By way of a quick recap; I started doing standup in 2017 because I was struggling a bit with life (3 kids and a career you hate will do that to you) and doing standup felt like a way of taking back some degree of control, something I could just do by myself, for myself.
I wasn’t wildly successful, but I had enough good gigs to convince myself that I could probably be decent at it if I put the effort in, and who knew where that might lead to? So began the grind – conventional wisdom dictates that the only way to get anywhere in standup is to spend years plugging away at open mics, developing your material, getting experience on stage, building contacts. So that’s what I started trying to do.
Things were going sort of OK – I never expected to make it big, but I felt like if I kept at it I might eventually become a passable club act, and that’s all I ever really wanted out of this. And then COVID fucked everything for a couple of years.
After lockdown I wasn’t sure if I still wanted to do standup, but a couple of strong comeback gigs convinced me that I did, and I ended up settling down into a comfortable rut, doing weekly 10 spots at bar shows run by friends, and the occasional open mic when I felt like it. That’s really all I’ve done since the end of lockdown – treading water – it’s been OK but I can’t say I’ve even tried to progress much as an act.
I turned 50 last November and I’d started to wonder why I was still doing comedy, whether I really wanted to carry on into my fifties, maybe I should call it quits. But my birthday fell on a school night, and because we couldn’t really do much in the way of celebration on that particular day, I got a spot at the Big Belly comedy club in Vauxhall, which always has a decent crowd, so I’d at least spend my birthday doing something fun.
The gig went really well, and by random coincidence a couple of relatively famous actors were in the front row – Bella Ramsey from Game of Thrones and The Last of Us, and Amybeth McNulty from Stranger Things, who happened to be there celebrating Amybeth’s birthday. So the night had a really good vibe and was pretty memorable for me, and it made me realise that I really don’t want to quit, even if I am starting to get to an unseemly age for these kinds of shenanigans.
But I also realised that I needed to get out of my rut; stop turning up to the same gigs with the same material a few times a month – get stuck back into it with the same energy I had at the beginning. Write more, do more open mics, make more of an effort.
And that’s kind of why I’ve started the blog again, because I think writing about the experience of doing all this is part of what kept me on track. Unfortunately the old domain (Basic Comedy) is now being squatted after I let it expire, and would cost too much to get back, but I’ve imported all of my old posts into this one.
Since my birthday gig I decided to stop performing for a few months and focus on writing a bunch of new stuff, which was only moderately successful – I didn’t write as much as I wanted, and I ended up doing a few more gigs than I expected – but I did get back into the right frame of mind, so I feel like it wasn’t completely wasted time.
What next?
I’ve entered the Museum of Comedy Not So New Comedian of the Year competition and have my heat in May. I swore off competitions a few years ago because I realised that those things are for younger, more interesting acts than me – but this particular one seems ideal for somebody in my position. So I’ve got a little over a month to put together a razor-sharp five minute set, which will be a nice back-to-basics exercise – exactly what I need.
Between now and then I’m going to do as many spots as I can, starting with some random new bar-show in Horsham tomorrow night, where I don’t know the promoter or any of the other acts, but apparently they’ve sold the place out. I’ll let you know how it goes.