Rust. There was plenty of it. It was a hot room, and I don’t mean that figuratively. And I was the last of 26 comics to go up. So, while the crowd was warmed up in the quite literal sense, it was not ideal.

I did okay. One of the new jokes got a big laugh, which made me happy. I swore not to look at my notes when I got on stage, since I was struck by how often I checked my notes at the Zanies show. (Small aside on that — I watched the bit again to get myself prepped for going on stage and I realized that I wasn’t so much checking my notes as it was just a nervous tic or something. Tonight, my nervous tic was staring at the mic.)

Alas, not checking my notes meant I breezed past some stuff I meant to do. And the little voice in my head reminded me of those bits well after I had a chance to deftly segue into them. It’s not terribly good form to say “Hey, remember that joke I did a minute ago? Pretend I’m telling this one right after it.” So, I did the fastest 3 minutes in Comedy — I think I was probably only up there for a couple, really.

But, all that being said, I didn’t bomb, I was hardly the worst one up there, I got some good laughs, and the only way I’m going to get better at this is to keep doing it. So next week, back to the open mic with a reworked bit.

No audio of tonight’s stuff — the room was dead, the mic levels were really low… nothing worth sharing.