A Bit Of A Surprise

It was another good night for me at Acoustic Coffee. I’m not really sure what’s going on, I have historically had bad luck at that room, but the last couple of times, I’ve been very relaxed and the crowd seems to have really enjoyed my sets. Last night was no different.

My set was fairly short. I had told my jokes to many of the same faces in the crowd before, so I wanted to use some new material. I only used 1 joke that I’ve told before, and one that I’ve been rewriting. Other than that, everything else was new. I had a few that I had in mind that I wanted to tell, but when I hit the stage and got into the flow of it, I forgot which ones I wanted to tell. I hadn’t written a set list. So I did what anybody would do in that situation, I made up a couple of jokes on the spot. It was funny to me because I knew that I hadn’t written them out, and oddly enough Dennis Fog told me one of the ones I told was a really good joke. It was strange, but kind of easy at the same time. Most of the jokes were potty humor, and I thought kind of "hackey", but they worked, so I can’t complain.

The funny thing about my set last night was that the crowd was extremely quiet before I got onstage. I already had it in my mind that they weren’t going to laugh at all. The first thing I did was grab the mic and go to pull it from the stand and the cable popped out of it. Nice. I didn’t let it phase me, and from joke 1 all the way through to the end, I had the entire crowd’s attention and laughter. The only thing that didn’t seem to work was a story I told about the crack addict in Toronto, but I was using that joke to stall for time. Knowing that the joke wasn’t working, I bailed on it and said something to the effect that that joke obviously wasn’t good because nobody was laughing. That got a good rise out of the crowd and I saved a shitty joke by calling it out for its lameness.

Next show for me will be another open mic in Gorham next Tuesday the 19th at Sierra. After that I have time at the Portland Comedy Connection on the 28th. Also there may be a trivia night that I’ll be hosting at Bingas Wingas, but I’ll have to wait to hear back from Timmy B on that one.