Don't Wear Shorts on Stage

At the end of every Saturday night, whether a club does one, two, or three shows, the staff sits around and talks.  Before a showroom is seated and the staff is setting everything up, they talk.  During smoke breaks, slow nights, or drinks at a bar after work, the staff talks.  Big clubs, small clubs, everyone on a comedy club staff is connected and talks.  If they drink after work, they talk even more.  The point is, they all share a same set of ears so if you have something negative to say, don’t.  Sure, there are a few clubs that have a higher turnover than others, but the ones I work the most have the same staff every time.  They become family and when you visit you’re merely like a cousin they see once or twice a year.

Comedy clubs make a majority of their money from the bar.  The bartender has to be one of the most trusted employees at the club.  Sometimes it can even be the general manager or owner of the club behind the bar working.  Where do open mic comics do most of their bitching? (other than Facebook) …With a drink in front of them at the bar.  Sometimes they’re not even bitching about the politics of the club.  Sometimes its just badmouthing someone else or talking delusional BS.  “Yeah, I killed it that set.  The new stuff is working.”  No, no you didn’t, no it isn’t.  Stop talking.

This week’s advice is simply watch what you say and how you carry yourself while at the comedy club.  It’s a very small world and famous or not, no one is more than two or three degrees away from the top comics in the business.  You might badmouth a headliner who hasn’t worked that club in two years.  If he or she comes back, word will still reach him or her.  I used to be a young doorman, I knew how to stir shit up and I wasn’t alone.  I still remember which comics we liked and hated back in 2001.  Bartenders have great memories too.  Some of them have unbelievable abilities to rattle off what each headliner likes to drink whenever they’re working that week.  And if they can remember drinks, of course they’re going to remember the conversations they’re in or overhear.  (It doesn’t help that you talk three times louder after one Bud Light.)

To sum it up, whether you’re talking to the box office, a waitress, a doorman, or even a regular bar fly who seems to be there every week, you may as well be talking face to face with the booker because word always gets back.

To counter all this negativity, there are plenty of things you can do (obviously tipping is one), to make yourself come off more professionally and avoid unnecessary politics.  Read about those in my book, Don’t Wear Shorts on Stage.

We all have our sensitive spots that we don’t think are funny, and almost 100% of the time the people making the joke have no idea of our background or life story, so they don’t know they’ve struck a nerve.  As comics, we have thicker skin (we’re supposed to at least), so we don’t take a specific type of material personally.  For example, at open mic, we make plenty of racial cracks at our black peers because we know they understand the context (and we’re jerks).  We wouldn’t dare make these jokes to a non-comic.

Audience members don’t always understand this when they’re at the comedy club.  I heard that once someone in the crowd tried to go after Heywood Banks (one of the more innocent headliners of all time), because he did a joke about a train hitting someone.  The enraged audience member had lost someone in a train accident and snapped.  When I was a doorman, we had to calm an ex-Marine down (he actually left the showroom in tears) because he associated a joke about the Persian Gulf with his buddy who died over there.  Sometimes a comic will make a wheelchair joke with someone in a wheelchair at the show.  These are tough to pull off.  Mark Lundholm does and actually explains this phenomenon about over-sensitivity in his act.  He talks about a hypothetical situation of someone getting upset about a joke involving a bag of Cheetos because they had a traumatic experience due to Cheetos.  He said we all have our own “bag of Cheetos.”  Audience members do, comics need to outgrow them and pretty much never be offended by anything in the context of our art form.

It takes maturity.  (Downer time, sorry!)  I lost my mother in ’93, but do you think I’ve heard “Your Mom” jokes aimed at me?  Of course.  Sure, it’s easy to shut that person up, tell them she passed away when I was 15 and make them feel “this big” (and don’t think I haven’t), but now that I’ve outgrown stage three anger, I don’t even bother explaining.  (It also helps to be 35 and not hang out in a peer group who resorts to mom jokes, but you get the point).

So here’s this week’s ladvice:  1.  If you’re a comic, you don’t get to be offended by material anymore.  Most of what’s “offensive” is becoming hacky anyway (We get it, Catholic priests molested children).

2.  Before you do a one-nighter, it’s a good idea to feel out anything that might be taboo ahead of time.  If the bar owner is gay, adjust accordingly.  If it’s a benefit show, BE SURE you don’t do anything remotely near the cause of the need for the benefit.  If it’s a fund raiser for someone with cancer, you don’t get to do an AIDS joke because those are two different things (let’s just blanket this and say you should drop all of your terminal illness material).  I recently did a show that was a fund-raiser for a burn victim.  I did a quick mental audit of my setlist to make sure I didn’t have even a pun that could be misinterpreted.  It’s also important to find the racial makeup of a crowd.  In Don’t Wear Shorts on Stage I explain how crowds react to jokes involving race depending on how many black people are in the crowd from all-white crowds to all-black crowds and everything in between.

Notice I said one-nighters for this rule.  The reason being, in these smaller towns, everyone knows everyone and they often think alike and sympathize with each other.  In a comedy club you have a bunch of strangers with different beliefs and backgournds so if you offend a few, all is not lost.  In my book I also mention the time Harland Williams did a 9/11 joke a month after it happened and somehow survived.

Sometimes a brief chat with the guy in charge at the gig and a visual scan of the audience can open your eyes so you can make the proper adjustments to your setlist.

One last disclaimer:  This week’s advice is for the guys who haven’t been doing this for decades.  I know pros can sometimes perform without censoring themselves but most of us can’t.  If you get a chance, ask them about a time they said the wrong thing at the wrong time.  A lot of us have at least one story where this advice would’ve helped.

I was reflecting back on the end of my 20s when I had to decide whether to rent a new apartment in St. Louis, or move back to my Dad’s house just before my 30th birthday.  I had less than $1500 to my name, no health insurance, obviously no retirement fund, and a 2003 Ford Escort with over 100,000 miles on it.  My comedy calendar was fairly empty with the exception of a few $100 gigs and a couple of MC weeks here and there.  What was the excuse for a valedictorian with a college degree to be in this situation?  My so-called comedy career.  I’ll get famous some day and get some break where I can finally live up to my potential.  It won’t happen this year, but look at me everyone, I’m living my dream. I don’t think I was alone in this attitude or way of life, but I figured I can help prevent others from falling into it.  

I’m a pretty healthy guy, but any sort of health problem could’ve destroyed my career.  You need health insurance.  Essig sent me an article about a musician who had this problem (read that article here).  To be able to become a professional comic you have to have enough money to get places in a car that works.  Medical bills aren’t an option.  

Want to know what else you can’t have without at least a little money and sense of responsibility?  A healthy relationship with anyone over the age of 25 (if they’re younger, you can assume it won’t be healthy anyway).  You’ll eventually want one of those too, I promise.

I hear young comics all the time swear that comedy is the most important thing to them and that they’ll sacrifice their life and everyone in it to be a touring comic, but I feel that they don’t know what they’re signing up for.  The bigger problem is that a lot of them never get to that full-time touring status yet they’ve still sacrificed any sense of normalcy.  Your 20s are the time where you need to put at least one professional thing on your resumé.  If you’re approaching your late 20s and don’t have a resumé, you’d better be pretty damn funny.

I’m not trying to sound like your dad, but on the last page of my book I had a comic explain it to me.  ”Make something of your life.  Do something meaningful.  Think about the next few decades,” he said.  

It’s fine if you have the drive to do this full-time–if you’re willing to make the sacrifice and make it your career.  A career takes over 40 hours a week of hard work.  I was never able to put 40 hours a week into comedy.  I just couldn’t get myself to (sitting in a condo on the road is not work).  If you’re the same way, you’re wasting very important years.  Don’t be the guy who wakes up at 40 and has the same financial worth as the 21-year-old comic who just scored an MC week you’ve been struggling to get for over a decade.  If you’re not building a solid comedy career yet, start building your backup plan in the form of a different profession so that you can afford to keep “chasing your dream” down the road when you grow into a better comic.  Trust me…you’re going to need that health insurance too.

Sometimes I get calls from people who have never put on a comedy show who want to hire me for a gig.  The thing that surprises them most is when I tell them that the show shouldn’t go over 90 minutes.  No matter how great a crowd is, they start to tire (or get too drunk) at the hour and half point.  Yes, there are exceptions.  I’ve heard Bill Cosby does two-hour sets.  Well, he’s funnier and does stories that work well enough.

Ninety-minute shows aren’t always possible, especially for open mic night.  If you can, experiment from week to week at early and late spots in the show.  Ask whoever runs it if you can go earlier or later if you’re in good standing with them.  (That’s a big if)  At some bars, the crowd tires, at others it fills up.

So this week’s tip, if you’re planning a show, try to keep it at ninety minutes.  If you’re planning an open mic, two hours is probably unavoidable, but if you can trim it down, please do.  Or put the comics who still need to pay their dues at the end after the two-hour mark.  If you want to up your game, take on the challenge of going later in the show.  (I will be doing this more often in the summer when I’m not getting up at 6:00 a.m. to teach the chil’ren all day.)

**If you’re want to give a few guys some longer sets, try this:  Keep the comics at 5 minutes or less when you have a dozen on the list.  I know the math calculates that at 12*5 = only one hour, but then you have time for an MC to warm the crowd up and then let a couple of comics do closer to ten minutes at the end of the show.  (Having a longer set in the middle of an open mic by a strong comic can drain the crowd’s energy.)

I know there are a lot of comics who want to try a ten minute set so gauge how well an MC set would go.  The thing is, most guys in their first two years waste a minute or two with useless/wordy setups.  Knowing you only have five minutes will shave your jokes and make you funnier than having a few throw-away jokes for a seven-ten minute set.  The audience will stay more attentive as well.

For more tips on everything comedy, read Don’t Wear Shorts on Stage.

There aren’t as many clubs that do a three-show Saturday anymore, but in case you encounter one, there are a few adjustments to make.  Last night at the St. Louis Funnybone we had two packed shows leading up to midnight.  With around 65 people who were much younger and drunker than the first two crowds, I made the mistake of not changing my pace.  The midnight show has somewhat of a false reputation as being some wild and crazy drunk-fest, but actually the bigger challenge is keeping them lively and laughing.  The MC actually has an advantage but must know how to handle certain situations that occasionally pop up during these late shifts.  Read about those in Don’t Wear Shorts on Stage.  For this entry, I wanted to acknowledge what I did wrong with my pacing last night .  My good friend, the very funny Frankie Chubb and I both admitted we went about our sets the wrong way.  I adjusted only my setlist to some jokes I hadn’t done in the first two shows just to avoid boredom.  Honestly, the reason I hadn’t done those jokes all night is because they aren’t as good.  So the first mistake was putting my interests before the crowd’s.  I also got off on a bad start trying to shush some people stage left.  The woman looked like the lead singer of The Pretenders (A younger blonde version of Chrissie Hynde), but the youngn’s didn’t get my reference…maybe I was wrong, either way, I wasn’t funny.  From that I hurried into my material while feeling the void of the big crowds from the first two shows.  It’s hard to gauge how well a joke is doing in front of 65 people who are mostly out of it, but you have to lower the bar and be patient.  Silence isn’t good, but it’s inevitable while you take a breath between bits (keep it short).  Continue to give off the vibe of confidence and they’ll come around.  Understand that you’re not going to get them into that rolling rhythm you establish in most shows.  It can happen, but it’s tougher by quarter till one in the morning.

Never give up on the set just because it isn’t going well.  It’s like sports in that even when you’re losing by a lot you can still put in a good 4th quarter.  Years ago I bombed for four minutes at a guest set in Little Rock.  My closer worked and after the show I still had a lot of compliments about my set.  A crowd’s memory can be brief and sometimes it just takes one good joke to catch momentum.

So going into a midnight show, be sure to do the following:

1.  If you’re going to adjust your setlist, be sure you know exactly which jokes you’re adjusting.

2.  Be patient yet still energetic.  Silence will happen between jokes, just don’t let it happen during them.

3.  Be careful with crowdwork.  As a non-headliner you shouldn’t be doing much at all, but if there’s a show during the week that will have some, this will be it.  This is especially true for the MC as he or she establishes the tone of the show.

4.  Get to that first punchline before gambling on anything off the top of your head if you can.  Premeditate something that comes off like improv.

5.  Limit your commentary on a joke’s performance.  This is a very bad habit of mine in shows like last night.

It’s impossible to tell how a crowd will be just by looking at them.  I’ve been fooled both ways many times, so don’t assume anything just because it’s the late show.  The more people there the more normal it will be, but most of the time expect crowds well under 100.  And I’m not saying Frankie and I bombed last night.  People laughed, it just wasn’t to the same level as the first two shows.  Still, it’s important to learn from the set.

Well–I’m off to do the Sunday night show which is usually pleasant even with low numbers.  There’s more about Sunday crowds in my book as well.