After trying out some new material at Lion’s Den last week, and it going reasonably well for a first pass, I wanted to use two gigs this week to tighten it up a little. Last night I performed at Rising Star in Holborn – things did not go well.
Firstly, I still haven’t memorised this material, so I was using a set list and I couldn’t really deliver it with as much confidence as I’d like, so that didn’t help matters. The first couple of minutes went OKish, I was getting some laughs but a lot of the stuff that worked well last week just fell flat.
Then about halfway in I did a bit about race which got a big laugh at Lion’s Den but landed really badly with the Rising Stars audience, and that just killed the energy so that there was no coming back. The rest of my set was an uphill battle to win back any shred of respect from the audience but they were having none of it. A few titters here and there at best. I’ve got a saver that I use when a joke falls flat, which reliably gets a decent laugh, and I used that as my closing line to try and walk out of there with a little bit of dignity, but even that only got a half-hearted reaction from them.
I’m glad this happened because I think bombing is all part of a baby-comic’s development, so it’s good that I now know what it feels like to die on stage. It’s not the end of the world, you get off stage, watch the rest of the acts, then slink away home to regroup and get up again as soon as you can.
The worst bit, however, was that the MC felt the need to apologise to the audience for some of my material – I didn’t think it was too far over the line, but that made me think I’d badly misjudged my tone. I don’t know what to do with the set – I know that some bits work, some other bits work with different audiences, and some of it is massively fucking offensive to some people.
I’m up again tonight at The Cavendish, and I think I’ll resist the temptation to fall back on my polished, easy material, but I’m not doing the stuff from last night either. I’ve got some new material on safer topics, which I think I can deliver pretty well, so we’ll see how that goes. I don’t want to abandon the political stuff entirely, but I probably need to rethink a lot of it before doing it again.