I’ve had a string of really successful gigs recently, so I knew that I was well overdue to die on my arse. And, boy, did I ever die on my arse last night. Obviously, this isn’t the greatest thing to happen, but it should, at least, make for a slightly more interesting blog post.
Preparation for the gig was fairly relaxed as I was largely performing tried and tested material, which I know like the back of my hand (or so I thought). There were a few tweaks to a couple of bits, but overall I was pretty confident with the set list, which was:
1. “I’m sat at a desk..” Previously only performed at Gig 25.
2. My “this really shifty looking bloke came up to me and pointed at my wrist…” bit (previously know as “the joke that unjusticely got me gonged off at Beat The Frog” (Gig 12))
3. The “Can’t Fight The Moonlight” bit.
4. The “Arnie\Controversial-Incomplete Joke” bits that have been in pretty much all my straight stand up sets. There was a bit of a change to the ending of the “incomplete” part, inspired by last week’s tweaked version for Beat The Frog (Gig 29).
5. New joke “So she lost her job…” Although this was new I’d tried it out on a couple of people and felt confident that it would get some kind of laugh.
6.. My “Personal” bit, plus a bit of “Personal Bit 2″ from Gig 27. On doing a timed run through, I needed a couple of extra minutes and decided that the first part of “Personal Bit 2″ would fit nicely. There are a few points in it where there are quite natural breaks, so I could always drop bits depending on how time was running.
7. Short play “One Day in Liverpool.” This has worked really well in Gig 26 and Gig 28, so I thought I’d give it a whirl in a straight set. It seemed a nice way to finish.
I got a bit nervous on the afternoon of the gig – I think because it was a gig I’d never done before and there was the element of the unknown. I’d calmed down by the time it came to perform, though, and was really looking forward to it. There wasn’t a huge audience, but the first three bits went down OK – not great – but I felt it was fine given the audience size. I then got to the Arnie stuff, which isn’t my cleverest but of material, but generally gets a decent laugh, and it got no reaction whatsoever. It was certainly disconcerting. Although it’s amazing your stuff goes down a storm, it’s still perfectly fine when you get muted laughter, but nothing at all is a nightmare. It makes you realise how much the material relies on some response from the crowd and that without it your rhythm and timing become completely shot.
I ploughed on with the tweaked “incomplete joke”, but I really didn’t get any reaction from this point onwards. The nadir of the set came early on into the “personal bit”. As I was starting off, someone on the front row’s phone fell out of his pocket and onto the floor. I instictively felt like I should reference it, which I did, but it threw my timing and, combined with the blank faces, I think I made a bit of a hash of the subsequent bit. Directly following on from this is a part where I start explaining my feelings on something and this builds up into something of a rant, but, by this stage, I was sufficiently put off that it didn’t really flow as it should. The punchline to that rant, is actually the start of the next bit and that also got no reaction. It was at this point that I forgot what to say next.
Now, I’ve done this section on stage a number of times and probably at least a hundred times in practice. I could probably do it in my sleep, but on this occasion it completely disappeared. The fact that I conscious of how well I knew the bit, somehow made things worse, and less likely that I would remember. I was genuinely panicking but then I kept repeating the line to stall and because it was the thing to do that made me laugh most. It perhaps wasn’t the best way to react but I kind of liked the honesty and lack of slickness of it. My mind was also reeling at this point; I couldn’t decide whether to ditch the thread and try and just do something else or whether to try and stick with it. The decision was made more difficult because the personal bit all flows, so it’s not like I could skip to a later section of it and it still make sense. In hindsight, I should have perhaps just said that I knew it wasn’t working and then dived into my joke book (which I had in my pocket as a security blanket). But, I didn’t. Eventually the line came back to me, but the performance was all very half-hearted from then on. ”Luckily”, I had used so much time up in forgetting that I didn’t have time to try any of “personal bit 2″. I ended with the play (to little reaction) and was pleased to get off.
When I died in my first handful of gigs, it was soul-destroying. Now that I have slightly more experience and have done a number of successful gigs, it’s still horrible but I’m able to deal with it relatively easily. I think it does dent the confidence a bit, but it’s also a really good leaning experience. It also highlights how much I still have to learn, particularly in how to deal better with cocking up and having different material to fall back on. The question that always strikes me in this situation is how can material that has worked so well on other occasions fail so badly? (truly baffling)
It struck me last night that the audience members will have left the gig thinking that I’m awful, and they probably would not be able to believe that the same material has worked really well in front of other audiences. It’s all a very strange business.
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