open mic 31

Date 17 June 2011
Venue: Hollywood Hotel
Topics covered: Google vs My Father, Unpaid internships and Twitter fights.

The big question: did I bomb?

No.
I didn't exactly rock the mic like a vandal as the esteemed Mr. Ice would say, but I got out some good jokes. Not necessarily the ones I'd planned on telling, mind you.

There is a little cocky voice inside you that says that you can totally just wing it and talk about whatever comes in to your mind without any preparation at all. Ironically, it takes a LOT of preparation to get to that point.

What happened was I had a pretty good idea of what I wanted to say. I started on it, the got sidetracked and took a journey into unfamiliar territory. Some of it was older jokes I'd performed before, some of it was jokes I'd written ages before but never performed and some of it was complete gibberish or garbage. Listening to the performance, there were times when I didn't even finish clauses before moving on to the next idea. I knew where I was going, but I can't say for certain the audience did.

Not to deny the sudden spark of insight that comes when your brain is forced to throw words out your mouth quickly. What happens is your brain suddenly kicks into "okay, I can work with this" and the chunks of words become whole sentences. Over time it slowly strings together as the jokes get longer and the lines start to congregate together. One joke becomes a series of jokes. The upshot is I now have an ending to the unpaid internships bit that works.

I think I'm getting into a good place. I'm going to stick to some older material, now that it's a little more flushed out. Talking it out helps more than anything because my innate nonfluency and mild-to-moderate ADD can produce some pretty cool stuff. I'll see what my brain comes up with next.