Stand-Up Show recap

So last night my friend Eli and I went and performed a little stand-up at a bar near where we live called Shea's. It was quite possibly the most confusing emotional experience of my life. Allow me to explain.

When you do stand-up (or at least I do) the adrenaline really kicks in. For about 2 hours afterwards you are really wired, and depending on if you killed or got killed you are either really high or very low.

So last night I performed and I did a really great job, I thought. But the rest of the night before then had been such a massive disappointment that it ruined the night for me. I killed and I felt like crap afterwards.

First off the MC was a dick to me the whole night for no reason. I showed up an hour before the thing started and even though I was the first comic there the MC seemed to arbitrarily pick the order of who went (even though he clearly wanted to get some people up in the first hour) and I ended up going 2nd to last over two hours after the show started.

But that wouldn't have been so bad, if virtually everyone before me didn't completely suck.

Of the 14 or so acts before me there were basically two types of bad: People who thought they were funny and people who didn't know what being funny was.

The audience was alright. Not great but it was a very big room and you have to expect that a room that size not everyone is going to pay attention to you. There were probably about 50 people actively listening at the start of it.

But nearly every guy who went up there complained about the crappy, disinterested crowd (and interestingly, not about how they were completely unfunny comics).

My buddy Eli (one of the better acts) who had no idea what he was doing had this attitude like "Please bare with me, I have no idea what I'm doing" and he had good energy so even if you didn't think he was being very funny he was at least endearing.

Most everyone else was somewhere in the spectrum of Awkward-Annoying-Boring.

Out of everyone I could have maybe seen 2 or 3 of them being funnier to the point where you thought they were pretty good if they had a better venue.

Sex jokes were the soup du jour and no matter how many one comic told, the next one would make twice as many like none had been told all night.

The MC (other than being a jerk) was terrible. He did about 5 minutes of borderline funny material when he first got up there (what an MC is supposed to do). Then standard procedure is the MC gets up between each act tells a joke and then the next guy goes.

But not this MC.

He got up there and went for 5 minutes of his own after almost every guy. Even long after he had run out of material he went up there and just talked and insulted the audience for a few minutes.

But the worst guy of the night was without question the guy who went on right before me.

Imagine the most boring, awkward, loser ever. And then sit and watch him talk for 15 minutes at 11PM in a dark room after you've had 5 beers. Asleep yet? The guy got up there and basically told completely unamusing stories to his girlfriend about the Twilight movies and food. At least his girlfriend was laughing, no one else was.

So then I went up there, performed to the 10 people that were still there at that point, and did a pretty good job, a great job if you consider what was up there before me. But because everyone else had sucked so bad leading up to then I didn't even get to enjoy it. Bummer of a night.

A video of the act may be coming soon.