Tag Archives: stand-up

Scared And Loving It! (Non-)Combating Stage Fright

I used to get stage fright before some gigs. Then I stopped drinking. Now I get stage fright before all gigs. And love it.

I used to look at the more experienced people I was working with while I was feeling stage fright and presume they weren’t feeling it. They were professional. I was unprofessional.

It took me years to work out that for me, feeling (almost unbearably) nervous is what it feels like to be inside my body while I’m caring intensely about what’s about to happen. It’s actually professional.

I know it sounds like mumbo-jumbo, but now I treat that feeling like friend. Alright, a business acquaintance. Giving me a pep-talk. It hasn’t gone away, but I’ve come to associate it with good things.

I think what happens is this. Early on (whether it’s stand-up, job interviews, public speaking, life in general…) you get nervous, you have a hard, learning experience (not because of the nerves, because you’re new!) and as this repeats over time, you come to associate that edgy feeling with bad experiences.

Unfortunately, if you’re growing, learning experiences never go away. I find any time I think I’ve got it nailed, that’s when I’m about to have a learning experience. It hurts in the moment, but I’m all the better for them. Maybe the trick is to associate the feeling with learning and not failure. Fake it till you make it. I won’t tell.

Some people actually use these dreaded feelings as a compass to direct them to their next project. If everyone else is afraid of doing something, but you can be with the fear (not make it go away) and do it, that’s valuable.

So let’s man and woman up, and get scared. That feeling is exactly what you should be feeling, because you’re doing something that matters.

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Audience = Gift, Deadline = Gift – A Cure For Writer’s Block!

People think comedians are crazy, but I feel sorry for people doing projects that don’t involve an audience.

If I have a stand-up idea like, now-ish, I can put it on its wobbly feet in front of some people like, tonight-ish.

The way tonight goes will change the shape of the idea for the next time I try it out. This process can repeat until we’re all happy with it. Having an audience is the gift that gives me an opportunity to take a chance…

Well, thanks for the gift, audience, but why do I want to get out of my comfort zone when you’re around?

Just a thought, but I reckon the gift of an audience won’t come to much without the gift of a deadline.

That’s the gift you have to organise.

Unlike a novelist who has to be really disciplined (or has the gift of a caring publisher breathing down their neck for a manuscript), stand-ups can commit to (say) an Edinburgh Festival run. That’s committing to a new hour of material or August is going to suck. Now those try-out nights really need to count.

The best deadlines I ever had were recording dates for radio shows (lucky me), or podcasts (don’t have to be lucky to do those). That mike is going to go live at that particular time, better have something to say into it…

Yes, going to Edinburgh in August is expensive (except when it’s not – be part of the Free Fringe!), but podcasting (for example) isn’t. The Camden Fringe or The Leicester Comedy Festival are also ace and may be nearer and less expensive for you. The Sheffield Comedy Festival is ace squared.

Yes, there’s a cost in time and effort; but whoever you are, what’s the long-term cost of not creating?

PS. Maybe the idea for non-performers is to find a way to involve an audience in your project, whatever that might look like.

How about this for novelists with writer’s block:

I had an idea to start a web company along these lines: You promise to help an author produce a manuscript by date (x). You get the author to give you, say, £1000 (more if you think they’ve got it). Both parties sign a legally-binding contract that you get to keep the money if you don’t get a manuscript of (n) pages on date (x).

I think this will result in a delivered manuscript 100% of the time. The reason that it needs to be a business is that it won’t work if you’re friends with the author. It has to be like “Strangers On A Train”. Maybe authors who don’t know each other could do this for each other via the web – each egging the other on to not complete!

Sounds sadistic, I bet someone’s already thought of it!

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Making Money And Stand-Up

So let’s talk about making money with our creativity.

I have a pet theory that whatever you were doing before you moved into stand-up, that’s how you’re going to do stand-up.

I was singing songs in pubs and clubs, so I approached stand-up like that. Write a bunch of songs (jokes), put them in a running order (set list). Drop the ones that don’t make people dance (laugh). Making money? I’m just happy to not have to pay to play.

Maybe because Jimmy Carr was doing marketing for a blue-chip company, he went straight in at the exec level, figuring out the power structure, befriending gatekeepers and getting ahead.

Before I was singing songs for a bit of money, I had a job. A job is where you have a boss, and if you make them happy you might get a better job, maybe better money.

When we got into stand-up, a lot of us had jobs. Then, when we started getting paid for stand up, we transplanted our job thinking into our stand-up thinking. There’s a boss (a promoter), if you make them happy (by making the audience happy), you get promoted (better gigs – nicer, or more lucrative).

This definitely works and makes sense. We would be nowhere without the circuit and the people who work their tails off trying to put audiences in front of our non-famous asses.

But how do performers like Daniel Kitson and Stewart Lee and Simon Munnery and Richard Herring and… (you finish the list) get to do the art they do? I can’t speak for them, but it seems to me that they didn’t turn it into a job.

It might be design, it might be default, but instead of (or as well as) building a list of bosses and thinking up strategies to please them, they built an audience. Sometimes one person at a time at fringe festivals, sometimes with the help of an accelerant, like TV.

There are two(ish) big companies who own all the famous people, and this duopoly works tirelessly to get their famous people on the TV shows that they make. Let’s not sit around waiting to get picked.

The internet’s a connection machine. “Publish” is a button on a website. You have your own TV channel. You have your own radio station. Go to it!

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