Every Tuesday night Sam Rhodes Comedy Explosion runs a bar show at the Lodge Tavern in Ealing – it’s set up in the corner of a public bar, but usually most of the people are there for the show so it feels like a dedicated comedy room even though it’s not really.
The venue puts some effort into promoting the show, so there’s usually a reasonable audience, although some nights are better than others. I was there this week and last, due to a booking error, but it wasn’t really a problem since there were only a couple of regulars who showed up on both nights and I did enough different material that they didn’t have to sit through an identical set from me the second time around.
I’m prepping for the Not So New Comedian of the Year competition, so on both nights I started with the same five minutes that I’m practising for my heat, and then did a different five minutes of new-ish stuff for each show.
The first show was the quieter of the two nights, with a scattering of couples and solo audience members, and one fairly boisterous table of about five friends who were just disruptive enough to make the night fun, but not so much that they completely derailed the acts.
Personally I prefer absolutely zero interaction from an audience because I’m just not good enough at crowd work to guarantee that I can always make it funny, but when it’s all fairly good natured like it was this time, I can cope with it. Generally it’s enough to just be friendly, acknowledge what they’ve said, and then push on quickly before your bit gets completely lost and the punchline flops.
I went on first, and my polished five minutes did OK, but the new stuff I tried was probably a bit too new – I’d thought it up the day before and hadn’t fully worked it out or memorised it very well, so I was delivering a half-written bit with very little confidence and it got a well-deserved fuck all from the audience. I’ve got a fairly strong closer for my tight-five, and I saved that for the end of the set instead of doing it with the rest of that material at the start, and that meant I at least finished on a decent laugh.
Also on the lineup was Callum Mackenzie, who I first met last year when he did my disastrous open mic a few times. I think he’s still relatively new to standup, but Callum’s got great energy and stage presence, along with plenty of decent material – he really wouldn’t look out of place in any pro-night, so don’t be surprised if he pops up at a gig near you in the future.
I went back again this week and it was much busier, with a few different groups and one particularly large bunch of young’ns who wandered in just before we got started. So right from the off there was a much livelier atmosphere, which always makes things easier, and the first few acts who went up all did a great job.
One of them was a visiting act from Sweden (although he’s actually Lithuanian) called Donatas Kvesely, who completely smashed, starting out with a lot of improvised material addressing some weird stuff about the venue, which went down really well. Out of all of us he easily got the most reaction from the audience, although Aussie transplant Katherine Dellar also did a stellar job.
I closed the show, and unfortunately the largest audience group didn’t come back for the second half, but there was still a reasonable audience and the vibe was good. Jamie Jackson went up before me, and although I also know him from my open mic, I’d forgotten just how similar our acts are – he touched on a lot of the same topics as I cover in my set.
It wasn’t too much of a problem because we’re not doing identical jokes, and I played off some of my bits as callbacks to things he’d talked about in his set. Again, I opened with my best five minutes, and in the second half of my set I did a longer bit vasectomies which I used to do back when I first got started but shelved once I wrote better material.
Recently I’ve reworked it and added more jokes, and it’s gone pretty well the last few times I’ve performed it so I think it’s a keeper, especially since there’s a bunch of stuff I can still add to it.
So the night was great and my set went well, I’m feeling good about the competition next week. I’ve got a 10 spot at We Are Funny Project the night before, so that will be my final opportunity to practise the set I want to use.
I’m looking forward to the competition, but also I’ll be happy to get it out of the way because I really want to focus on new material instead of doing my tight five every gig.