First Night Nerves And Picking Your Advice

Here’s some useful advice I got before my first stand-up gig.

I was really nervous the day before.

I had tried some of my lines out on actual people. There was no Twitter back then. I knew from their reaction that my first gig would be carnage.

I was lucky enough to be able to ask Rich Hall for advice. I said to Rich, “Is there anything I should keep in mind when it’s all going tits-up?”

He said, “Yeah, remember this. EVERY. BODY. DIES…”

I tuned out for the rest of it. (He went on to say, “…Even me!”)

That’s not the useful advice I meant. After performing for a few years, I now totally get what he was preparing me for, and what a generous thing it was to say, but at the time it shook me.

As it turned out, angels intervened and my first open spot was cancelled due to someone in the venue having a heart-attack before I got there*. Phew.

My next bite at the cherry was three months later. This time, when I got nervous the day before, I asked a newish act friend of mine if he had any advice.

He said, “Yeah. Just stand there, get through your five minutes. If you get a couple of laughs, literally two, you’re doing really well”.

This really took the pressure off and helped me get through those hard early gigs.

Maybe, because my new act friend was having experiences a bit closer to my own, his advice helped. Maybe you have to travel a bit of road to be able to interpret the advice of someone so far into a journey you’re just starting out on.

Maybe the lesson is that everybody’s got a valid point of view, but no-one knows what you need.

Or maybe the lesson is cut down on fried food.

*(The show before my cancelled first gig was called “Cabaret Extreme”. Ironically, the flyer said “You’ll die laughing, or we’ll die trying”)

Mmm. Apple Pie.

There’s a line from a book that keeps bubbling up in my head since I read it (a few years ago now).

It’s from Carter Beats The Devil by Glen David Gold. Carter, a magician, is being grilled by an investigator, who is trying to throw him off balance by talking about two other magicians that he’d seen doing a similar rope trick to Carter’s. Carter responds:

“There are few illusions that are truly original, it’s a matter of presentation… In other words, I didn’t invent sugar or flour, but I bake a mean apple pie.”

Happy baking!

How Do We Do It? Volume! Jokes Are A Numbers Game

It took 100 million hours to build Wikipedia*. Phew. But that’s a drop in the ocean compared to the 200 billion hours people spend watching TV annually.

This is according to Clay Shirky in Cognitive Surplus. He says since the 1940s, in our free time, we’ve been steadily moving from a consuming posture to a creating (and sharing) one.

I was at a comedian’s conference (I know!) once, and a promoter described a new act whose work ethic he liked (me too!). This new comedian had a day job. On the ride to and and from work (I’m guessing 30 minutes each way), this person made it their mission to write ten jokes. That’s do-able. Five on the way in, five on the way out.

Fifty jokes a week, two hundred jokes a month. An hour a day. Your leisure time is still your own when you walk through the door.

In the old days, you could write all you want, but you’d still have to wait for a gig somewhere to see what flew. Now there’s Twitter and a whole bunch of other stuff I don’t know about (I’m assuming!).

Two hundred jokes a month. Tweet your best, what, twenty? Fifty? Do the lot! It’s your life. You can interact with an audience and learn something.

Baby steps. See what works. Five jokes on the way in, five on the way out.

Also, a great thing about the internet: If you do something a bit rubbish, no-one looks. No-one’s got the time. There’s 200 billion hours of telly to catch up on!

*That’s what it took to build Wikipedia to its 2009 extent.

Mess It Up!

A couple of days ago, I saw a busker beat-boxing and playing harmonica at the same time. It’s probably quite hard to do.

Not many of us have tried beat-boxing and playing harmonica at the same time, so the fact that he was doing it really well wasn’t good. He was making it look run-of-the-mill.

Just my way around it, but when I parody someone, I’m not necessarily going for pinpoint accuracy. Sometimes it’s better to mess it up and make it look tricky.

I could deliver the music bits of my act a lot more smoothly, but I’ve noticed that if you start getting too music-y, people’s brains start doing whatever it is they do when they hear music.

A bit like a straight stand-up who delivers their lines too pat, you run the risk of re-framing what you’re doing. The audience might start feeling like they’re at the theatre or parliament, instead of the club they walked into.

They say Ginger Rogers did everything Fred Astaire did, but backwards and in high heels. Nobody cared. I can relate to that. Maybe comedians (and beat-boxing harmonica-ists) are the Ginger Rogers of entertainment.

Maybe it’s good to trip on your dress now and then to show the work that went into it.

(I know Ginger Rogers was the Ginger Rogers of entertainment, but hopefully you catch my drift!)

Maybe You Were Put On Earth To Muck About

In bits of my comedy act, I sing like a real singer would. Sometimes people say afterwards, “You should do music for real”.

I did and I do, but in my experience, if you show up in a place where they’re expecting a musician to show up, and you do music – all in tune and what-not – well, that’s just what they were expecting you to do.

Thank you, Music Guy, for doing exactly what we expect from music, you’re like a CD, but a person. Thanks, here’s some indifference.

Les Dawson had much more success – screwing up the notes and not worrying about a record deal.

In the Wordpress ebook about blogging, it features two writers, one with 60,000 readers, another with 24,000 readers. They both have a similar story. “I started off writing about (x) and then I tried writing about (y) and suddenly things took off”.

It’s a solid case for mucking about and putting yourself under a real deadline to do it. Without the pressure of a delivery date, these writers might have walked away from their experiments, missing out on their undiscovered passions and a tribe of thousands who care about the same thing.

They say if you’re a hammer, every problem looks like a nail. Maybe we’re Swiss Army knives!

Back to screwing up the notes!

Have a great weekend! Muck about!

PS. Yes, I know someone will accuse me of being some kind of tool, before you start.

Creativity And Not Starving To Death

It’s tough to walk the tightrope of creativity and not starving to death, but there are some inspiring ideas out there. I’ll share these with you, in case you’re a bit late to the party (like me!)

In 2008, Kevin Kelly wrote a blog post enquiring into how many True Fans it would take to sustain an artist. We should all read it. If you don’t have time, he gave a vague rule of thumb. 1,000 True Fans.

In The Curve*, Nicholas Lovell wrote about (among other things) how the free price-tag is here to stay, and what’s more, artists and creators giving things away for free is a good thing. We should all read it.

If you don’t have time, the idea is instead of doing one thing at one price, like a DVD, or a show ticket, you treat different people differently.

The problem with selling one thing at one price means if you’re not making a living, you need to find more people to buy that one thing at that one price. Which means getting distribution, employing offices of people, setting up meetings with TV execs, paying your execs to talk their execs (we’ve all been there, right?) to drive up your profile.

Now the overheads are mounting, so now you’re only making 12p per copy of the thing your selling, but that’s okay because you’re Michael McIntyre and sales are through the roof.

Just in case you’re not Michael McIntyre…

What if you’ve already got enough people who want to sustain you, who love what you do, but want different things from you?

Clicking around on the 1,000 True Fans post, I see that painters know all about this. They treat different people differently. This commission is worth £200 to this person, so now I’m going to make a £200 thing. This commission is worth £1000 to this person, so now I’m going to make a £1000 thing.

Same paint, same canvas, same artist, different value to the buyer. Nobody’s being ripped off – the painter loves to paint, the buyer loves her work. In a world of meaningless froth, how much would you value a personalised, custom-made thing of beauty and meaning from your favourite artist?

Doing comedy here in the UK, I know I’m lucky. Some pioneering people came before me and built a comedy circuit and a culture has formed around it. But whatever it is you create (poetry, fiction, software, knitted lampshades), there’s a probably culture and maybe we owe it to the pioneers to do something with their legacy.

Unlike, say, a big media company, you don’t have to pay an office full of people to make you famous and connect you to True Fans. My Nana has an iPad. She might like your stuff.

All you need is a laptop (maybe not even that) and your tortured artistic soul (check!). You may as well dig in while you’re waiting to get picked by the Head of Go Away at Don’tLetTheDoorHitYouInTheAss Media Group**.

Make stuff. Get it out there (hint – people like free things that they can share with their friends). See who salutes. Try again. Don’t quit.

To sum up:

The Curve says: Use the power of free to reach audiences, build relationships with them, and create ways to let them spend money on your lovely stuff. (If you were creative enough to make a stand-up routine, or a script, or a knitted lampshade, you’ve got this.)

Kevin Kelly says: One thousand is a feasible number.

How far away are you?

*There’s also a free podcast out there of Nicholas Lovell talking about The Curve.

**If you can pull any strings at DLTDHYITA Media Group, please put in a good word for me.

The Problem With Jokes

There’s a fundamental problem with jokes.

Think of music. There’s no “getting” a song. No nice, that’s that, move on. You can hear a song that moves you thousands of times before you need to give it a rest.

When you love a piece of music, the affair goes on and on until one of you changes. The song’s permanent, so the relationship only changes when you change. Even then, you’re probably still wed for life.

That old Adam And The Ants song doesn’t move you in the same way as when you were eight, but it’s a touchstone. You’ve got history. It’s a family member that knows you better than your own family.

Think of jokes. A vital element of a joke is surprise (see here about that). Once you’ve heard the punchline, that vital element is gone. You can still enjoy introducing someone else to that feeling you got when you first heard the joke, but for you, the thrill is gone. As a thing that’s supposed to do a thing, it’s stopped doing that thing.

Tom Stade and Rich Hall got around this problem with two routines. And I think it’s because they’re like music. In case you haven’t got time to click, I’ll outline them.

One of them is Tom Stade’s “Meat Van” routine. Tom talks about being in Bilston (it’s already funny) and a man shows up to sell meat from the back of a van. The salesman has a style half-way between carnival barker and Martin Luther King, Jr.

If this routine was a song, the verses would be the meat van guy introducing each cut of meat (verse one: “I got a rump roast…”, verse two: “I got eighteen pork chops…”).

The choruses would be: “Do you know what I’m going to do with this [insert name of cut of meat]..? I’m gonna put it on the scale!”

In songs, after the second chorus, people get used to the pattern. Time for a guitar solo. The guitar solo in this routine is when Tom says: “I got a bag full of faggots”. He moves away from the main theme tune to riff on the bag of faggots. It’s a blistering guitar solo.

Rich Hall’s Tom Cruise Bit is equally beautiful. He describes the formula for making a Tom Cruise film (“He’s a cocktail maker. Pretty good cocktail maker, too. Then he has a crisis of confidence. Can’t make cocktails anymore. Then he meets a good-looking woman, talks him into being a better cocktail maker. End of film!”).

Then he says the whole thing again, but substitutes “cocktail maker” for “race car driver”, then he does it with “jet pilot” – On and on, each time funnier than the last, as the predictability of Tom Cruise films is roasted.

This one’s more like a ballad. We’re thinking: “Where’s he going to go in the next verse?” Rich finally pulls out a surprise ending to make it work as a joke joke.

My guess is, because these routines are such beautiful creations, Rich and Tom didn’t set out to solve the problem of how to make a replayable joke. They just showed up to work, beavered away, and one day were proud parents.

Maybe it’s because these jokes are like music, I’ve actually enjoyed listening to them just now with the same intensity as I did when I first heard them.

It’s just a pet theory of mine, I don’t know what it means, but I thought I’d share it with you.

Ps. If you’re having a crisis of confidence, just check out the thumbs down on these YouTube clips. They’re both about as good as art can possibly get, but there’s still someone out there not smiling. Trying to please everyone is just not a worthwhile mission.

The Case For Writing (And Being Weird About It)

These days, attention is a privilege that has to be earned and respected. We’ve got no shortage of stuff (articles, songs, stand-up videos…) anymore. The new scarcity is attention.

But that’s a good thing. More and more people are departing from the mainstream every day because it’s just not creating things relevant to us as unicycling, lampshade-knitting, Slovakian folk music-loving planking enthusiasts.

When there were five TV channels (I’m in the UK, if you’re just tuning in), and two-ish radio stations doing programmed speech, the producers had to come up with average stuff, because they needed to capture the attention of everyone (or as close as possible) to make it work. Now there are infinite channels, publishing can be as varied as there are are people on the planet.

That’s why I’m so gung-ho with the “go for it!”. More is actually more again. Nobody’s getting crowded out, there’s infinite shelf-space – and that also means there’s a strong incentive to make your output weird and relevant (to someone!), because of the attention scarcity.

So write. And yes, maybe for the sake of it. Because I also think that we don’t know what’s rattling around inside us until we give ourselves a real deadline to publish and be damned. (That’s what yesterday’s post was about).

Probably sounds like mumbo jumbo, but I remember reading and loving an interview with Tom Waits, where he said he thought of songs as having a life of their own, and it was his job to make them come and visit him (“Yeah, that guy was pretty cool, let’s blow down there and say ‘hi’ again…”)

It’s easy to walk away from a blank page. You can quite legitimately claim you’re not in the right frame of mind to write. Yep. Agreed. You are definitely not in the right frame of mind to write.

But what do we do every day? We show up to our work whether we’re in the mood or not. The question, “Am I in the right frame of mind for going to work today?” doesn’t figure into it. We’re there like a bear.

If we can do that for an activity we don’t necessarily love, it must be possible to do it for things we’re passionate about. The only thing holding us back is page fright.

In my experience of fear, the idea is not to make it go away but to understand that the uncomfortable sensation is just there trying to protect you.

…And now here it is again, protecting you from negative internet feedback, or a lukewarm critical reception, or a joke not hitting – with the same ferocity that it would protect you from an attacking grizzly. Fear has no finesse. You can’t educate it. You just have to be in the same room as fear and plough on regardless.

If you make an irreversible decision to publish at a certain time, that crunch point makes you get your house in order re fear quite effectively.

Yes, what you publish (in your novel, on your blog, on your podcast, to your stand-up audience) might be less than perfect, but that’s great! Now you know what you would’ve said if you were perfect. Now you can refine it. The act of forcing yourself to publish made that happen. If you reflect and repeat, it gets better.

So I think writing for its own sake still has value – plus there’s an underserved audience of unicycling, lampshade-knitting, Slovakian folk music-loving planking enthusiasts out there that need you!

Page Fright!

I’ve found when I’m feeling tense before a gig, the only cure for it is to do the gig. In twenty minutes, I’ll be feeling different.

There’s a different kind of stage fright for writers. The scary venue is a blank page, and the gig starts when you sit down to fill it.

Unlike live gigs, nobody knows about this gig. There’s nobody there to impress, no friends to egg you on. You can just walk away from it. The person who booked you (you) will understand. Unfortunately.

You won’t tell yourself you got stage fright and chickened out, you’ll tell yourself the dishes needed doing, or you needed to send some emails, or…

How to beat the blank page?

Maybe a way to deal with it is to actually treat it like an actual gig.

Like with stage fright, the only cure for page fright is to do the gig. Like with live performances, when you start it’ll be awful, and then it’ll be awful some more, and then there’ll be moments where it’s not awful and you realise you were learning something all that time you were suffering.

You might actually find these gigs are way nicer than live gigs. At writing gigs, when you’re a struggling open spot, nobody sees. When you start ripping it, you can make it so everybody sees.

(I remember one comic I talked to describing writing as the actual job, and the gig as the drive home after the job…)

Like with your live gigs, the first rule is show up. Regularly. Pull some strings and book yourself for a residency.

Note, I said the gig starts when you sit down to fill the blank page. That’s when it starts. The mission is to sit down and write. Not to write The Greatest Thing Ever. Just show up. The masterpiece will follow.

Don’t leave me hanging!

Christian Reilly

musical comedian and MMT-lover

Tag Archives: creativity