I was back at We Are Funny Project in Dalston last night and, while it was a little quieter than it has been recently, the room was still buzzy with plenty of audience and a good atmosphere.
I’ve been at WAF quite a lot recently so I had a bit of a dilemma about what material to do. On the one hand I’ve got a few competitions coming in April and I want to hone my best five minute set ahead of that, but I feel bad about constantly doing the same material at the same gig.
So I’ve been compromising with myself and throwing a minute of two of new material into each set, alongside the tested stuff I’m trying to practice. This time I dusted off a few old bits about porn that I first tried about a year ago and quickly abandoned because a) they were only getting a mediocre response and, b) pretty much every open mic act does porn jokes and it just felt a bit hack.
I’m not sure what made me want to try this stuff again – I suppose I wanted to put some different material into my set but haven’t done much writing recently, so it seemed like an easy solution.
Things have calmed down again at work , so I’m feeling a lot more at ease than I have been for the past couple of months, and was really up for the gig. I forgot to find out where I was in the running order and normally that would put me a little on edge but this night I didn’t really care, I just relaxed and made a conscious effort to be in the moment, soaking up what was happening at the gig rather than staying in my own head.
As it turned out I got called up to close the first half, which caught me on the back foot a little because by that point I’d assumed I was in the second half, but I was in the mood to just roll with it. My set was sloppy because I’ve not been focused on comedy recently, so I waffled a bit too much and my delivery wasn’t as tight as it has been. All the same, it went well enough. Most of my punchlines landed and because I’d been paying attention to the other acts I was able to bounce off some of the things they’d said earlier.
But the really interesting thing was that the old porn material worked really well and got me my two biggest laughs of the night, even though it was very rough because I haven’t used that stuff for ages. I think just having a bit more confidence and stage presence than I did a year ago made a world of difference, and a better developed instinct for how to tell the joke helped. It’s probably worth digging through some more old, abandoned material to see if I can breathe new life into any of it.
All in all I felt good about the set. More than anything else it was just fun to do, compared to recent gigs that have felt like hard work because of all the other stuff I’ve had going on.
I bumped into a few acts I know, Steph Aritone, Vitaly Filipsky, and Nick Everritt, who all smashed it. The second half of the show was run by a guest MC who had been through one of the WAFP MCing courses, a guy called Simon Whitaker who did a top job and had some great material.
I don’t have anything booked for next week, but it’s the Comedy Store King Gong show on Monday so I might go along to that and see if I can get one of the audience-volunteer spots.
Gig Count: 80