I did a spot at Sam Rhodes’ Comedy Explosion at the Rocksteady in Dalston this week. To be honest, I’m stressed out of my nut with work at the moment and not focusing much on standup, but I’d booked the gig and didn’t want to bale on it. As it happened it was qute nice to get to the gig early, grab a burger and pint, and spend some time decompressing in peace and quiet before the gig.
I chatted with the other acts as they started showing up – although apart from Sam and Tom Goodhead (who I’d met at a previous gig) I didn’t really know too many of the other acts. It was a fairly quiet night to begin with, and by the time it was my turn to go up at the start of the third section, it was even quieter.
I wasn’t too worried about this – Sam did his best to squeeze some energy out of the depleted room, and the mood was good. Sometimes you have to remind yourself it’s just an open mic night, not every set has to kill, and it’s fine to just get up and dick about for five minutes.
I started off by riffing on some stuff that Sam had been talking about – it wasn’t particularly funny, but it got me into a conversational vibe, which set the tone for the rest of my set. I launched into my usual material, but at a more relaxed pace – having a couple of beers in me meant that I kind of meandered a bit too, which was a mixed blessing.
On the one hand I waffled a lot and added too much fat into bits that are usually tight, but the upside was that I stumbled into one or two laughs that I wasn’t expected. For example, I have a joke about putting my kids on a vegan diet which is punchy and works pretty well, but after I did it I started rambling about how vegan jokes are getting pretty hacky. I don’t know why I did it, other than just being a bit drunk and undiscplined, and most of it was pointless time-wasting, but one thing I said got a good laugh, so I’ve written that into the bit as a tag.
Most of my usual stuff got as much of a laugh as could be expected under the circumstances, but one newish bit that I’ve been trying out landed really well and I had to wait for the room to stop laughing before I could carry on. It’s a joke I posted on Twitter a couple of weeks ago, that I didn’t think would work particularly well as a standup bit, but a few people liked it so I tried it out on stage a few times and it’s worked well on every occasion.
So in the end it turned out to be a good night – I chilled out and stopped thinking about work for the evening, and just relaxing and messing about a bit helped improve some of my material. I should do that a bit more; instead of treating every gig as though it has to be a strong performance, just have some fun and not worry about fucking up.
No gigs next week because of work, but after that things should calm down again and I can focus more on comedy.