Day 33 - August 9th

Day 33 - August 9th
Did a spot at Monastery, pretty tipsy
Went out to New Guernica with Rach and her friends

        The first time I ever performed stand up was August 15, 2011, but I really didn't start gigging regularly until I moved to Melbourne a year later. This card might be from the first time I'd been to Monastery, but pretty soon I was there every Thursday because it was effectively a sign-up-on-the-night show if you got there early enough. I was ravenous for stage time, but like all new comics I was absolutely awful, so no one wanted to put me on. Micah – who ran the show at Monastery – putting me up almost every week was invaluable experience to me, and an act of kindness that I can only appreciate fully with the privilege of hindsight, knowing now how truly horrific my comedy must have been then.
        It was also in Richmond, around the corner from Timmy, Brodie and Ben's house, which eventually became my house when Timmy moved out and I jumped at the opportunity to leave the hostel and take his room. That was sometime around September; I lived out of my backpack at the Melbourne Connection for two months, and left missing a few t-shirts, some socks, and my favourite pair of Nikes, but I made it.

        One night, during an early period of experimentation, Brodie came to watch me at Monastery – he'd never seen me to stand up before, but he would have known from talking to me that I'd already decided this was something I wanted to for the rest of my life. I remember committing to doing it ten years very early on – I was all in.
        One of the first things I noticed when I started stand up was people would avoid eye contact with me and generally zone out while I was on stage. I know now that the reason for this lack of attention was I wasn't saying anything funny, or really much of anything at all, and most people find it incredibly embarrassing and difficult to watch that. Being an audience member at open mic comedy is one of the most brutal things you can subject yourself to, and I stand in awe of those brave few who do so on a regular basis without the ulterior motive of getting on stage themselves. You people give more of your soul than any performer and ask nothing in return, and one day there will be statues of you faceless heroes lining the streets in place of the disposable stars we currently worship.
        Back then though I had no idea why people weren't paying attention, or if I did, I lacked the capacity to just Be Good At Standup and rectify it, so I was grasping for solutions. The week that Brodie came to see me, my solution was to stop, mid-set, and declare, “I've noticed sometimes at stand up shows people don't pay attention to the stage, and I've found a good way to get people back to focussing is to yell like this: AAAAAAAAAGGGGGHHHHHH!!”
        That was the bit. The plan was I would yell directly into the microphone and then... and then I don't really know what I thought would happen after that. Everyone would laugh probably?
        Turns out they didn't laugh, but they did all jump and hold their ears, because yelling into a microphone makes a painfully loud noise, and it also really bums people out, whether they were paying attention before or not. Brodie asked me after the show how I thought I'd gone, and I sheepishly mused, “I don't think that yelling into the mic thing really worked...”
        He couldn't have agreed faster. It was vigorous.

        That night I learned another truth about starting stand up, which is that your friends are generally excited to come and see you, until they do and realise that you suck because you've not learnt how to do stand up yet, so they rarely if ever come again. You see them less and less, because you're always out doing stand up, and if you're doing it right, you don't have any evenings free to give time to social commitments. A few close friends will always be there, but those who were always on the periphery will drift away, and be replaced by friends in the stand up world.
        Thus begins your descent into a new life.

Click here to read the next part - Day 34 - August 18th