I love that one week, I was chatting with humor expert Andrew Tarvin in Germany via Zoom, and the next, I’m picking him up from his hotel in Nashville. His confidence in me performing standup was so low that he insisted on flying to Nashville to see me live! I kid; he was in town for a speaking engagement.
Drew and I embarked on a Friday open mic at Cafe Coco. This would be my fourth time and a return to the first place I performed. We enjoyed a quick bite to eat and talked at length about improv, communication, public speaking, world travel, living abroad, and standup comedy.
Tyler Buckingham hosted the evening. He did a good job trying his best to increase the energy in the room, but something was off. I concluded that a weekend night in the backroom of a cafe is probably not a great place to be for standup comedy.
If the audience wanted to see live comedy, they would go to a comedy club like Zanies or Third Coast. They could have even been at the Ryman that night to see John Mulaney. The audience was made up of some jock types who were there to see their friend hit the stage as a dare he had lost, late comers arrived (conveniently before my set) to talk to one another loudly over the comics, and the rest of the room was filled with the usual crowd of aspiring and professional comedians. Most of this audience didn’t seem like they wanted to be there, but we can’t blame the audience, right?
My main lesson is not to do open mics on Friday or Saturday nights.
As usual, the unfamiliar names on the signup list were saved until the night's end. At this point, I get it. I understand why this is, and it still kind of sucks, but that’s life.
I was looking forward to testing my updated set. I took Drew’s advice and significantly changed the flow and bits of my set. My Starbucks Hermitage, “It’s a trap!” tag always gets a laugh - but not that night, mainly because the audience wasn’t listening.
I stumbled upon an opportunity to do improvised crowd work from my last performance by asking a person in the audience for one of their favorite presidents. This time the person I asked didn’t answer, so I tried another person and nothing. I then asked the audience if they were Americans and had multiple people yell out presidents’ names, but I couldn’t respond as I had planned because of this.
The lesson here is to try to ask one person in the audience. If it’s clear the audience isn’t paying attention, I’ll just skip this bit.
I ran out of time before reaching the new ending of my set. However, the last bit was going to be some accent work and would have been lower volume and probably ignored by the talkative asshats in the audience. I ended my set by angrily thanking the chatty crowd.
I feel like hitting open mics is like starting martial arts or MMA. I will get knocked down, hurt, and maybe even bleed. But the more I do it, the more I’ll learn how to reflect and block. Waxing on and waxing off.
Drew had a decent set but was running into the same problems I was. He was testing material he had written on the flight, in his hotel, and as he was waiting to go up. He handled the crowd elegantly, and his demeanor showed he is a pro.
On the way back to his hotel, he commented that it's easier to test material at open mics in other cities because nobody knows you, and you’re not there to make friends. It’s a good point. Maybe I need to take my material on a little road trip.
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