The Ankle Biter @ Quibbling.net

I had a bit of a chat with a friend yesterday about Tuesday’s comedy performance (he had to miss it, so he wanted to hear about it), and occurs to me that I ought to be writing more about this experience than I currently am, so I thought I’d share some of those thoughts with you.

I Twittered on Tuesday that I was simultaneously less and more nervous than I thought I’d be. All day, I had a weird, tense feeling in my stomach.  I was hungry, but didn’t want to eat.  The day dragged by. I couldn’t stop checking my email or flipping my phone open.

I wasn’t afraid of getting up onstage to talk-  public speaking does not frighten me at all.  In fact, I actually enjoy it quite a bit, and I’m reasonably good at it.  What I actually was afraid of was that no one was going to think the jokes would be funny.  I mean, sure, I thought they were funny, but I’m a pretty high-context person, and a lot of the jokes I make on a day-to-day basis rest on a strong foundation of shared experience and knowledge between me and my friends.  I can’t count on that in a standup context, which means I had to ruthlessly pare down material until it could stand on its own with people who have never met me.  That meant that The Denver Incident, a 10-minute story about irresponsible alcohol consumption on our road trip last summer got boiled down to the only part of it that’s really funny on its own- a few sentences about having an ex-con buy you a shot.

So I was nervous about that.  Contributing to that issue was the fact that I was on next-to-last in the program, so I had to sit there and watch my new friends absolutely KILL with their jokes, being thrilled that they were doing so well while also wishing they hadn’t set the bar so damned high.  Freakin’ mixed emotions, messin’ with my Zone.

I walked from the green room, down the hallway, and to the immediate offstage area during the set of the person who was on before me to await my turn.  I tried to concentrate as I looked at that one bare panel right before the stage on which years of comics have signed their names as they’ve come through the Improv.  I didn’t add mine- I’m going to hold off on that until I’m being paid to be there.

Our teacher and I waited back there during the set, listening to the delivery of the jokes and how the crowd reacted to them- the fun thing about taking this class is that you get to know everyone else’s routines almost as well as your own- and saying things like, “I gave him that line, glad it worked,” or, “You gave him that line- that was great!” 

I greeted my classmate as he came offstage and congratulated him quickly- I had to be sure to listen for when Matt called my name: “…please welcome to the stage, Tiffany Bridge!”

Even though the audience had been sitting there in the dark for well over two hours by this point, the applause I got as I walked out was pretty astonishing.  It was immediately obvious that the cheering wasn’t coming from just the group of people specifically there to see me, but from the whole room.  It’s cliche to say that the tension “melted away” at that point, but that’s really what it felt like. My stomach released its knots, and I nearly started laughing myself from listening to all the cheering. Suddenly there was nothing else- me, my jokes, and an audience mostly concealed by the bright lights in my eyes.

What Matt said was true- getting up there and making 300 people laugh is a pretty intense feeling.  There’s power to it, and the affirmation of all that laughter directed at you is pretty heady stuff.  I can see why a comedian’s success seems to correlate to his personal dysfunction- it’s hard to walk away from that kind of energy every night and go back to being just a normal person instead of a superhero with a microphone.

But I did walk away- I didn’t see the light to tell me my time was up, and I don’t know yet whether I went over my time or not, but I do know that I ran out of material.  And my closing line?  I had nearly dropped it because it had never gotten much of a reaction, but since I couldn’t come up with another closer I kept it, just to see how a real crowd would react. 

They LOVED it.  Awesome. 

It was definitely one of the coolest experiences of my life.  Going to have to do more of it. Yeah.

This entry was posted on Thursday, April 12th, 2007 at 12:45 pm and is filed under comedy. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.