Last Wednesday I did my 25th open mic spot, at We Are Funny Project in Dalston. The room was busy, which is always great for a non-bringer night, and there were a lot of good acts on, a few of which were either professional, or at least close to professional, so the standard was high. Don Biswas wrapped up the first half with a solid ten minutes, and the night was headlined by Olaf Falafel trying out twenty minutes of new stuff.
I was on second in the second half, after a great ten minutes from Harry Wright, who I later had a chat with on the train back into central London. I’d been planning to do a completely new five minutes, but I hadn’t practiced it much and wasn’t feeling very confident about it. So I chickened out at the last minute and decided to do some of the topical material I’d performed a couple of times earlier in the month, with one of the new bits sandwiched in the middle.
I didn’t exactly bomb, but it was a fairly underwhelming performance. I’ve listened to the recording a couple of times and people laughed at bits of it, but it was all a bit low key. It didn’t help that I hadn’t been on stage for over a week, so I was a little rusty, and the ‘topical’ bits were based on news stories that were at least few weeks old by that point. I didn’t feel too bad because I know that material worked well at a couple of spots earlier in the month.
The new bit in the middle got a decent enough laugh, which was reassuring, so I think next time I go up I’ll try the whole of the new set. When I got off the stage the MC, Alex Martin, told the audience “He always goes too far over the line, and he doesn’t give a shit, I love him!”– I’ll take that for positive feedback.
Right now I have a bit of a dilemma about the best way forward. I know I should really focus on one or two five minute sets, and just keep performing them and polishing them so often that they’re permanently committed to memory. But at the same time I’ve got tons of material I want to try out (not to mention topical stuff that occurs to me from time to time) and, since I can currently only do one or two gigs most weeks, I’ve got very limited stage time to do it all. If I keep trying out new stuff it’s going to be very hard to get it to a polished state.
I suppose really I need to think about where I’m trying to get with this, and which approach is most likely to help me get there – but that’s not exactly an easy question to answer.
I’ve got nothing booked for this coming week, but I’ll try to get a walk-in somewhere, and then the week after I’m back at We Are Funny Project.