Comedy Goals 2011

For the past couple years, my goals for comedy always included competitions and festivals and doing this and that room and so forth and so forth. In 2010, I felt I made some headway in regards to getting better gigs but I also felt that I stagnated a little in developing fresh material. This coming year, I decided to take my focus away from such a wide variety of goals. Instead, my focus will simply be on development.

I think opportunities will continue to come my way as long as I add to my catalogue. Not only do I want to develop more material, I want to leave my comfort zone and play around and start using the mic stand. I want to try sitting down and chatting with the audience. I think crowd interaction is the weakest part of my skill set and I have to improve on that asap.

So, no long laundry list of what I’m looking to accomplish in 2011. I just want to focus on improving me as a standup comic.

Return of FlipnFunny!

In January 2009 I decided to start a blog as a way of tracking my progress in the Vancouver Comedy Community. Unfortunately, it got off to a very rough start as one of the very first entries got me into a huge online war with a fellow comic. Things were smoothed out in a relatively short time, but the experience took a lot of the fun out of blogging.

Another reason for the lack of entries was a combination of a busier schedule and a loss of focus. In 2008, I logged 8.14hrs of stage time which grew to 11.11hrs (2009) and 14.01hrs (2010). It probably should have been more this past year, as I basically shut it down at the end of October to prepare for my wedding. I’m getting the call more and more to do longer sets and paid sets which are great, but when you get that paid gig the expectation is to bring your best material. I essentially traded developing new material for paid gigs this past year. Hence, my development stagnated.

In hindsight, I should have used my time more wisely away from the stage. I should have focused more on writing and developing new material. I have added material in 2010, but in all honesty the time I put into developing them was minimal.

Going forward, I think I have to get back to the disciplined approach I took when I first started. In 2007 and 2008, before I decided to do the blog, I was disciplined about recounting what I did right and what I did wrong. No performance would be left without analysis. I need to get back to that kind of discipline.

In the next couple days, I will lay out my goals for the upcoming year for comedy.