I’m going to copy from my blog but switch some things around.
I think that everyone, in their life, has a few moments of absolutely transcendent triumph or joy. For me… and feel free to think these things are silly… I’ve had three of those up until February 13, 2011, one of which is too personal to mention here, but the others were the birth of my daughter and my crushing victory in my high school public speaking competition in 1990 (I can do that speech right now, if asked.) Those moments are few and far between, obviously, but they’re the moments when you just absolutely freaking OWN the moment, when you think “this is what the hero in a movie feels like.”
Yesterday was Moment 4.
We drew lots to decide what order we’d go in; I was #5, an auspicious number since the Small One is 5, but then I’d have found a reason any number was auspicious. Two hundred audience members sat there waiting to be made to laugh, and 188 of them didn’t know me and so I wasn’t getting sympathy laughs from them. I was nervous. I was nervous for everyone else.
Things started off well. In fact, the four comics before me all did the best performances they’d done yet… better than any practice run. That was inspiring. The advice we’d been given to use the nervous energy, to sell the jokes hard, seemed to be working.
Now, some history. I am a damned good public speaker. I didn’t win that speaking competition by accident; I like public speaking. My philosophy on public speaking has always been twofold; one, if you know what you’re supposed to say beforehand you practice and practice and practice until you have it so memorized you could never forget it, and then you practice some more so you have it down BEYOND memorization. Two, just think in terms of narrative structure; if you have a thesis to prove or a story to tell, even if you forget your place or have to speaking extemporaneously, you’ll end up sounding logical, more or less. So I had written my routine to be an actual narrative (I am, in other words, a storyteller comic; some comics, like Steven Wright or the late Mitch Hedberg, are one-liner comics, and have no narrative theme at all; they must have been born with memory of a supercomputer) and I had practiced, and practiced, and practiced, and practiced some more. So my advantage, the thing I knew I could get right, was my presentation. That I can do. But would the material be funny? Or, for that matter, would I panic and blow it?
Standing there waiting to be called while Hayley (comic #4) finished her act, there was no more time to worry. The nervousness subsided. There was no time to be nervous I’d forget something, to worry that the audience wouldn’t like me because I don’t look friendly (I AM friendly; I just don’t look it), no time to worry that I don’t tell any sex jokes where everyone else does. I thought, “Well, I can’t have tried harder. Here goes.”
Ted, the professional comic who taught the class and was MCing the show, called me up, saying the intro I’d written for him. I made the walk, shook his hand. I stepped up on stage and looked out into blackness; you can see nothing except the people sitting right at the stage, the stage lights, and the clock. You’re speaking into an inky darkness and have to pretend you’re looking around the making eye contact. I took the mic, said the opening line I’d planned – “My God, what a good looking audience you are…” and began.
I nailed it. Absolutely dead-on nailed it. Perfect.
Of the 200 times I’ve run through this routine I have never done it better, not even close. The audience did not make it harder; the audience made it easier. WAY easier. They laughed and laughed and laughed some more. I was absolutely slaying the set, and I got better as I went. The fear left; confidence and power filled me as the audience broke up again and again. I was flushed with courage. Ted had said this would happen but feeling it happen was something else. Around mid-set I told a joke I’d added just a few weeks before, which I wasn’t sure about but everyone in the class said it was great, and it destroyed the audience. It was a BIG laugh. So in a moment of inspiration, not wanting to lose the chance I’d been offered, I threw on a tag that I had come up with just days before, and it killed, too. I flew through the set. My planned narrative worked exactly as I had hoped, telling a story, expressing frustration, building up to the finish. When the warning light came on I was in perfect position and I wrapped up at 4:54, precisely six seconds less than the allotted five minutes. It’s a good thing it wasn’t six minutes because I had no moisture left in my mouth.
As he said he would do for all of us, Ted let me bask in the glow of applause and cheers for a few moments, then came up, gave me a hug and a warm congratulations I quite honestly cannot remember the wording of, and I walked off in triumph.
It was AWESOME.
I sat to watch the rest of the show, everyone in the class pounding me on the back and congratulating me. I don’t know how I compared to the other folks in the class and I don’t care. They were all good – every single person in the class put on their best performance at the show. Everyone got big laughs. They all reported the same feeling of elation and joy. The show was a smash success, and as much as standup is an individual thing, we’d worked together on our acts.
After the show there was a blur of family and friends and the other comics and THEIR families and friends and happiness and congratulations and your set was great and so on and so forth. I sat with friends in the Rose and Crown, desperately needing rest and at the same time so elated I can’t even explain it. I had nailed it. I killed. Those people laughed their asses off. Strangers came up to me afterwards to tell me what a great set it was. My jokes worked, and I worked the jokes to perfection.
(Actually, I did miss one small line. I carried on without it, exactly as I had been instructed, and as Ted had promised, it made no difference at all.)
Will I be on stage again? You bet your ass I’m gonna try. I’ll try to sneak on an amateur night, and I’ll definitely try to get at some open mics. And maybe I’ll succeed at those and maybe I won’t, but what’s for sure is I had a Moment. I’ll have that until the day I die.
When I get the video ina few weeks I’ll put it on Youtube.
The experience, in erms of moving forward, was amazing. The key thing is that it took place at an actual comedy club, so I now know the lay of the land, what it’s like to be up there, how my voice sounds in the mic, how to listen for laughter. One of the things that I noticed - and we’d been warned about this - is that the laughter can be a distraction, because the audence will often really go nuts over a joke you didn’t expect a huge laugh from and will just chuckle where you expected laughter. You can’t know for sure where you need a beat. You can’t step on laughter, but you have to get the set done, too. I was lucky in that the joke that they went bananas over to my surprise was the joke with a pre-planned tag, and the tag involved a physical movement before I said anything, signalling an impeding joke, so that was very lucky.
