Getting Naked On Stage

My second month in San Francisco

One of the biggest problems I have as a comedian is silence. I hate silence. And as such I try to block out the silence with as many words as I can possibly spew. When a joke doesn't get the laugh I expected I speak faster and faster until no one can understand me. I lose eye contact with the audience because I don't want to see their blank stares. I wind up mumbling at the stage floor. Needless to say, this isn't funny, so I set out to rid myself of this problem.
 

I started with this joke that I loved, but no one ever laughed at. The joke was part of a series of escaliting one-liners. The later jokes did OK, but not as big as I expected. What I tried was waiting a beat after I delivered it, and the laugh came. So I did the same with each punch line, and it worked. What I discovered was that just because I understood the premise of the joke, doesn't mean the audience did. I don't mean they were stupid, but they had to be given time to work it out in their heads. And when they did work it out, most of them laughed. Since then I saw some old footage of Bill Cosby on the Jack Parr show. I could see him doing the same thing, but he was much better at it. He would wait three or four beats to let the audience figure it out. All the while he had this devilish "I know you're going to laugh" grin on his face. And yes they did laugh. Every time.
 

This got me started on the concept of getting naked on stage. I don't mean taking my clothes off, because if you've ever seen me you know that would be gross. I mean stripping away the fears. My fear of silence for instance. To combat this I performed a pantomime at an open mike night. It did not go ever very well for a variety of reasons, but that's OK. I did two minutes without saying a word. And it was not nearly as tough as I thought it would be.
 

Another problem I've had as a comedian is doing characters. I love character pieces, but I've never been able to distnguish the character from myself to the audience. What helped with this problem was wearing a wrestling mask. I stumbled open these wrestling masks at this weird little Haight-Ashbury shop, and just had to have one. Well it turns out that the mask was a great way to create a division between myself the comedian and the character behind the mask. As I wrote a routine for this character I started saying things that I would never say. This piece got huge laughs. What I need to do now is do a character without a mask, but with some other obvious dividing line.
 

The last problem, OK so it's not really the last, is talking about personal things in my life. To me the funniest comedians are ones who can take painful and embarrising things from there lives and make them funny. Whenever I tried this I would become so uncomfortable that the routine never had a chance to get a laugh. What I tried here was to make up something painful and embarrising and talk about that. THIS EXERCISE DOES NOT WORK! Hey, if they all worked, I'd be on the Tonight Show already. So I still have to work on this one. Maybe next month.