Sam Spade Comedy

How is a comedian like Sam Spade? I'll get to that.

I did the Velveeta Room this weekend. I hosted the open mike on Thursday, and was MC for two shows each on Friday and Saturday. I did Sgt Hardwick again, since I really think he's the best thing I can do for 10 minutes of paid comedy.

Last Sunday, I did the Sarge at the Cap City open mike. Got a very good spot in the middle of the pack -- that hasn't happened in a while. Ever since Scott Hardy left, they have consistently put me as one of the last five comics. As a result (at least partially) I have rarely done that open mike, preferring instead to use their Comedy Gym Showcase. At any rate, the Sarge was fantastic, and I felt like I was warmed up for the Velv.

Thursday open mike at the Velv did not go well. I stammered over lines. I had a couple of new jokes I was going to try out in case the room was mostly comics. It was, but I screwed up the ones I had the balls to try. I had lost the respect of the audience, and that makes it difficult to be in front of them for the full two to three hours. I wasn't happy with it. Still, a good portion of the audience stayed the whole time, and left happy. So it wasn't all bad.

Two shows Friday night, both were bad. Patrick Christmas was at one of them. The thing that struck me most of all was that when I performed the song "Believe", nobody got the punch line. How was that possible? I understand if you don't laugh out loud, but I got the genuine impression that nobody got it at all. I've performed it many, many times, including four as the Sarge, and this was the first time that's ever happened. And it happened twice.

For the late show, I brought in the Taco Bell bit, which is material-driven (rather than character-driven like most of the Sarge's act). The audience seemed to like that more. Could it be that the opener needs to be material-based comedy? That an audience can't handle the character (Napoleon Dynamite-esque) stuff? That they're not in the right frame of mind for that yet?

I considered dropping the song for the second day. It failed twice in a row! But I know that it's funny. There had to be something I could do better. Plus, I suspect people who work in the place hate the guitar stuff, and would be very happy if I took it out. In the end, I decided to keep it in there, mostly because of the selfish reason that it's what I eventually see myself doing. I want to become good at guitar comedy in particular, and I had better not let just two audiences get in my way. So I kept it in, but I was nervous.

The first show on Saturday was sold out, but I wasn't very good. However, the song went over pretty well. They still didn't any entertainment out of the Sarge character. And Wes Reynolds and Steven Harrison were in the audience. It felt bad, but at least I could feel better about the song. Still, the Taco Bell stuff did the best.

Alright. Now I'm feeling really down. I had three mediocre-at-best sets in a row, and I've only got one more. The crowd is quite small, less than 20 people, making it really hard to knock it out of the park. What do you do? You do the same act you've been doing, because that's all you can do, but the pressure is off. No matter what, your obligation is over in ten measly minutes. You might as well have some fun with it.

I decided to slow things down. Take some time to introduce myself as Hardwick. Maybe they'll be with me when I do the Midget & Nun bit. And it worked. I had a very good set, which is difficult with such a small crowd. I even got the impression that they liked me more than special guest Doug Mellard, and maybe as much as they liked Jeremy Neal. They shouldn't have--I'm nowhere near where they are. But I delivered for that one show.

My dignity salvaged, I can now spend this week knowing that the last time I performed I did pretty good. Of course, I might have trouble convincing Steven, Wes or Patrick, but I know.

The headliner for the whole weekend was Jim Hamilton. I would classify him as partially a character-driven comic, like the sarge. But his character is like a dark version of Emo Phillips. Every show, he delivered thirty minutes of his material, and it was fun to watch him work. We've never been close personal friends, more like professional colleagues. My impression of him has always been that he takes comedy very seriously. He seems depressed a lot. Sort of sad, but driven.

Anyway, I asked him how he felt about his show, and he seemed very disappointed. He said the crowd was pretty unruly, which, of course, makes it tough on a comic who's trying to perform tried and true material. Still, I saw the show, and thought he did fine. Maybe he didn't knock 'em dead like he did for his Comedy Central Premium Blend taping, but still, he held a room full of people for the entire 30 minutes and kept them entertained and drinking. What more is there?

Of course, there's much more, but I thought he delivered that, too. I was particularly intrigued by a crowd control bit he did. The bit is, he asks the audience for a town to make fun of. They answer with one, like Pflugerville, and he says, "Okay, Pfugerville. You're going to love this one. True story! I'm driving throught Pflugerville..." It's a good joke. But one unruly crowd gave him College Station. He starts using it, and part of the crowd groans. He asks for another town. None comes. He keeps at in, and finally somebody says "Kerrville". Now, the audience has lost the train of thought and doesn't remember where he was going. Technically, the setup is out there, and all he has to do is deliver the punch, but the audience isn't ready yet. Jim slowed things down, said "Okay Kerrville. Kerville? Am I pronouncing that right?" Of course you are, Jim. No one on this planet could possibly mispronounce a name that easy. But it was a great tactic. The audience believed it, and I'm convinced that because he slowed the pace down, he reminded them where they were in the joke. If I had done the same bit, I would have rushed into it, and the joke would have failed. But instead, he delivered it masterfully, to a great result.

What I'm getting at is that there was a lot he could have felt proud of. Instead, he seemed disappointed and depressed. But why? Didn't he hear the applause and the laughter?

Here's my theory: applause is a Maltese Falcon.

As comedians, we're always chasing after applause. More and more of it. We think it's going to make us happy, like it will make our lives worthwhile. But when we get it, we realize that they are applauding what we did, not who we are. They are saying "That was funny," not "You're a funny person". That makes it hollow and meaningless. Because once you get your Maltese Falcon, you scrape away some of it's golden paint and realize it's made of lead.

Sometimes, after a great performance, I have felt an immediate euphoria followed by a huge crash. I'm convinced this is why Kirk Cobain felt it necessary to kill himself after achieving the pinnacle of a rock star's career.

I don't think anybody else understands this. I have trouble talking about it. I can barely explain it myself.

So if applause isn't worth it, then what makes me happy? Why perform at all? There's one thing above all else that gives me a lasting high: it's when I do better than I expected I could have. Like the time in high school, junior year at the high school state swimming championships, when in the finals I really, really wanted to break 5:00 in the 500 free. A 4:59.9 or 4:59.8 would do, and a 4:59.5 would be even better. And after the race, I looked up and saw, to my own shock and amazement, 4:53. I never saw that coming, and it was a big enough event for me that I'm writing about it to this day. Of course, in college, I swam much faster, getting 4:39's unshaven. But the expectation-shattering race is what I think of as my greatest.

If you're a comedian, don't get depressed by an audience response, ever. It's fleeting, and it doesn't mean anything. Keep working. But remember, you're doing this to try to impress yourself. You know what you're capable of, and sometime, you're going to be dead wrong. That will be your greatest moment.

Comedy -- it's the stuff dreams are made of.

P.S. -- I apologize for spoiling the ending to the Maltese Falcon, for anyone who hasn't seen it yet. But for crying out loud, it came out in 1941, and the statute of limitations on giving away the secret has long since past. In another 50 years, I'll talk about how comedy relates to the Sixth Sense.

Spite Club Defeat

Tim Speer eliminated me from the Spite Club tournament.

No regrets, really. I put a lot of effort into it, which was no easy task so close to the release of LabVIEW Constellation at work.

Short synopsis: I had an awesome opening statement. Tim didn't really say much, and I had trouble getting the end of my statement out, because the audience kept laughing for so long. Tim became the first contestant ever to sweep the trivia round, 5-0, which kind of rattled me. As for insults, Tim had more depth than I did, although I like the quality of mine. He won that round, also. At that point, the match was decided, but I managed to beat him in the freestyle round.

Now, for a breakdown. My opening statement was something I had come up with a long time ago, and never found an appropriate time to use it until now. I had tried writing something specific to this matchup, something like "Who's the marketing genius who dreamed up a comedy contest between a computer programmer and a bureaucrat?" I worked on it a bit, but wasn't happy with it. Ran out of time, and went with the bit I had written before:

Zucchini. Asparagus tips. Salmon Filets. Low-fat Triscuits. These are just a few of the items on my grocery list for this week. My opening statement, as well as dozens of well-crafted insults, it seems, are in my other pants. I hope I win the trivia round.

I don't know how well this line gets across when read, but when it was spoken, it developed a lot of dramatic tension up until I said "pants." At that point, people started laughing. They didn't all get it at once. It caused a gradual buildup of laughter, not an explosion. And it took forever to recede. I had to be very patient to get out the "trivia round" sentence, which was only there as a denoument.

As for the trivia, I had actually studied up on what I thought Bearden was going to ask. In the past several sessions I've seen, he has always asked questions that reflect his liberal politics. Well, this was a great week for him, because Bush had nominated a completely unqualified woman, Harriet Miers, to the Supreme Court, and Tom Delay was finally indicted. Also, Matt tends to ask questions based on the contestants' last names, so I brushed up on my Britney Spears trivia. Matt didn't ask anything like that.

The first question was to name the four teams still in the baseball playoffs. Since I ignore baseball at every opportunity, I lost that one. The next question was what sporting event happens for the 100th time this weekend. I didn't know it and Tim did -- the Red River Shootout (which I'm watching as I write. Oklahoma is getting stomped). Should have read the paper this week. I knew the year Kirk Cobain died (or rather, my guess was correct), but Tim rang in before I did. For the last question, I decided to try to be funny rather than take a guess. (I had forgotten to try to be funny at my last Spite Club appearance.)

I had some very good insults for that round. My favorite, however, didn't get much of a crowd response. It dealt with the fact that Tim has only had three girlfriends in his entire life:

Tim has only ever had three partners. His girlfriend, on the other hand, well... Let's just say that Tim has fewer notches on his bedpost than she has actual bedposts, if you know what I mean!!! Ha,.... She has four, just like everybody else.

I love the fact that it sounded like a slam, but ended up being a nonstatement when you thought about it enough. I didn't want to make fun of his girlfriend being a slut, since most likely she's not, and I'd consider that out of bounds anyway. But I think the line is written brilliantly.

The audience, of course, disagreed. Who's right? I'm not sure. I suspect that if I had adjusted the timing a bit, maybe putting more time between the slam and the number "four", so that the answer occurs to the audience right before I say it, that it might have gotten a much better response. Too bad I won't be able to try this line again -- there's really no place for it. Spite Club is special.

The freestyle round was the most interesting.

Rewind the clock, and I'll discuss what I went through in preparation for that round. Let me begin by saying I had no idea what I was going to do until the day of the event.

Actually, I had lots of ideas. Too many. They all seemed good, not great. I stayed up late the night before, and I had a good number of punch lines for each idea. There was no stand-out. One idea was to give the closing arguments in the libel case Louis v Kordelski. That would have been very funny to comics, but not so much to anybody else.

My first idea was to sing the song "El Paso" (Tim is from El Paso), only give an alternate meaning to all the lyrics. There is a lot of inconsistenchy in the song, and I would have plenty to play with. It would have had a good amount of theatrics, a big musical number, which is always good for a freestyle round. I even had Todd ready to play the guitar for it. But I had trouble making it funny enough.

Eventually, at 2 in the morning before the event, I decided I would try the "Gunfight in El Paso" skit. I figured it was good enough, and it had the best "likelyhood to be pulled off: potential quality" ratio. There were only 19 and a half hours before the event, and I hadn't even started the script. Still, I went to bed.

My plan was to take most of the day off work, to get a skit done, buy costumes, polish up on insults, whatever it took. Unfortunately, LabVIEW was trying to release, and my boss Jon was not very receptive to the idea of my taking the day off. What if I got a bug report? So instead, I stayed at work, and instead of testing, I worked on my script. I took an extra-long lunch to track down some western costumes. I'm lucky this match was in October, because several shops had Halloween on their minds. I found cap guns and a crappy little kid's sheriff's outfit at Kay Bee in Highland Mall. Got a quick lunch there. Found more (and more expensive) cowboy stuff, and a crappy Pilgrim outfit (which Kerri used the bonnett) at Party Pig on Andersen near Burnett. In all, spent $60.

In the morning, I asked Kerri to be the damsel, and I got in touch with Todd and made sure he could still do it. The two biggest punchlines I already had in my head, and they came out easy. I had two major trouble spots -- how to get Kerri's character off the stage, and how to end the sketch. I figured the most important was the ending. I hit that one first.

I called Matt at work from a privacy phone near my cube. We had talked about the sketch before, when he came up with the idea that the gunfighter had to be just like Tim, but more so, not just in the soft-spoken way, but in other ways too. (Therefore, I had to use the insult round to set up what I was going to do in freestyle. I got dinged on two of the insults that were weak, but I had to do as a freestyle set-up. No regrets.) But how was I going to end the sketch?

Then Matt said this: "No matter how good you think you are, there's always one more..." I knew what he meant. I remember it from a karate kid movie, or something, but I remember the moral. And it was a great conclusion to the sketch. When you apply the concept of "there's always one better" to the idea of being a shitty comic, you get that there's always a worse comic out there. My addition: "unless you're Matt Kordelski", or fill in the blanks with whomever you want to make fun of.

So I had my ending. Sort of. I didn't know who I was going to make fun of.

I finished typing out the script, did some clean-up on my insults, and headed out. Skipped dinner. Got my props together. There was one insult I was going to use, that didn't make it into my printed out copy -- only the setup did. I figured I would remember it and be able to use it on stage. (I was wrong. When you're nervous and on stage, you're using your other brain, which doesn't remember stuff it has to reason out.)

When I got to the venue at 9, neither Todd nor Kerri was there yet. I was nervous out of my mind. I didn't think we were going to have time to run through it in order to make it work. I was bouncing off the walls. Drinking Captain and Coke to try and mellow out, but still stay awake. Todd showed up first, and we went through his lines quickly. Then Kerri showed up, and we went through hers too. I said that even though it wasn't in the script, that her character should leave the stage for no explained reason, and that I would, at that time, try to deflect audience attention away from her. (This ploy ended up working, as far as I could tell.)

I also realized that I had forgotten a prop. Todd was supposed to have a feather duster with him during the gunfight, to signify that he was even more domesticated than Tim. We had to scratch that joke, which I really kind of liked. I also scratched a David Cole cut-down.

I asked to go second in the freestyle round, since I had to make a costume change. Tim and Rabon allowed me to go second for everything.

You already know what happened in the first two rounds. Fast forward.

So I go backstage while Tim is presenting his freestyle round. He has some videos, commercials for fake products, that he's showing on the TVs in the club. Nothing was directed at me, and he had actually shown at least one of the videos before, in his Spite Club match against David Cole. I thought this was kind of cheap, since I viewed Spite Club as more of a comedy writing exercise than anything else. I think a lot of the audience felt the same way. At least my Spite Club was tailor-made for him, so they knew I had to put in a lot of work to come up with it. I think the audience respects that.

While Tim is doing his stuff, I'm going out of my mind. I'm so insanely nervous. My mind was going through a "this is going to suck" phase, which had slashed any confidence in the material. The worst part was I had two friends, who had volunteered to help out, and it was going to bomb. They were going to look terrible, all because they tried to help me. I was like an inadvertent Judas. Like Hitler, fighting a war already lost, in order to punish troops that he felt let him down. I was bringing my friends down with me. That feeling was unbearable.

I tried to look confident, for Tim and Kerri's sake. It wasn't coming through. I think my Turrett's syndrome started coming out, when I would try to say something positive and in the middle, almost inadvertently, I would exclaim, "this is going to SUCK!" I followed it up with, "Well, since it doesn't matter, let's just do it as quick as possible, don't take it seriously, and have fun." And that helped. A lot.

They had trouble with the A/V equipment. John came back and asked if I was ready. I said yes. Then they fixed the problem (the CD wasn't in the player, duh). I felt like a condemned man, and the governor keeps calling as a cruel joke.

Finally, it was my turn. I added a punch in the beginning -- after saying "I'm going to tell you a story about the old west," I added, "and I'll make it quick, since this doesn't fucking matter." They laughed. It calmed my nerves a bit.

Kerri's part went over well. I think her delivery helped add a goofiness that both Todd and I picked up on.

Todd was a little later than I expected coming out on stage. I mentioned it. It went over fine. Not polished, but still funny.

When I shot Todd down, the audience was laughing pretty hard. I had trouble remembering what came next. While I was thinking, Todd decided just to shoot me. I was supposed to say something... what was it? Then Todd got up, shot me a bunch more times and got off the stage. The audience was laughing hard. I threw my hat in the audience and said Good Night.

We never even got to use the ending that Matt helped me come up with. That was actually a VERY good thing, though, because I realize now that in my nervous rush, I never had figured out who I was going to make fun of with the last line. Sometimes things just work out.

Then it was over, and time for open mike. To be honest, I really don't know how well I did. I know it was a packed house, and I know the club and comics were very satisfied with that aspect. But I don't know what kind of impression I left with people.

Case in point: Bearden said something to me on two occasions later that night, which seemed to suggest that he thought my ego had been shattered. It was almost like he was consoling me. But that can't be; why would he? Even if I felt like my performance had sucked, it's not like that's never happened before. Why would anyone think I need consolation? I could see why people would think I'm so competitive that I couldn't take a loss at anything. But I don't consider Spite Club to be a loss unless the audience isn't entertained, and they most certainly were. Maybe other people are even more competitive than I am, and they look at it another way.

On the other hand, talking with some comics outside, one of them said to me, "how was Spite Club?" And Jeremy Neal intervened, saying essentially that I had the best freestyle round this season. Wow! Really? He couldn't be lying, because there was no reason to. Jeremy also had given me a complement on my freestyle against Todd months ago.

So I don't know how I did. But I feel pretty good about it, and it really was a packed house. No regrets.

So if anybody asks, I'm going to exaggerate how awesome my freestyle was.

I'll muse more about this later. This post is too damn long already.