I faced what all comics face at one time or another in their career, the bad show. I have seen my favorite comics in the world bomb, Brian Reagan in front of fifteen hundred people in Montreal, Rob Schneider melted down in the best room in the west at the Tempe Improv, and Mitch Hedberg who I miss and adore walked more people than the japanese on the Bataan trail.(wicked reference)
And now me... Although not as good a comic as them I stunk it up the other night in Birmingham. Wow, I was off key, I was fighting a flu bug from which I have now been in bed for three days fighting, but really is that an excuse for just missing the beats? I watched the first two acts do fantastic, and really the only thing I had to do to even coast out the show was to be likeable, but somehow couldn't even pull that off, it was like losing all your feathers midflight.
Here I analyze it step by step.
Pre-show;
I feel pretty out of it, I just finished an eight hour drive, and had two hours of sleep. I feel crappy, but I've done shows where I feel crappy before and pulled it off. The other two comics are distinctly unwelcoming(something that always fucks with my head) but they exchange the limited greetings and such. They both seem to have way more energy than I can muster.. First bad sign...The next bad sign is the big one that says the date... cinquo de Mayo... Which loosely translated means 'hack premise', and also wow the crowd is gonna be drinking hard, not always a bad thing though...
Show Time;
Show starts and I go to the back of the club to watch the first act, he is very good, I like his presence a lot, but the sound is really weird, either my ears are plugged or it seems really hard to hear his words... Plus he is a real baritone so maybe it's the range I let it go, looks like a fun crowd.
The second act is a waifish guy with a really funny accent even though he's from Maryland. It's a super high pitched nasal twang- That seems to resonate around the microphone, but the sound still seems bad, weird maybe it's my ears? He does about five topics a minute in his comedy stylings, with a real "one of us" southern take on things, and he kills. Strong act, crowd seems happy. I put on a suit jacket... (mistake!), I grab a coffee to walk out on stage with(mistake!). So The MC announces me, and I walk out on stage, it's pretty loud before I get to the mic, lots of talking but that's ok they're having a good time. I start into my opener and the sound fluctuates on the mic or the monitor and I get that distinct feeling that my mic is dead, I pause and ask if the sound went out but nobody really answers... (not good! Losing momentum)... I drop character(horrible mistake, cause now I just completely changed my accent to Canadian for no good reason) and I push through my opener, which gets a good laugh, but certainly not the cannon ball it always delivers. I get set to roll that into my opening three, but a drunk girl is standing at my feet on the stage, she is really hot in a short dress, and she is tapping on the stage with something, not easy to ignore... I address her politely as possible and find out what she wants, seems she found a ring in the bathroom and is trying to give it to me... I take the ring and miss about twenty five jokes(cause I'm sick! And the sudafed slowed my brain!) about being proposed to right out of the gate.... Anyways I continue, and before I even get started into my first joke another girl yells from the back of the room that the ring is hers and she walks down(count out thirty five seconds) to get it... All this has taken up the entire opening "Trust building" three minutes of ones routine.
It is the most dangerous part of an act to fuck with because it's when a comic establishes the trust with the audience that he is funny. If you effectively establish that trust in the first three minutes, the crowd will give you leeway to set up longer jokes, and be interested in your character throughout the show. Without that trust... You are pretty fucked. You have to shorten your jokes to get to the funny faster, you need to oversell the story you have to tell to get them to vest in your character, it truly sucks for the rest of the show.
It's like having someone you already know is good at fixing your car, fix it again, you don't worry about it, you don't second guess him, you don't ask for the parts back to inspect, but if it's someone new all things are suspect... That is why it is sooo important to be funny out of the gate, that is why being heckled out of the gate can be devastating if you are not quick, or spectacular if you are quick.
So the show continues, I start to vest myself into character jokes, but I find myself parsing bits to get to the biggest payoffs faster than I should have. In a clearer mind I might have gone quieter for a minute and faced the fear of the crowd early to manipulate their attention back on me, but then that other big risk is if a crowd is too drunk they can't follow that path. SO Maybe I did what I should have? That will be something I will wonder about. The crowd was very ethnically divided. The right side of the room was white and young, the left side was older and black. While the older black side was quieter (both in talking and in laughing) they seemed far more distant, which makes sense as black crowds tend to judge a comic in the first minute of their act(see any black comedy show...You hit it hard out of the gate to command attention, Norm McDonald, Mitch Hedberg, Jerry Seinfeld... Not big bang openers, not real popular in black clubs...) I felt bad about this, as I really enjoy diverse crowds, and I hated losing that part of the room so fast. Now the ultra drunk white kids were no picnic either, they shouted out stuff all night... But I couldn't hear a damn word they said! Now I think that's when it started to dawn on me, that maybe, just maybe it's my ears and not the room that the problem is with, as I think I couldn't hear do to the fact that my throat was infected... But that doesn't help when your only reply to shouts is, "what?" " I'm sorry I couldn't hear that?" ...Funny so far huh?
Jesus, it was a nightmare, I actually had some ok laughs in the first ten to fifteen minutes, but only with the right side of the room. Then about twenty minutes in a huge table of about twenty black patrons got up and left... Damn.. You couldn't ignore that... Even though I tried my hardest, my heart freakin sank. They just left. The room saw it, I saw it, oh and I'm pretty sure management saw it... Wow, this is not good Pete, mayday mayday...
Go blue my brain said... Blue fixes everything...
Hmmm. What a dilemma, but they did seam rowdy, so I started into some of my bluer material, and it did work great with one section, about fifty people loved it, and they of course were the hard drinkers in the crowd, and somewhat rowdier portion, but knowing I had them did help, cause at least somebody liked me, but this was a bad error on another level, cause it alienated most of the older white crowd, and the rest of the black audience, and guess what? It walked them.
It was the longest forty five minutes of my life. I saw the light, and I couldn't end quickly enough. I probably walked 45 people. I mean some people liked me, but by no means as much as they liked the other acts. I painted on the biggest smile I could, and tried to end professionally thanked them for coming down, and said goodnight.
There is a horrible empty feeling when you bomb. Sometimes you really have to taste the blood to realize it. Your ego and self esteem battle tooth and nail with each other, tryin to tell placating lies that friends would say... like, It wasn't so bad.. and maybe you didn't hear it right, or you're being to hard on yourself...
But sometimes all the negative voices are right. And boy is that a tough and scary moment. When you are afraid to leave the green room, when you can't make eye contact with the staff or the guy paying you. When words are short and everybody needs to do something right away, which is funny cause when you kill, they all have time to hang out.
You are never more alone, and there is no-one to blame but yourself, and you rack your brain trying to reassemble the crash, where, why, when, how... it just kills you.
Sitting sick in that hotel room, which I didn't deserve, I did everything I could to keep from breaking down. I called my ex. She talked me through it, pretty good. It's hard to remember the thousands of good shows, when you just finished the worst. But she took me on a walk of my accomplishments, and reminded me that I am funny, but like every human being alive, somedays you just fail. And as a comic, you can't call in sick. You can't get a temp agency to cover for you, you just gotta try and get the job done, sometimes it works, but this time it didn't.
I decided to drive all the way home the next day. 8 hrs. I was gonna stop and do shows in Atlanta and Raleigh but I felt too sick. I got an email while I was driving, from the booker. It was my worst fear, it asked "What Happened?" with five question marks, and the email contained a clip from the club that said I sucked and walked the crowd.
I just started working for this booker, and from all accounts he is a great guy. I was so scared he was gonna cancel all my work with him, but I didn't pass the buck, I told him it was my fault, and why. I hope that my reputation can hold me up, but I also have to accept the fact that there is little I can do. And just look forward and learn as much from it as possible, and also to remember, but not dwell. That is a big one. Remember but not dwell. Remember that it happened, remember that it felt horrible, but don't ever let it cloud future shows, don't let it win when defining yourself as a comic. I think maybe surviving a horrible bomb is what defines certain level of success in comedy.
Had Norm, or Mitch or Brian let their bombs win, they would never be who they are. And it is amazing, cause they were devastating shows, but they still knew they were better than the individual performance, they were on the whole amazing, and could not be defined so simply.
Anyways I would love to hear any thoughts on this from either comics, or audience members. Feel free to email me at blog@petejohansson.com .
