Every group of friends always has the “funny one” in it. This person is usually loud, makes inappropriate comments and of course…is funny. Now this individual if actually funny has heard it from friends or whomever they perform their comedic role in front of at one time or another that they should be a comedian. This innocent comment may actually cause the person to think
“Gee you know what I fucking should, I’m the funniest fucker in my group and I basically can make anybody laugh their ass off like a stoner watching South Park!”
Well this individual may take this idea very serious and put together a routine, practice it, ask for feedback from his friends, and look for an open mic to perform his “God given” talent. Unfortunately what this amateur may find out is that it is not easy being a comedian and what’s funny to you and your retarded friends is not funny to the general public.
If your reading this and find yourself wondering “what the fuck does this guy know he’s made like three jokes in this thing and they all blow” well readers me and my friends have started down this path to becoming stand up comics and let me tell you it is not as easy as you would think. I do not claim to be a total expert on the subject in fact I may be the worst amateur amongst my friends but I felt like sharing my experience since it was a unique and still ongoing journey into the world of standup comedy.
It was this past semester of college when Blanka, Burgundy, and I decided that we wanted to try standup. I remember this idea coming up while we were all home for the winter and Blanka in his horrible Brazilian/Portuguese/”Americanized”/Mentally Challenged accent, kept egging me on to do two things. Match.com (don’t ask) and standup comedy along with him and Burgundy. I decided why not could be fun and a better form of procrastination than playing super smash brothers (best game ever by the way) all fucking day. So we decided (months later) to look for open mic spots, actually put together a routine, practice it, give each other feedback, and then finally perform at the open mic.
The three of us had very different ways of coming up with material. Burgundy was going to use stories he had created for his blog that he hadn’t posted yet along with other experiences he's had. Burgundy’s blog has been around for over a year now and it’s not solely the opinionated type of blog which I passionatley hate. What I believe separates his blog from the other pieces of unfiltered crap out there are his crazy, usually completely retarded and drunk stories about us, his friends.
So that was Burgundy’s well for material. Blanka on the other hand, had a notebook were the thoughts of his perverted mind were written. Don’t get me wrong I mean I may be top 10 horniest/perverted individuals at our school but Blanka takes the fucking cake. After living with him for one year the guy definitely rubbed off on me (figuratively and literally unfortunately) has he did to anybody who lived with him. I’d say if you’re in constant contact with Blanka for over a month you will start acting like him and always impersonating his horrendous accent. I would describe Blanka’s accent has a mix between a Latin pornstar, and that scumbag immigrant Oskar Kokoschka from Hey Arnold. The quality of a Blanka impersonated accent varies from person to person. Anyways Blanka’s arsenal of jokes was in the category of obscene and totally perverted.
My material was basically jokes I’ve made to my friends that they found funny, self deprecation which I’ve been told is my best stuff, and just observable humor. So that was the first part easy, done, and surprisingly simple. The next step was a little more challenging and that was putting together our routine. There are 3 aspects in my mind one must take into account when putting together a successful routine. One is the opener.
Like talking to girls an opener in a routine may be the head start to some action and results. Now I’m not saying if you have one good opening line you’re going to get laid automatically or in this case put on a killer set, but you will want to hit the audience with your best stuff in the beginning because once you get them cracking up from the start they're more likely to laugh at your later stuff. I always felt this worked better than saving your best stuff for the end and hope to get your big laughs then. On a side note I may be great with approaching girls and starting a conversation but I am no Mariano Rivera I cannot close for shit especially when I’m drunk but that’s a different story.
Anyway back to standup, the second important aspect to a routine is your transition. You don't need to perfectly transcend from one joke to another but I found that during my brief experience that if you’re able to transcend well, your flow will be better. For example you can’t just go from talking about a recent STD you acquired to why Europeans love soccer so much without noting that it is an extremely random transition. Believe it or not I took a history of hip-hop class at SUNY Albany and I remember one class where we compared rappers to standup comics. This actually strengthens my point because just like any singer or rapper needs to have a good flow within their songs so does a comedian throughout their routine.
The third important aspect of a standup routine is the ability to improv. Improv is one of my best talents, it has helped me half ass class speeches and presentations as well as stay out of jail. The ability to improv during your routine is invaluable when dealing with the unexpected. The unexpected includes forgetting what you were going to say, heckling, a unrelated outburst within the crowd or area, a bag of dicks being thrown at you (Louie C.K.* your the fucking man) or basically anything that may fuck with your performance. Ways to successfully improv include the ability to talk shit back, make up jokes on the spot, and just make timely funny comments. Preparing to deal with the unexpected and mastering or at least improving your improv ability comes from the next step of doing standup comedy, practice.
We all would usually practice at my place or downstairs where Blanka worked. Blanka “worked” in the gym his job was to sit on his immigrant ass and make sure nobody killed themselves witht he gym equipment while he was down there. Also he got to work out during his shift and check out the hot girls on the treadmills so yeah real backbreaking labor.
Anyways during our practices we would try to run through our routine, ask one another what we should get rid of, what we should add, how we should perform each part, and how long our routine lasted. Honestly this was the fun part because we felt like comedy writers sitting around pitching ideas and suggestions and just joking around with one another. That part motivated me to start taking this comedy thing more seriously because I mean think about it imagine getting payed to sit in a room with two of your close friends and talk about comedy all day long, what more could a guy want…well besides pussy and free taco bell for life.
After the three of us figured out the main outline of each of our routines we decided to find any open mic spots near campus. Fortunately the first one we found was on campus and was hosted by a school group called the sketchy characters. Now I need to state this, this group may have been the corniest/blatantly unfunny group of kids I’ve ever seen, like they were those geeky kids in high school who hung out together in the library laughing their asses off while they played world of war craft or some shit like that. But none the less they were nice kids and provided Blanka, Burgundy and myself a forum to test out our routine in front of a decent size crowd.
So after we sat through one of their open mic shows we decided no question we were going to go for it. We had about two weeks to practice our routine down to the point where we could recite it from memory. Balancing this with school work was tough but manageable also considering the fact that the three of us were fucking insomniacs the time of day really wasn’t a factor. Besides to us this was leisure not work so we were always down to practice.
Two weeks fly by and our debut night into standup comedy was about to begin. Long before the show began Blanka and Burgundy were freaking out. Burgundy especially, the guy over thinks every little part of his life to begin with so constantly analyzing the possible results from his act was driving him fucking crazy it honestly was getting on my nerves. Blanka was just nervous like anybody else would be which made me wonder why I wasn’t nervous. I had no reason to be calm I guess I was just tired from a rough week and looking forward to the weekend or something. I remember thinking “This isn’t going to be so bad I'll just ggo up there and have fun. Public speaking is my thing anyway and that’s basically what this is…right?”.
Well I was calm until we got to the place where the open mic was being held. I remember right after we signed up I started getting butterflies in my stomach, my mouth was dry, my heart was racing and I thought I was going to shit myself. Burgundy and I insisted that we rehearse one more time before the show started. We went upstairs to a private room went over our routines one more time and then headed back down for the show. I felt so much better after that last rehearsal. We were up at the end of the show and the anticipation of performing was starting to get to me. Besides I was the first one to go out of us three so I knew I had to man up and lead off with a bang.
I’ll never forget waiting for the dude before me to finish and it feeling like a fucking eternity. Three hours later the guy finished his act and I started to walk near the stage prepared to go on. Then finally I heard my name called out by the host and I walked on stage to begin my very first stand up act.
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