The Secret of Comedy

Raw Canvas Lounge - Jan.11.11

Set Time - 5.30min

First time at Raw Canvas Lounge. What a cool place! I can’t comment on the quality of the food or drinks because I just had my regular prison fare (glass of water). If you’ve never been, half the space is reserved for diners and the other half is reserved for artists. There are about ten easels set up for art enthusiasts to take advantage of. And because the venue respected art, it seemed to have permeated to the staff who showed respect to the comics and the art that we were refining. They were friendly and respectful. Much respect to Darcy Michael and Jane Stanton for setting up the cool ass venue.

As for my set, this was a promising development. I forgot to do the Beauty and the Beast reference to one of the jokes and it seemed to have smoothed out the bit which I’m happy about. Unfortunately, that portion makes me giggle. Unless I can successfully restructure the tag I might have to remove it indefinitely. The preceding joke, Surrey Costco, is surprisingly getting a bigger response. I may need to switch the order if this continues.

Tuesday night also served another reminder that my material makes me The Secret of Comedy – strong enough for a man but made for women. As in my material seems to be written for women to enjoy, but men get a good kick out of it too!

False Start @ Lanalous

Lanalous - Jan.09.11

Set Time: 7min (approx.)

I wanted to start off the year on the right foot. I wanted to go out and have fun and destroy the room on my first set of the year. I wanted people laughing soooo hard that they would shoot their drinks out of their noses. I wanted them laughing so hard that they actually start coughing up organs. THAT DID NOT HAPPEN!

Instead I received a drunken woman asking me math equations. I shit you not. After my joke, This, she yelled out "what's the square root of 3+1?" My response was "do I ask you how to shoot heroin?" Not exactly the best comeback but I was able to get back at her a little.

As for the remainder of the set, I think I need to spend more actual rehearsal time rather than just practicing in the car. There's an old New York joke that goes like this -

Tourist: How do I get to Broadway?

New Yorker: Practice! Practice! Practice!

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.