How not to improvise comedy

Fuck. fuck. fuck. fuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuck. You ever fucked up before? How about in a room full of people? How about in a room full of people with a microphone in your hand and those people expect you to entertain them but you have no fuckin clue what you’re doing? Yeah, that’s what I did. Fuck me sideways this is so painful to watch. Alright, it didn’t start off terrible. I told this story about how I’ve had diarrhea the past few days. Which was great, because I was at the first “Lisbon Shitty Comedy Night”. I had been sick for several days. The day before the show I ended up in the emergency room. The story I shared was almost 100% true. People I talked to after the show thought it was all a joke. Nah, I was fucked up sick as hell. I probably shouldn’t have even been at the show.

So I tried to take some truth from the experience and make it a bit humorous. I don’t think it was amazing, but it wasn’t terrible either. I didn’t need to lean on my cell phone for this bit and It felt really good. it’s fucking hard to remember jokes when you’re up there nervous as hell with people staring at you. Until I’ve had time to actually practice my stuff on a regular basis and get more comfortable on stage the phone is a necessary crutch.

So after I finished the shitty story it was time to bust out the cell phone where I had all my jokes written. As I pull it up to start I notice that it’s ALL BLANK. WHERE DID THEY GO!? FUUUUUUUUUUUCK. So I write all of my stuff on google docs. The nice thing about mobile google docs is that there’s an edit mode and a read-only mode. Usually, when I go up there I have it on read-only, so I can touch the screen all I want and everything should remain in place. For some reason, it was on edit mode when I pulled it up to look. I managed to delete everything while I wasn’t looking. What an idiot.

I don’t get a lot of opportunities for stage time. I didn’t wanna walk off right then and there because I didn’t have my jokes memorized. I know, I’ll improvise some shit and it will be hilarious! It was not hilarious. Okay well, the part where I stood silently looking off into the distance was hilarious. At least to me. It really seems like silence bothers a lot of people. It makes things awkward. I like silence. Doesn’t make me feel awkward at all. It made some people uncomfortable though and I kinda enjoyed that. I might but that one out again one day. See what sort of high score I can set. Walk out there and stand silently for five minutes and then start tellings jokes like nothing was weird about that. I’m laughing to myself just thinking about it.

So I learned on this day a few things. I suck at crowd work. I generally suck at improvising. I need to make sure read-only mode is active, or maybe switch to pen and paper like everyone else. Comedy is hard. Stand-up comedy is harder. Even when I completely fuck up bad in the worst embarrassing ways I still enjoy this. I don’t want to give up.