Kownsulling

After my gig in Tewkesbury tonight, a young man came up to me and said, "I just wanted to say thanks - my Gran died last night, and it was nice to be able to laugh about it." I didn't know what to say to that, but this sort of thing is happening more often now. If it's not someone saying something about a bereavement, it's someone saying something about a relative with a degenerative disease. I just mumble something in embarrassed response, and hope that doesn't seem like I'm being aloof. Maybe I should consider how to deal with it in the future.

Anyway, the gig was okay. It was certainly my best performance in a while - it was nice that the weather was much cooler, and an audience arrived ready to be entertained. One annoying woman kept "whispering" in her friend's ear, though she was too drunk to realise she was being very loud and very disruptive, but nothing too bad. I just need more gigs really.

It's Too Hot For Comedy

The World Cup has started, the weather is nice and the days are getting longer. None of these things are conducive to comedy - as evidenced by the paltry crowd that wandered into Jesters last night. Hardly anyone came along, and quite frankly, I don't blame them. Sitting upstairs in the sweltering heat waiting to go on made me less inclined to be there, so who knows what was going through their heads.

I did a job. Nothing spectacular, nothing awful, not the best gig I've done there, nor the worse. Um, what did I learn? I didn't sell my opening with enough conviction, I think partly because confidence is an inverse square of the amount of gigs you have done in any given short space of time. Or is it a square? I dunno really. Either way, I took my time bringing them onside, and the whole set suffered as a result. Mr Duncan Oakley said nice things about my stuff, and was bewildered why it didn't get more than it did. But I'm not, I just didn't sell it to them quick enough.

And more of this twaddle can be found on MySpace.

F.A.T.T.S

I've just proved to myself, once and for all, that when I have a bad gig, it's always MY fault. That may contradict some of my earlier posts, but I can't remember what I've been writing. It's a notion I should know, and never forget. Here's how it is:

(Hee hee, that's a vague Firefly reference, and it amuses me)

Anyway. The gig was in Cheltenham, which is nice because it's fairly nearby, and means a short enough drive. The venue was bloody awful - completely inconducive to comedy. Three storey high ceilings, no lighting, free to get in, no advertising and the acoustics of a leisure centre. It didn't help that the compere kept shouting at people (who hadn't been there for comedy anyway) to shut up. The first act struggled very much. Then the compere convinced everyone to go upstairs in the break, to a smaller room, with better acoustics - and they all did. Every one of them. With a smile on their faces.

Then, when the comedy resumed, with the microphone still screaming huge howls of feedback, a now mic-free compere managed to whip them up into a gleeful frenzy. After all of that, they were completely up for some comedy. I went on, and made my mistake. I was cheeky and happy - which got a nice response, and some laughs from off the cuff introductory banter. But it meant that I had to keep up this tone all the way through my material - and my material at the moment doesn't suit that kind of tone. I was too wary of changing it too, so the stuff went vaguely okay, but would have been better had I been strong enough to correct my mistake. I was not.

I'm keeping a different blog here now as well.