Open mic 4

Location: The Hamilton Hotel
Date: 7 October, 2010

Let's dive in and look at the biggest scandal rocking the Brisbane open-mic comedy world. Some Journalist decided that as part of her "30 before 30" that she would do open mic. There's nothing wrong with that. More power to ya. (except my 25 before 25 list wants me to be at 200 open mics by that point. Which makes me 200 times cooler than yours.)What was the problem was the way she treated the other open mic'ers in her column.
An excerpt:
Some of them were so relentlessly awful that I felt like taking them aside and just asking what was so wrong in their life that they felt the need to torture themselves like this. I wish I could repeat some of the jokes, but you might be eating as you read this.
This is open mic. We don't have the "10 years of improv training" that you have. Most of us doing this haven't even been on stage more than a dozen times. And we do it because we enjoy it, we do it because we like a challenge. Heck, some of us are doing it just for the hell of it... much like you are.
The column ends with this:
It takes a certain kind of self-flaggelating narcissistic masochist with something to prove to actually get up there in the first place. And hey – now I can proudly say I'm one of them.
Trust us, you're not one of us. For one, we're supportive of each other.
And narcissistic? Have you met me? Granted, I wasn't up that night, but I'm at least 30% humble. The masochism is spot on, however.

Enough of her. Let's focus on me. How did my night go?
Well, the Hamilton is a tough room. Seriously, take a drink every time I say that in this blog. There was something resembling an audience tonight, but most of them only paid attention for the first few seconds, and if they decided it wasn't worth listening to a comic, they ignored him or her.
I did ok. It started off not bad and the audience got quieter from there. I did break out a new joke, which I think has legs. I just need to mime it out better and make it clear what it is I'm doing.
I really want to work on my ability to chat with the audience. In rooms like this, it's got to be the only way to get people to pay attention.

The other great bit of the night: the drunk heckler woman. Stav, the MC for the night (and B-105 morning show co-host) was riffing on an audience member who admitted to working for BP. Drunk heckler woman shouts out 'it wasn't BP'

There was a pause. We briefly considered if she was right


Then everyone in the audience shouts out (mostly in unison) YES IT WAS.

Moral of the story: if you're going to be drunk and heckling, please be stupid too.