First up, I have to say that hands-down, Mike Birbiglia is one of my very favorite comics. He’s got some killer bits that stand up extremely well to repeated tellings, many of which have become trademark catchphrases that really only a great comic who connects with his audiences can get (and, no, “Git-R-Done” doesn’t count — that’s not a punchline, it’s a tic). If you’ve ever heard someone say “Cracker, please!”, “What I should have said was…”, or flashed the gang sign for Paper Scissors, you’ve run into a fan of Birbiglia. And rightly so. Buy his CDs, listen, laugh. They’re hilarious.

Birbiglia assumes the defensive pose

The one-man show we saw was simply an extension of that. It began quickly and unexpectedly, with Mike walking out on stage with no introduction just as the house lights came down, and he launched into his show. Borrowing only minimally from the established bits you’ll hear on the CD, he weaves a true tale of his battle with relationships, being a struggling comic, and some of the strangest sleep disorders you’ll ever hear about. And while it’s occasionally touching, it is consistently funny. I’ve a personal peeve when I find comics-turned-monologists getting just a bit too maudlin in their acts, and Mike didn’t even touch on that nerve.

He takes you through the highs and the lows, with the absolute best reactions when the audience reacts with shock to something he said or did in the story, but he always brings you back with a smile.

If you’re here in Chicago, you’re not likely to get a chance to see this again anytime soon (he performed it on 9/11/08 as well, a show I was supposed to go see until an emergency at work got in the way), but should you find yourself in New York, look it up and check it out. I promise you, it’s worth it.

Stace.com is going to be my “professional” site. Also, I started reworking little excerpts from the stand-up bits I’ve been working on and Admiral Sasquatch is where they’ll go. You may see some stuff there that has already been touched on here. If that’s the case, laugh harder. It’ll make the elves happy.

If you’re reading this on facebook, it’s all on the same feed and none of this makes any difference. So, for you, here’s a dancing robot.

I’m planning on going to the Edge Open Mic this week and try to shake the rust off again. Will post updates as warranted.

Almost every eulogy and obituary I’ve seen on the talking picture box and the interwebs makes mention of his Seven Dirty Words bit, but he was much more than that. He was a great observational comic, a gifted wordsmith, and shied away from nothing. The profanity was nothing more than a tool in the toolbox, and he often used it to poke fun at society.

One of his bits that I always held close as a personal philosophy centered on how words in and of themselves are meaningless and harmless, and therefore inherently inoffensive. Context is what should offend people, not a word. I can use a string of profanity while praising you to the highest levels, and I can not utter a single four letter word while belittling and insulting you, and in this so-called enlightened age it’s the former over which people will get their panties in a bunch. It’s ridiculous.

Alas, now there’s one less person praying to Joe Pesci. I guess I should start.

I also have errands getting in the way, so all in all it’s just not a good week for it.

Next week, back to it, with new material.

(A) WTF is up with that picture on that story?

(B) That man is far too happy about tomatoes.

Link to full story.

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.

Last week, I went to the Edge Comedy Club for their open mic to check out the room and the crowd, but not perform. It was a good crowd, friendly and supportive, which is no doubt partly because most of the audience were either performers themselves or their friends. But it was certainly an inviting atmosphere.

So tonight, after work, I’ll go try out some new material and a slightly different take on performing than I took in my graduation. I still need to find my voice, and this is really the only way I’m going to. So there’ll be some reworked stuff from my first bit and some new material. Not a lot, though – it’ll only be a three to four minute set.

Still, it’ll be good to do it again. Hopefully, I’ll have audio to post.

For those who are interested in my thoughts on the process and the performance, read on. There’s nothing funny in there, it’s just a deconstruction of the whole experience.

The Process

The class was an interesting exercise in juxtaposition. You’ll be told in one minute that the class is a warm, happy, and supportive atmosphere, and in the next minute get an entirely different vibe as you’re torn apart. You’ll be told to be yourself, then be given myriad suggestions on a direction to go that’s not in any way what you are.

Let me be clear — I’m glad I took the class, my graduation was a fantastic evening, and I thought I did pretty well. Would I recommend this class to others? That’s a tough one, and it really depends on the person. You really do have to be good at taking criticism, and not all of it is constructive. You’ll deal with a teacher who’ll go on about how much he loves comedy, and how much fun the career is, but you can tell he doesn’t believe it himself. It’s clearly taken its toll.

You will be prodded and shaped and molded into delivering a 5 minute set in front of a primed audience. Whether or not that set is you or the stage persona you want to be is an afterthought — it will be what the teacher thinks you should be. I watched classmate after classmate be advised to go in directions in which they had no interest or experience, based simply on how they look, or what their first impression on the teacher was. So the guy who looked like a biker should do biker jokes, and the guy who looked like a stoner should do stoner jokes… but it didn’t really seem like an area they wanted to go. Did that happen to me? Not quite, I’ll go into that below in The Bit.

Hey, he gave some good advice. He’s been in the business longer than some of the people in the class have been walking. His standup routines are hilarious if you’re into his brand of humor (which I am), but aside from some very basic fundamentals, they’re not what you’re taught in class. The class primes you to be a five minute Jay Leno, or a Bob Zany, or a Rodney Dangerfield — a nonstop barrage of setup-punch, setup-punch, setup-punch. Don’t waste words, if it’s not a setup or a punch, don’t bother.

That’s not the type of comic I want to be. I’m not entirely sure what kind I do want to be, but I’m reasonably sure it’s not that. I know who I like, and what it is about their style that I like. I like Jake Johannsen, because he’s a gifted storyteller, an incredibly funny monologist with a killer delivery. I like Brian Regan because he’s funny as hell, completely clean, and unabashedly goofy. Jim Gaffigan is my hero, because he can do 4 minutes on bacon or Hot Pockets and have you in pain from laughing.

I like Patton Oswalt, David Cross, Bill Hicks and Lewis Black because they speak/spoke their mind and are/were funny as hell doing it. I like Doug Stanhope because he’s what the others are, but completely fearless. Dave Attell is just hilarious and a wonderfully obscene way, and Mitch Hedberg was the 21st century Stephen Wright. I could go on naming comics, but it boils down to this — my tastes are all over the board.

So, as I said, I don’t know what type of comic I want to be, but it has to be natural and is has to be me.

The Bit

Which brings me to the bit. Is it me? Yeah, I guess so. But not quite.

I stood on stage the opening class and said I wasn’t quite sure what kind of material I was going to do, but I didn’t want to do fat jokes. Not that I’m sensitive about my weight, mind you, I just don’t intend to be fat the rest of my life and don’t want to lose a bunch of material because of it. I was being led in a direction of playing up the fact that I’m Canadian. I tried that, but my beginner class graduation showed me that I just wasn’t interested enough, or couldn’t find enough seeds from which to draw the jokes. Knowing I’d be in front of a real live audience at the end of the class, I decided to take the easy road — I’d do fat jokes.

But that wasn’t my intention going in. I wanted to focus on weight loss instead — that way I’d have material whether I was fat or not. I worked my bit over and over, finding the weak jokes and rewriting or replacing them. As luck would have it, my travel schedule combined with the fact that there’s not enough time to get everyone up on stage every night, I didn’t actually get much stage time in class. I’m not complaining, mind you, because every time I did get up it was a good thing/bad thing kind of deal — I’d find out what worked and what didn’t, but most of the suggestions for punching it up were again in the direction I’d felt was drilled dry with nary an oil strike. I used some of the suggestions, I tried stuff on my own, I bounced ideas off others, but in the end I’d be convinced I had a great bit until the next time I got on the stage and had it torn down.

My last time on the stage was just before the class, and after that performance I tore out huge chunks and rewrote the rest. I whittled it down as best as I could to fit my personality up there but still be enough “setup-punch, setup-punch” to show that I was listening. But, again, not all the advice was good. I was told I should ditch the “hectare” line, because nobody would know what it was. Meanwhile, it got one of the better laughs of my set, and here’s why:

• People may not know what it is, but they know it’s something metric
• If they don’t know it’s metric, they can figure that out from the setup
• Hectare is a spectacularly funny word

Apologies for deconstructing humor like that, but I wanted to use a concrete example to drive it home. I did all the right things I learned in class (setup-punch, rule of threes), while ignoring what I thought was the bad advice.

In any case, in the process of whittling it down, I had to expand on some stuff, and before I knew it, my deftly written set that wasn’t just a bunch of fat jokes turned into a set that was… well, pretty much a bunch of fat jokes. I didn’t realize it fully until I’d heard some comments from friends on it. They liked the bit, and everyone was very supportive, make no mistake. But more than once I heard “I’m surprised you did a bunch of fat jokes.”

And you know what? So am I. I said in our post-class teleconference that I didn’t think I’d ever perform that bit again. It’ll be my safety blanket for when I need to pull five clean minutes out of my ass (insert joke here), and I might rescue some of the parts I’m proud of (hey, I like the hectare bit), but I think I really want to have a different set worked up in the not too distant future, one that’s closer to the type of comic I want to be.

What’s Next

I get asked this a lot, so here it is. After the nice brain break I’ve been taking for the past couple of weeks to just unwind and soak up the whole experience, I’m going to start writing again and polish up a new bit. In the new year I’ll be going to open mic shows to scout out the venues and crowds, then perform at the ones I think fit. I’m going to do a bit at a variety show they’re having at work (how very, very odd). And we’ll see how it goes.

I’ll be posting any times I’m going to be on stage here, in case anyone’s interested. Though I’ll warn ya up front, most open mics aren’t on the weekends, so if you can’t come out to play on a school night, it’ll be some time before you can see me live again.

I’ll record any times I’m up on stage and share the ones I think are worth sharing.

But, mostly, I’m going to stick with it until it stops being fun. And right now, it’s still pretty fun.