Gig 4: Mirth on Monday @ Iguana Bar, Chorlton – 13th June 2011

Well, this was something I wasn’t expecting.

I went along to Mirth just to enjoy a bit of comedy, but a few minutes before the show began, I was asked whether I wanted to do 5 minutes as one of the acts hadn’t turned up. My first instinct was to say: “NO!!!!! I’m not prepared!!”  But I was able to fight this urge as I knew I would regret turning down the opportunity.  Somehow, I found the word “yes” coming out of my mouth.

I was going to use some of the material from my gig at Comedy Balloon the previous Wednesday, but I had already started changing it about, so I wasn’t confident of remembering the order in which stuff came – despite knowing it so well last week.  Luckily I had a notebook with me which had headings for different bits, so I had that to fall back on.  And I did, literally, fall back on it.

There wasn’t a huge audience and the two acts before me had found it tough going.  Sadly, so did I.  I had a new opening to the set which I thought was terribly clever, but I didn’t know it quite well enough and it didn’t work with that audience.  Things didn’t improve too much, but I kept going and maintained my on-stage persona to the end of my hastily improvised set.

Weirdly, I still kind of enjoyed myself. More importantly, it was great experience; not only was it valuable stage time, but it helped me learn something about what different types of audience might expect.   Most importantly, I found out that I wasn’t emotionally scarred by not doing as well and it hasn’t put me off – if anything I want to get up and do it more.