More Stand Up!

I basically have 2-3 minutes of decent material now.  Almost all of it revolves around bicycling.  I ususally do more material than that at each venue, but I have close to three minutes of almost always gets laughs. At this rate I could be a mediocre headliner in 2 years, which is probably too good to keep up, but I will try.  One of the professional comics I’ve met recently had a wonderful metaphor for stand up, “Stand up is like being a battered woman.  You get the shit beat out of you most of the time, but the good times seem so good, you keep coming back for more.”  With that said, here’s some more of my learning experience:

Back in Action

So my computer’s a little under the weather right now.  It has randomly restarted 3 times, and I can’t use search engines anymore.  Other than that it’s fine.  It’s just as well, since I’ve been devoting the past two weeks to memorizing scripts.  The first was my lovely Salem script, which I ingrained into my psyche while the animatronics weren’t working.  Then they made the realization that people don’t go to haunted hauses to hear stories, so the script was thrown out.  People go there in passive-agressive attempts at vengence against their love ones.  It’s amazing how many parents, and especially boyfriends, will allow me to follow behind their cherished ones until I scare the shit out of them.  In law, that’s called being an accompliss. 

The second script I’m especially excited about.  In 10 days, I’ll be playing the lead role in a dinner theatre production called, Major League Murder.   I play both Roger Lemons, the best pitcher in baseball celebrating his clearance from steroid allegations, and his twin brother Jack.  If you want to know any more, you’ll have to come to the show. 

I did my fifth stand up performance last night.  I did all new material, partially based off the Salem piece I did for BNN.  It wasn’t fantastic.  I’ve been busy, so I didn’t do a very good job memorizing what I wanted to say.  There was one guy named PJ, who laughed at everything though–loudly and creepily–and everyone else in the audience was a comic, pouring over their own routines.  Nobody was getting laughs.  Except from PJ.  Here’s my set:

Definately still have a long way to go, but I feel better on stage each time.

My First TV Credit

I finally got a piece put on Boston News Net.  It got edited a little bit, but the majority of the jokes are mine.  I’m officially a community television writer!  Enjoy:

More to come soon!

Getting Paid to Make Children Cry

Friday was my first day at Salem’s 13 Ghosts.  I looked vaguely like this dude.  The majority of the animatronics were only semi-functional, so everything depended on the tour guides.  When asked if I wanted to be a guide and recite script we weren’t supposed to memorize, or just scare people, I chose the latter. 

I experimented with a few hiding spots–in a corner, behind the barrel with the dead body, next to the haunted mirror–but then I found the perfect spot: in plain sight.  Being dressed as a skeleton, I fit right in with the dead pirates in “Captain White’s Room.”  The room is also the most fantastic to see in 3D, because there’s a gang plank painted on the floor that pops out and appears to be two feet above “the water,” which is also painted on the floor.  Guests are generally preoccupied with absorbing the sights.   Plus, there is another actor dressed as Captain Jack Sparrow who distracts them as well.  I just stand still while holding the cage containing the non-functional zombie parrot, and wait until the group is about to leave.  Then I jump out and yell, “Give me your heads!” or “Vengeance!” or “AAAAAAHHHHH!” or whatever else feels right.

Apparently, I’m rather good at this.  Very few people notice me, particularly not the family with the six year-old boy.  I have little visual area in the mask, so to be fair, I didn’t see him.  When the time came, I popped out and yelled, “There’ll be blood tonight!”  Pleased with myself at the horrified reaction of the parents, I suddenly heard the siren wail of the small boy.  There aren’t many jobs where you get paid to cause long-term psychological damage to toddlers.  Lucky me.  I just stood there, looked at his tear soaked cheeks and thought, “Dear God.  I’m fantastic at this!”  I’ve said it once, and I’ll continue to say it:  I’m going to hell.

There was another group of semi-drunk, young professionals.  It contained one of those guys who are so insecure about their masculinity, that they have to find every scare before it happens so they are never seen frightened.  Then they have to point it out, make terrible jokes, and ruin everyone else’s time.  Well, this dude was poking around in the pirate room, and completely missed me.  Again, it was my time to shine, and I came to life and scared the crap out of his friends and even made him jump.  Well, this guy was a big strong man, who couldn’t possibly be startled in a haunted house, so he actually steps up to me with his chest all stuck out, gets his face two inches from mine, and says, “This is the shittiest attraction I’ve ever seen.”  Again, I should point out, I looked like this.  He caught me completely off guard, so I fired back: “Maybe you should work here.  Your breath is scary.”  Not ideal for customer relations.  At that point we were running on bravado, and just stared at each other.  Man against skeleton.  I started to wonder if I was going to fight a customer on my first day.  Finally, he turned around to join his group, which had already left.  Then he turned back towards me, and quickly started poking at things again.  I asked him to move on, and he was kind enough to oblige.  I’m working a ton starting this Friday, so I can’t wait to see what else awaits me.

Being Billy Mays’ Assistant

If you’ve been following along, you may remember that I tried out for a puppeteering reality spoof called Felt Up.  Well, I got a part.  A human part.  I am “Paul,” the personal assistant of a Billy Mays impersonator, coincidentally named “Billy.”  The shoot was Wednesday, Saturday, and Sunday, and there are pictures of me as Paul on the Felt Up link. 

When I arrived on set Wednesday, I was greeted with a water bottle, a script “treatment,” and a playing card featuring the backside of a black man, as he penetrated the anus of a white women.   I was told to keep it in my pocket for inspiration.  It is a reality show after all.  There was an actual film crew with lights, sound, and even one of those zebra boards you smack before the director says, “Action!”  The ”treatment” is an outline, a basic synopsis of each scene that leaves the dialogue to be improvised–and the people from ImprovBoston are hilarious.  I was nervous that I wouldn’t stack up to the other actors (and I didn’t), but I managed to be funny enough to merit filming.  During the three days of filming, we moved to different locations ranging from a business office to the Spice and Rice Thai Restaurant. 

I don’t want to tell too much, but I’ll be appearing a few times in the episode, and I managed to work Pomona College into one of my confessional pieces.  Yes, there were confessionals.  When I have links to anything new regarding this, I’ll be sure to put them up.

My Cyber-shot Hates Me

It’s been 10 days since my first open mic appearance, and I’ve already done my 4th performance.  I even captured the moment on my digital camera.  Unfortunately, it ran out of memory, but I got the first third of it.  Before you view this, I ask you to lower your expectations.  Lower.  Keep going. Okay, here we go:

I won’t be doing this too often, because comics do the same jokes a lot to perfect them, but I’ll put one more up in the near future, since this one is so short.

My First Heckling

Tonight, I hit up the 6B Lounge in downtown Boston.  I signed up, and immediately went through my pre-game routine, which involves pacing the area adjacent to the venue, and mumbling my act to myself.  It’s one of the few times homeless people don’t approach me for money.  After half an hour of this, I went back inside and made friends with the other comic that was there.  He’s been doing stand up for two years now, and told me he didn’t really see results until “six months ago.”  I don’t know what “results” means, but he won a $1000 dollar comedy competition a little over 3 months ago, so he’s a funny guy.

He went up first, and that’s when I realized what a shitty place this was for comedy.  There was a large Irish family celebrating a birthday, and it was three dollar beer night.  The comedian fought for their attention and won it, unfortunately, because they began yelling drunken “witticisms” in response to his jokes.  The guy used his veteran prowess to fight through a tough crowd, though, and came out alright.  Then it was my turn. 

As usual no one really cared about my first few jokes.  One them involves the phrase, “Will you have sex with me?”  Which a bar patron was kind enough to ask back at me.  As usual, it was a dude.  I’m proud of myself though, because I looked him in the eye, held back my nervousness, and uttered, “Maybe if you bought me a couple of drinks first.”  The Irishmen laughed, and I had magically won their 10 second attention spans, so I bombarded them with two whole jokes in a row, one of which lead to a very unexpected result. 

I got my first big laugh!  I’m fantastically excited!  In fact, I was so excited in the moment, I forgot the rest of my act!  As I floundered on stage, I lost the crowd.  “I lost where I was going with this,” I proclaimed, and a woman was supportive enough to say, “I lost where you were going to.” So the whole thing didn’t go as planned, but then again, it hasn’t yet.  Either way, in comedy you gotta appreciate each little success.

When You Fall Off the Horse…

…try riding a donkey.  Feel free to use that line with your friends, so I can be a trendsetter. The thought is appropriate with stand up, because a little different wording, a different voice tone, a different character, and a joke goes from awkward to “Hey, I’m amused.”  Last night I performed at King’s Back Bay bar/restaurant/bowling alley.  Described by some as having “the best food I’ve ever gotten at a bowling alley,” it was a decent venue.  The lanes were in a separate room from the open mic, thank God, so I didn’t have to worry about someone celebrating a spare in the middle of a punchline.

There were both musicians and comedians, and I got to go towards the beginning this time!  The first performer was a classical guitarist who was amazing.  If he didn’t look like he only played guitar and World of Warcraft at MIT while not showering, I probably would have slept with him.  The next two guys were horrible emo guitarists.  One of them played two songs.  One about the girl he loved dumping him, and another about his friend dying in a car crash.  The latter he prefaced with, “My friend died drinking and driving, so to remember him I wrote this song.”  Now, I’m secrectly an asshole who’s going to hell, so my first thought was to go up to stage and say, “I also had a friend that died recently, so to remember him I wrote this joke.”  Finally, a comedian went up, and then it was my turn.

Looking back on it, I bombed the first time.  This time, I told a completely new set of jokes, was a little more charactery, and got consistent chuckles and even a couple decent laughs.  I also forgot half my material and made a couple “ummmm…” noises when that happenned, which was not ideal.  I felt more in control, too.  On Monday, I was practically frozen, staring in one spot but not really looking at anything (especially the audience).  This time, I moved around a little, and even looked around, but still not at, the audience.  I’m up again tonight at the Squawkhouse Cafe in Cambridge, sometime between 11 and 12am.

Tom’s First Stand Up

I’m not gonna lie, thinking about doing stand up has been pretty nerve racking.  I planned to start last Wednesday, but procrastinated out of fear for my delivery.  Well, Monday night I finally changed into some big boy undies and did my duty (pun definitely intended).

As I walked through the door of Sally O’Brian’s Tavern for their open mic, I was greeted by 30 sets of questioning eyes–Is he a comic?  I wonder if he’s funny?  Why is he standing at the door for so long like a zombie?  I eventually realized I needed to continue walking in and immediately asked the booker for a five minute set.  “You can have two minutes,” he replied.  Awesome, my first show, I may be having an ulcer, and now I have to pare down my act on the fly.  Little did I know, I’d be going second to last and everyone else was going to go over their amounted time, so I had 2 hours to just wait. 

And what a 2 hours.  There were 15 or so comics that hit the stand and about three that were good.  On the other end there were four that were awful, including one guy who either forgot his act entirely, or was a “special” comedian.  Another dude made two jokes about how his problems looked better, when compared to someone with AIDS. Then he walked off the stage and directly out to the street.  Eventually I was announced.  I got up to the stage and started…then stopped to awkwardly fumble with the mic height, attempted to hide my nerves while I did my 2 minutes, and then went back to my seat.

How’d I do?  Well, not awful, but probably closer to the bottom of the heap than the top.  I heard 3 distinct people laughing really hard, and was too nervous to tell how the others were reacting.  In the comedy business, that most likely means the audience was being polite, and other comics were laughing at my suffering.   Granted, the audience had been ready to leave for half an hour and were staying out of courtesy at that point, but that will happen a lot until I get better. 

I was happy with how I felt afterwards.  I was proud of myself for having the courage to do this, and wanted to work on my jokes right away.  I usually take failure personally and not want to deal with the task anymore, but not with comedy.  That’s how I know I’m in the right profession.

River-dancing and Getting Paid to Eat

Saturday I worked as a Phantom at the Phantom Gourmet Food Festival.  We phantoms received t-shirts, capes, hats, sequined bow-ties, and masks–all purple of course.  It looked like I had killed and skinned Barney, used all the parts to the fullest extent, and then disguised myself as a Zorro with a flair for redecorating.  I should have pictures soon.

My job involved handing out purple bead necklaces for two hours, and then taking photos with patrons and generally entertaining people while they waited 10 minutes in line for an once of frozen yogurt.  We were also allowed to cut the lines freely, as “quality control.”  Tickets cost $40 bucks, so I was paid $100 to have more food access than everyone else.  Phantoms walked around in pairs, and I was paired with a girl who had just graduated from college and was performing improv as well. 

On two occasions we got bored.  The first time we wandered into a bar and sat with random people who possibly didn’t know we were employees.  We were just a crazy couple who enjoyed sporting purple capes in our free time.  For the second stint of boredom, we went to the dance floor at the beer garden.  It was less of a garden, and more of a parking lot with a Budweiser truck in it, but there was also a (purple) dance floor.   We improvised a dance number to ”Sexyback,” followed by a river-dancing encore to “Shipping Up to Boston.”  I did my best Papelbon.  Our audience filmed us with cellphones and cameras, and even applauded when we ended by grabbing our capes with both hands like the Batman before he jumps off a building, and “flying away” into the crowd.  Again, I don’t know if they realized we were “working.” 

It was a triumphant day for the poor comedic actor that I am.  I got paid to eat, got to keep a t-shirt and some necklaces, and even made off with a display potato from the baked fries stand (wouldn’t they be bakes?) for later.  It was awkward riding the T wearing multiple purple necklaces while grasping a potato, but definitely worth it.  Also, the girl is in an improv performance group that pays $50 per show.  She invited me to join, so I gave her my email.  Hopefully I’ll have more on that in the future.