So I do this open mic every week at the Old Town Theater. It is primarily a music showcase, but it is the first place I ever got on stage, they love me there, so even though it is hard as hell to get a laugh I still do it. Every now and then I will get a crowd that is really receptive and I will get laughs. But not last wednesday. Crickets. Big time. And it probably didn't help that I was doing all new material, all of it, nothing old. But before I even get on stage, I am outside looking over my jokes thinking about which ones I want to do. Some guys comes out and starts talking to me, asks me what I am singing, I tell him I'm not, I am doing comedy. He then tells me 'Oh yeah, I used to write jokes for comedians.' And I am thinking, a. that isn't true, b. if it is true then you wrote jokes for no-talent assclowns who can't come up with their own jokes. Which is pathetic for both parties. Then he proceeds to tell me a couple of the premises for his jokes, and they are horrible. Not even remotely funny. Then I go on and I bomb hugely. Worst set in my short time of doing comedy. And to top it off, some idiot in the crowd thinks he should make it interactive and he starts yelling shit as I am doing my jokes. And then he starts mock laughing at the jokes as they get no other reaction. So I cut it short and get off the stage. I find Heckley Heckleton in the crowd, and I tell him "This is an open mic for music-whatever- but if you go to a comedy show don't do that shit. Don't ever do that again" or something to that effect, I don't know if it was verbatim, whatever. So the idiot says to me, 'I thought you would feed off of me doing that, I thought I was helping, I know that I feed off of that kind of stuff when I am telling jokes'. So I'm like, 'Oh, so you do comedy?'. The idiot replies to me, 'Well, no not for a living, I mean, c'mon', like I just proposed the most ludicrous, beneath-him option. And that is the only way to do standup, if you are paid. What a stupid shit. Turns out that he came there with the guy who I ran into earlier, Mr. Larry David joke writer extraordinaire. So I walk outside and these two are out there, and I stood there and listened to the two of them talk non-stop for about 20 minutes. I figured out pretty quickly that I wouldn't get a word in edge-wise, so I decided to just sit back and enjoy the show. These morons are trying to give me tips on how to improve my comedy and basically telling me how stand up works, even though I briefly told them both early on that everything I did up there was new material, and that they are really misguided in their assumptions. Not to mention that I was trying to do comedy at a music open mic. These guys who have never done standup before somehow know so much more about it than me. And it's like they are trying out for me. They are trying to tell me all of these jokes they have, and it is just the worst shit I have ever heard. They couldn't be more clueless. And I am just standing there the whole time, not saying anything, just listening. Finally I think Heckleboy figures out that I am just humoring them and they are in essence just performing a 50 car pileup in front of me, and all I am getting out of their antics is morbid fascination. I can't look away. So he says, 'I bet you get this all the time'. I told him, yes I do. When in fact, people usually only take up 30 seconds of my time telling me their stupid joke that I should use. I hope I don't ever see them again/I hope I see them this wednesday.
