I was at a Pro-Am not too long ago at a comedy club and saw something I didn’t expect to see – every single amateur went over their allotted 5 minutes of stage time. The parade of overtime on stage didn’t just end at that club. A week later, I saw another comic go over their allotted time and after the set the booker actually said that he was over but it was okay because he was doing well. This blog entry isn’t written from Dana Carvey’s Grumpy Old Man perspective, but in my day, there were repercussions for going over your time.
If being funny is the first rule of stand up, then keeping your time surely must be the second. Not keeping time is the most selfish thing you can do as a performer. If you take 2min more than your given time in a tightly produced show, inevitably, that 2min will be taken away from another performer somewhere down the line up. Guess what that makes you? On the flipside, if you do 2min less time than you’ve been given, at times, that 2min will have to be made up by another performer down the line up. Again, guess what that makes you?
The very first time I went over by a substantial amount of time I was taken aside by the booker and told the truths I just mentioned in the previous paragraph. Then after the show, another comic told me the story of a comic he heard about that did a show in Vegas. Apparently, this comic was crushing the room, so he decided to do more time than he signed up for. Once he finished his set, the casino manager took him aside and told him that an average casino makes x-million amount of dollars per minute, so for every minute that an audience stays in the comedy room laughing is another minute where the audience isn’t losing x-million dollars to the casino. Then the manager said, “that if you go over time again, you will be paying the amount of money the casino just lost.” After hearing that story from that comic, I have heard the same story told by Rosie O’Donnell and Jay Leno. To be honest, I don’t even know how true that story is. Now, I think it’s just an urban myth told as a cautionary tale for newbies who like to go over time.
Aside from being a douche move, going over time consistently when you are new is counter-productive. Like I mentioned earlier, keeping time is the second rule of comedy with the first rule being “be funny.” A new comic shouldn’t look at the 5min and think that it’s a 5min limit. Instead, they should look at it like a 5min challenge. There is a reason why comedy has a term called “Laughs Per Minute.” The challenge is to cram as much laughs as possible in 60 seconds. The challenge is to be as concise as possible in your setup and just as efficient in your punchlines.
So, if you’re an amateur comic, the question isn’t why you’re not being given weekend spots performing 30min sets. The question is how many laughs can you fit in 300 seconds?
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