Frustrations of a Beginning Comedian

Yesterday, I received a call from a beginning comedian who I saw perform at a comedy class graduation show. She was stressed, "I did my first show at an open mic and it didn't go that well. I'm supposed to do one this week and I'm thinking of canceling. I don't feel good. What happened?" She proceeded to talk about how she actually caught a cold after the performance and questioned her ability. I thought about what I should say to her to calm her down or ease her frustration. At the risk of sounding off with a petty and unoriginal cliché I said: "Everything you're experiencing is normal." So much for originality, right?

It's very common to have a great show at a graduation performance of a comedy class and then not have a great one at a regular open mic. At a graduation show, everyone in attendance is aware that the comedians are all new and, therefore the audience is incredibly supportive. All the comedians are fresh, eager and excited about their first show and the audience feels that. It becomes a mutually generated energy between comedian and audience, audience and comedian. The goodwill from both sides turns into a wonderfully supportive environment where new, mediocre comedians will get laughs and new comedians who are above average will get laughter, cheers and applause. Most humor is the shattering of predictability, expectation or assumption. An audience's expectations of new comedians is very low, so if they perform anywhere above that level, the expectation was shattered. Therefore the audience response is going to be very favorable. On the opposite end, if the audience expected Dave Chappelle and they got a line-up of new comedy students, the reaction would be completely different.

In your graduation show, your first joke out of the shoot works and you get laughs. It loosens you up and you're in the moment. You're instincts are alive and you can feel every impulse and every instinct. You feel free to quip off script. You can hear the voices saying the lines a split second before the words come out of your mouth. You can hear the inflection and feel the emotion. You're alive and you know it's going well. You can actually feel that you're in the 'groove'. Joke number one: Laughs. Joke two: more laughs. Joke three: laughs and applause. You close the set; applause. You're on top of the world!

Then comes the open mic...One of the most difficult transitions a new comedian can make is going from the very supportive graduation show to the vapid, sometimes hostile open mic. It's very different from the graduation show and few teachers of comedy have experienced performing at one of these, let alone sat as an audience member. I've been there performing many, many times and continue to go back, because the experience is worth it. Being able to stay in your game despite the distractions will make you a better comedian; stronger, more focused and faster on your feet.

Tiger Woods is without exception the world's greatest golfer. When he was just a boy learning golf his father, Earl Woods, would barrage Tiger with verbal distractions and annoyances, sometimes demeaning him, while Tiger was trying to play. The purpose was to force Tiger to sharpen his focus so that soon those distractions and annoyances were mere sounds that barely existed outside Tiger's world of concentration. Now, nobody who watches Tiger play could even imagine anything taking Tiger out of his focus or out of his game.