A couple of months ago somebody posted on the Comedy Collective asking if anybody would be interested in an open mic in Horsham, East Sussex.
I didn’t know the guy, but I signed up for it because I live on the very southern border of London and it’s just as easy to get to Surrey and Sussex as it is to travel into central or north London, which is where I usually go for spots. Then I forgot all about it, until a week or so ago the organiser messaged me to say the gig was on and would I be OK to open with a ten-spot, since I was one of the more experienced acts in a lineup of eight.
I didn’t really know what to expect, but I turned up at the venue, a big upstairs room in a chain pub in Horsham and introduced myself to George Wright, the guy who organised the night. We got chatting and he told me that this was his first time hosting a night, and he’d previously done three open mic spots, so I immediately started wondering what I’d got myself into.
Everybody has to start somewhere, but MCing a night when you’ve got almost no experience is a pretty big leap. All the same, kudos to him for putting the gig together, and as it turned out a decent audience of about 40-50 people showed up to watch, which is way more than you could hope for at most of the open mic nights in London.
George kicked off the show, doing about 10-15 minutes at the start, and struggled to get much from the audience. There were a few niggling issues, like a lot of noise coming from the main bar area because there were no doors between us and them, and the PA system was a bit distorted, which meant that it was hard for the audience to hear everything unless you really made a point of being loud and clear.
So when I went on they weren’t exactly warmed up, but I cranked out ten minutes of my best tried and tested material, and despite being a little rusty most of it landed well enough, including my closer, so I think I did a good job of getting some energy into the room. All in all it was well worth the two hour round trip to get back into some practice in front of a very respectable audience.
The following Tuesday I was booked for a ten spot at We Are Funny Project in Dalston. The way that night usually works is that around ten open mic level acts do a mix of five and ten minute spots, then a pro act closes the show with 15-20 minutes of new material.
But on this night the booked pro act didn’t show up so the host, Luke Terry, asked if I’d be OK to close. I jumped at the opportunity because I’ve been thinking recently that I’ve probably got around 15 minutes of material that would work as a cohesive set, so it was a good chance to try it out.
There was a reasonable audience in – as well as all the acts there were at least five people who’d dropped in to watch the show, which by contrast to Horsham, counts as an OK turnout for a London open mic. On a good night We Are Funny can be very busy, but even on a quiet night there’s usually enough of an audience to make it interesting.
Because I hadn’t had time to really think about doing a longer set, it was a bit of a hodge-podge of different bits that were kind of related but weren’t planned out with much thought – it was all I could do to just remember everything. And in the event I didn’t actually remember everything – I’ve been dusting off and reworking an older bit about having a vasectomy, which has been doing fairly well even though it needs more work – and once I got off stage I realised that I only delivered half of that bit, missing out some of the best parts including the big punchline.
I rambled a bit too much, got distracted, didn’t deliver the whole set with the kind of confidence and energy I would have liked, but all the same it went down pretty well and the closer landed well so at least I left the stage feeling good about it. It turns out I was up there for just under 12 minutes, which makes me think that with some more work it could all form a reasonable 15 minute set – not that anybody’s giving me 15 minute spots just yet.
Really I need to focus on practising a strong five minutes, for my Not So New Comedian of the Year heat in May, so I’ll be doing that for the rest of this month.
Since I’ve only been gigging sporadically for the past year or so, it’s no surprise that I didn’t bump into anybody I knew at WAFP this week – other than the host Luke, and Sam Adamson who’s another regular that’s been around for for a while and seems to be developing pretty well as an act.
Of the acts I didn’t know, the one standout was Madeleine Bee – she had some great material and delivered it with confidence that made me think she must have been doing this for a while, but I’ve never bumped into her before. Ana Little was also there, who I don’t know personally, but like every other open mic trooper in London who’s been slogging away at this for years, we’re somehow connected on Facebook despite never having met in person before, so it was good to finally say hello.