Ccs posted:This may not be the place to ask this, but what's the deal with Patrice O'Neal being considering a "comedian's comedian". I think you're simplifying his comedy some and should give him another try, or at least point out some specific bits you didn't like and why. I think Patrice O'neal was probably one of the greatest comics of all time, and I don't think he ever implied anything like what you got out of it. Because he did comedy without disclaimers and without making the jokes "safe", he left things with room for interpretation. If that was your interpretation, that speaks to what you saw in it, but in fairness he never said that. I think a lot of the biggest comics were really into him because even as you're going "oh my god, that's horrible" as he says something really out there, there's always deep logic to it. Even if you disagreed with something he said, he could always back up what he was saying and argue his position to an infinite degree because he really believed it--there's was no persona, no difference between him on and off stage. To do a style of comedy that offends people and is so different from most people's values yet be completely honest and unapologetic takes a special kind of integrity. I think it's pretty incredible to have a guy at that level never disavowing what he said or hiding behind the classic dodge of "it's just a joke, I don't really believe what I'm saying." That said, he probably was an rear end in a top hat, but who cares now? So were Picasso, Richard Pryor, Nabokov, etc.
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Jul 15, 2013 06:22
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Question Mark Mound posted:Unfortunately "supportive" isn't a word I'd use about most of my friends with regards to me trying comedy, so I don't think that'd work. In my experience, a good "storytelling" approach works approximately the same as the "lots of jokes" approach in terms of the overall number of potential laugh lines. Even if they don't all land, there should be a punchline of some kind planned every 15-30 seconds or you're going to lose people. A nice experiment is to try reducing all your bits into one or two line form and then try them out. If you're having trouble doing that, the bits themselves might need work. People see famous comics and forget that they can get away with fewer hard punchlines because they already have credibility and a fan-base, whereas open micers have to be really compact. That said, another way to get a bit tightened up is to do it more loose a bunch of different ways at open mics and figure out what's working and what's not, then cut the fat. Seconding what everyone else said, it's vital you record your set somehow. If you're already committed to comedy, not having a lot of friends watch you perform can actually be a big advantage--comedy is the art of making strangers invested in what you're saying, and a crowd with lots of friends/family can be way too forgiving, which leads to nasty surprises when crowds don't have that bringer element.
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Sep 1, 2013 05:04
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E the Shaggy posted:2 mics a night is too little if you're trying to make a career of it, go to as many as you can possibly handle. LA has numerous mics, many of which though won't let you just walk in, you'll need to get in touch with whoever is running it and then you'll be given a spot maybe a few weeks down the road if you're lucky. This is a giant "it depends" actually. I'll take 7-10 minutes with an actual crowd 4 times a week over an infinite number of 3-5 minute sets at shows with crowds that are always 90% comics. Of course neither are ideal, but having done standup in SF and Seattle, the crowds and stage time were actually way less than in some smaller cities, with a lot more transit and far fewer opportunities for hosting or doing a feature set. LA and NYC are kinda the only two cities if you've been working for a few years and have your solid hour and/or cleanish 15-20, but if you're just starting out, don't be afraid to go to smaller places--you can get more meaningful stage time in places where the competition is less cut-throat. An almost totally empty bar with nothing but sullen comics in LA is still an empty bar with no crowd, and 50 people crammed into a bar that obviously used to be a Pizza Hut is still a real crowd, even if it's in a town no one's ever heard of.
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Sep 22, 2013 02:15
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Secretserviced posted:Twitter stuff If you find twitter a useful way to jot down joke ideas, then I'd say go for it, but don't expect it to be anything beyond on that. With a tiny number of exceptions, twitter is for amplifying the presence you already have rather than a way to raise your profile. Abitha Denton posted:Here's a question for experienced folks, I'm trying to get a venue for a regular open mic, ideally at a bar. I don't know if I should go to the bars I'm considering in person during the day, or e-mail first, or call, or what. No idea how bars decide what they want to host or even how to present my concept - the only show I've organized was at a theater. Does anyone (FactsAreUseless) have any pointers for making a good pitch?
Here are two promos for shows that I did, and they've really helped whenever I'm trying to get a show someplace new: http://vimeo.com/63740009 http://vimeo.com/68047875
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Nov 8, 2013 20:10
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Evil Sagan posted:How often do you repeat your own material? Like, if you went to four different places on four different nights in the same month, would you tell mostly the same jokes? Or would you, heaven help me, come up with a new 15-30 minutes of funny every week? Seconding what freud mayweather said: you have to do a bit dozens of times to really finesse it and then once it's polished you're going to want to do it all the time for years, but sometimes it can be helpful to space it out. If you go to open mics and the audience is literally all comics or friends of comics that come out every week (this happens more often than anyone would care to admit), you're not going to get much out of trying out a new tag on a bit they've all heard a dozen times over the last three months of open mics and shows, and you might as well try all new material or just riff. With a fresh crowd at an open-mic you attend regularly, a good ratio is somewhere around 70% old stuff, 30% new stuff. Strong polished bits up top, new stuff in the middle, then finish strong with something polished.
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Jun 2, 2014 05:21
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freud mayweather posted:you're being a real weirdo about beards. dan st germain has a big beard and he's blowing up. sean donnelly, mike lawrence, literally a ton of guys who are climbing the ladder right now. I opened for Dan St. Germain in a mid-sized southern town about a year ago and it seems like in the public's mind he looks too much like Galfinakas, even though their acts are pretty different. There are lots of other great guys with beards like Sean Patton, Derek Sheen, Dave Stone etc. but they're definitely struggling to market themselves, as evidenced by the fact that they come through my town every six to nine months to perform in front of 25-30 people. Hell, sometimes I don't even remember which bit goes with which of them, and I've seen them all live/opened for them/am facebook friends with them. It's definitely possible to be "good" but not "distinctive" and a lot of guys at the lower levels of barely-paid work hit a brick wall for reasons almost completely unrelated to their material. http://connectedcomedy.com/gabriel-iglesias-interview/ Comedy is comedy, but once you get past the open micer level marketing is as important as the act. I don't think Gabriel Iglesias is funny at all, (AT ALL!) but he is proof that if you work hard and market yourself well, the material doesn't matter much. If people don't really know what to expect from you that's bad news, even if you're an indie-artiste comic or whatever.
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Sep 1, 2014 20:45
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Yes, but on the jumper with her face on it her hair isn't tied back, so... 
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Sep 5, 2014 02:04
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Sataere posted:Even though this thread is mostly dead, I'll try another question. How long do you feel you have to use "topical" material? What is a good shelf-life? Good topical material can be used as lead in or else endlessly retrofitted and made into a proper bit. Bad topical material has a shelf life of a few weeks and is usually low-hanging fruit everyone else has already gotten to, or else it's too much work to put into a topic that's going to feel stale in a month. It's usually better not to not even go down that road while you're still trying to find your voice. This is especially true at the open mic level, because the comic not doing topical material usually stands out more than all the guys who don't really have anything to say. It's fine if it falls in your lap or you want a cheap "pop" to get a crowd on board with your act, but if you're not working towards crafting pieces that can fit together to make a lasting 15+ minute set, it's even more of a waste of time than being an open-micer is already.
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Sep 25, 2014 03:20
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Sataere posted:It makes me sad that this thread isn't more active. Are there just not a lot of guys out there doing open mics? The best and worst thing about standup is that no one can really tell you what to do or what will work. What might be good advice for one comic in one scene might be terrible advice somewhere else. Some comics work on their material obsessively and write and refine it and just because they work hard that doesn't mean they're funny, while other people literally just go on stage wasted and say whatever they're feeling and it's hilarious. Some rooms will die laughing if you work clean but shut down if they hear any swearing or mean-funny, and other rooms require 3 solid minutes of dick jokes up front or they tune you out, etc. The only consistent advice is to record yourself as often as you can so that you can review your material later and be more objective about what's working and what's not.
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Sep 25, 2014 09:03
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Keven. Just. Keven posted:Hey quick question, if this thread is active: Does anyone know some good open mics in NYC? I've been to a few at some of the bigger name clubs and they felt pretty dire to me. I need to become a working comic asap. Thank you for your assistance. I've done some mics up in NYC as well as a bullshit showcase because I've got a friend up there who's been in the scene for about two years. NYC mics are structured much like Dante's Inferno: there are 9 entire circles and 8 of them are horrible and one of them is sort of ok. You will start out at the very bottom of the 9th circle and it will take months and months of solid performances before the first non-90% other comics audience will see your act. Hanging out and making connections with other comics is more important than getting "maximum stage time" because most of the stage time is pretty much worthless. Seriously, don't try to "hit 5 mics in one night" because all you're going to get for racing across the city is five garbage spots in five empty rooms. Check out badslava and pick out a random half-dozen mics based on what's most convenient for you, then ask the comics there what the best rooms (that you can actually go up in) are. The good and the bad rooms change so often that any recommendations that are more than a few months old aren't likely to be of much use. You will get better stage time by having a decent act and being cool with other comics. Of the two, being cool with other comics is way more important. There's no reliable way to know who is going to finally get their poo poo together and start a really good room, who will get passed by a comedy club to MC and be able to sneak you on a showcase you have no business being on, or who will land a sitcom role and be able to get you a paid-extra role. If you're starting now, you will not be a working comic in the next 12-24 months. It has never happened. The only possible exception is Pauly Shore, and his mother owned The Comedy Store.
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Oct 8, 2014 03:56
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Sataere posted:Ha, I have the opposite problem. I think my material is fantastic, I have too many ideas and everything I try results in abject failure. A friend of mine gave me good advice once: he said "Don't try to be the Louie CK of open micers." It's good to always be writing and most old material just sounds stale after a few years, but don't skip the polishing step. If there's no one but comics in the room and they've all seen your act a dozen times, do some new stuff, try some riffs, whatever. But if there's any non-comic crowd at all, practice your best material. I used to not do my best stuff because I wouldn't want to risk my ego or second guess my showcase material. That's stupid though, because even the best bit falls flat sometimes for reasons you can't control, and the more polished it is the more likely you can kill hard with it in good rooms and not totally bomb in bad rooms. This thread is always gonna be kind of low-key, but it's cool that you're going up a lot and I'd encourage you to keep posting in this thead, it's not that active otherwise. I'm very rusty and haven't had time to go up in awhile, but I'm going to try to hit a few mics next week and I'll post the audio.
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Oct 25, 2014 09:47
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Sataere posted:So how long before I stop saying stupid poo poo like "um" and "you know" repeatedly during my sets? I am not aware I am doing it and it is driving me nuts when I listen to recordings of myself. The answer is never, sort of--even the most perfectly edited standup special from a pro comic that's done the material a hundred times before has some uhhs and ums and likes in there. The thing I found is that I was beating myself up for not eliminating all verbal tics instead of trying to figure out what was causing them in the first place. Finding a good natural speaking rhythm that incorporates a normal amount of them into your tone makes them less frequent and less noticeable. Also, if you have your setlist for that night memorized and you're confident in your material, you won't try to needlessly tag lines with "you know" and the ums will be a lot less frequent. If it's new material, I wouldn't worry about the verbal tics too much unless it's so bad it's hurting your set. For myself, I find that when I'm saying "you know" and "here's the thing" and other nonsense phrases like that, it's a sign that my setup is too long/confusing and I need to either make it shorter or find a way to put some quick jokes in it. Your experience may vary, though: if you want to post audio from a recent set, other people might have some insights too.
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Nov 5, 2014 02:58
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Sataere posted:So I did a set on Saturday and I walked away from it feeling confused. I was bringing out a new set, went up and I felt like I absolutely crushed it. My last couple of trips onstage, I've felt like I'm doing a much better job of sounding like me onstage. I've had this confirmed by some friends, so I think that is definitely a positive. There are two things to watch out for. The first mistake is made by comics who almost always think they "killed" even when the recordings reveals crickets throughout. The second mistake is to compare yourself in absolute rather than relative terms, ie, comparing your reaction at an open-mic hellroom to Louie CK's last special. It's good that you're using the recordings to be more objective, but don't beat yourself up with them or second guess yourself too hard, trust your initial feeling. If your set was a 4 and everyone else's set was a 2, that means you're improving and you did some things right, even if the recording doesn't sound like much. A useful thing to do is to record the set of the person who goes on before and after you to get a feel for the baseline crowd level, assuming they're not incredibly funny/unfunny.
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Dec 23, 2014 23:19
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