Standing Up Part II

Stand update (see what I did there?), last night I returned to the open mic and gave stand up yet another go. Whereas last time I emailed ahead for a slot, this time I rolled in around 11 and signed up in person, waited an hour or so, and went up after midnight with the joint more or less in after hours mode. Another change was that I loosened up a bit this time with a few beers, which seems like an obvious thing to do at any kind of open mic in a bar, but this added step definitely aided my efforts, which were improved over last time. It helped having some sense of moral support, having chatted with a few of the other dudes there, with whom I shared some mutual acquaintances, and the dude before me being so super high crazy energetic (he dropped a lot of gay slurs in his act in various contexts not in an explicitly offensive way but sort of in the Brechtian sense, at least I think that's what was going on) I went up and tried to match it. I then went into an extremely lewd routine about sex and the umm... culinary qualities. Ok let's cut to the chase it was about swallowing ejaculate. And in the middle of this bit, a scantily clad girl who was there for the Middle East's weekly 18 and up club night wanders through the open mic section of the club and I have to stop and say "OK why did she have to walk through right then?" which cracked the audience up, as well as myself, and although I got a huge response it kind of killed my momentum. But still! A response! It was a little frustrating also that since I was going up so late, my time was less than the standard five minutes, so I only really got through that bit and one very short one before I brought the next guy up, but oh well.

So where am I at with stand up? Well it's nice to feel some improvement from one week to the next, definitely. I know I need to continue honing my material, obviously, which is unto itself a life long pursuit. I wonder if to improve my writing I should start writing sketches and plays and those other things I've been meaning to try as a means to improve my overall sense of wording. I'll get there eventually. In the meantime, I may wait a week or two before standing up again, and take some time to do some of that honing I talked about, and really fill my five minutes WITH BITS!