The very first Lisbon English comedy jam was awesome
So this past Friday was AWESOME. I hosted the very first English comedy jam in the history of Lisbon! Well, I mean, I don’t know that for sure. But considering English comedy didn’t even really exist more than a year ago, I’m gonna say it’s safe to call dibs on the title. We did the show at 86 Cocktail bar, which was a small cozy venue to do something like this. The show lasted three hours, and we had tons of aspiring comedians.
Here was the format I set up for the Lisbon English comedy jam: Anyone can sign up. All you have to do is show up. Everyone has five minutes with the mic. After you perform, if you’d like to sign up again for five more minutes, that’s fine. We keep doing this until the comedians give up, or the bar kicks us out.
I’ve had this idea for a while, and I had been bouncing it by other comedians who said it sounded interesting, but nobody showed great interest in it. Comedy jams have never been a thing in the Portuguese comedy scene from what Portuguese comedians told me. And pretty much everyone doing English comedy in Lisbon is learning from scratch. So this was a new thing for everyone. But the thing that got me to set the date and push the idea forward was a bunch of friends who wanted to try doing stand up but didn’t feel they were ready for a big show. And many people in Lisbon seem to be caught up with the idea that if you’re not doing a “real show”, then it’s not stand up comedy. I have heard this from other comedians as well.
Fuck all that noise.
The gatekeeping isn’t going to build a community. I want to get together with comedians, hang out, try out jokes around each other. Get feedback, share ideas, network. Feel like there’s an actual community of comedians, ya know? We have almost nothing here, so we need to start somewhere. At least for English comedy in Lisbon. The show last week where nobody showed up felt like that. We were all comedians hanging out bullshitting and trying new stuff, and it felt great. The jam puts the focus on experienced and aspiring comedians to have a chance to get together for a casual event, and if people want to come to watch, that’s fine. But it’s for the comedians first.
Anyway, my buddy Lee Squires wanted to give stand up another go but in a more casual setting, and he said he knew other people who were interested and wanted to do it asap. Perfect. Fuck it. If just three of us show up and we fuck around on the mic for an hour, I’ll be happy with that.
We had a way better result than that, and it was so awesome!
We had the bar pretty much filled up. A nice mix of experienced comedians from the Lisbon English comedy crew and people were just were interested in trying it for the first time. What I thought was remarkable is that we had a bunch of people in the crowd who had no intention to perform get up and improvise for a few minutes. And they did well! The environment was so warm and friendly that people felt comfortable to get up there and try. For me, that’s the most significant success of the night. It was the vibe that we were able to build for people to feel comfortable and share some of their thoughts and ideas in a fun way, even if they had no material prepared at all.
We intended for the show to be about two hours, and it ended up being about three. Almost all the comedians went up twice. They would run out of material that they had prepared and had just to go up there and wing it. The environment was so great. It wasn’t a huge crowd, but the place was full. And since the bar is small, if one person starts chuckling to themselves, everyone could feel it. When people began laughing together, you got all that energy bouncing at you. It felt soooooooooooo good ahhhhhhhh!
The comedians were all happy. Having a chance to go up twice and perform was a new thing for them. Watching everyone have time to chat with each other about comedy and ideas and doing more comedy stuff during the breaks was great. We did short breaks between every two or three performances. so it gave people a chance to talk about things that just happened
It was a magical fucking night. Honestly, I’m still buzzing over the whole thing. I can’t wait for the next one.