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.