do a stand-up comedy routine

If you want to see it, it’s up at http://www.jakubkorab.net/2009/06/my-first-stand-up.html

After producing heaps of material over the last couple of months, most of it not funny, I finally have 5 minutes that I’m pretty happy with. Tomorrow night I’m lined up as part of a showcase in a bar in Covent Garden for the guys who were on the comedy course. Looking at a friendly crowd of about 80. I’m practicing the routine all day today. And when I say all day, I actually mean once or twice. I’ll probably end up playing Xbox, and freaking out this evening :)

The laughs are more in the attitude than the content (which is also pretty important) – so a little ad-lib will definitely help. Just have to keep the adrenaline down.

It has been a huge amount of work to get this far, and there’s no getting out of it now. Well, there is, but not without a whole heap of ridicule from my friends and workmates. Nothing helps you reach your goals like peer group pressure.

I have been told that stand-up is typical of a first time experience. It’s over far too quickly, and you’re left wondering what all the fuss was about.

I am currently in week 3 of a 3 month course in London working towards a set in June, and it is absolutely fantastic. If you can find a supportive audience to help you work out the kinks before hitting the clubs, it’s well worth the effort. After just a couple of sessions, the guys around me are coming up with the most awesome material. It’s hard to be objective about your own stuff, but it’s getting some laughs. It’s an absolute buzz, loving every minute of it. It is absolutely the highlight of my week. The trick really is to write mountains of stuff. Some will be interesting thoughts to follow up on, others will be genuinely funny. There’s a long way to go, but it’s as much about the journey as the destination, and I’m having a great time on the way!

I was lucky enough one day to make a call into a radio station and make a joke about a current event. I ended up doing a daily call-in the station called “The Mailman from Security” mainly because that’s what I called myself and the fact that the joke was about “going postal” right after that happened the first time. I called in each morning for the next couple of months and then hit paydirt one day. My timing was good, because a guest on the radio show that day was a stand up comic named Vic Dunlop. He was on a TV show called Make Me Laugh back then and was being interviewed when I called in. He said he thought I had “the stuff” and asked me to meet him at a local comedy club that night. He told me to bring in my “list” of jokes and my routine. We went out to my motorhome to unclear our heads a little bit (puff puff) and I showed him my stuff. He was impressed and asked me if I wanted to go on staff as a writer right there and then. Being a single dad I couldn’t do that. I did however end up doing a few gigs at the comedy club as an opener or a warm up guy when travelling acts would hit town. I also did a weekly gig at a local sports bar happy hour with the morning crew from the local FM station and ended up getting a lot of perks from the station including a bar tab to buy drinks for people with the station paying for it. It was fun. As far as the comedy went though, it was brutal at times. There are always those people there that no matter what you do they just aren’t going to laugh. Many of them think of themselves as professional hecklers and try to sabotage your bit. My advice is to turn it around on them and use all of your off color jokes with them as the subject. If they aren’t going to laugh at least you can get everybody else to laugh at them. The worst thing that happens is when you totally bomb. There are off nights and then there are nights from hell where nothing is funny to anybody. Don’t quit if you have one or two of those. It happens to everybody and if you get past them you can use them later as reminders of what not to do.

I’ll keep doing it until the first time I “kill.” Then that’s it, “mission accomplished,” I’m out.

I may have to stick to children’s shows.