Standup Set #10

I don’t want to bore people with all the details of my nascent standup career, especially not at this point where I’m doing it at such an amateur level and have dubious skills. But I wanted to share something that happened the other day at my most recent show.

In general, my set went really well. While I wasn’t that confident in the material I had written for that week, and I had to actually stop halfway through my set to read my notes for the first time since starting this endeavor, I can still honestly say that I totally killed. This is the first time I can honestly say that, at least in reference to standup. Every single one of my jokes got a laugh from someone, and most of them were received well and boisterously by the whole room. Even the worst acts of the night got a little bit of a leg up from the fact that someone had brought eight or ten people with them, so there was a much higher ratio of normal people to frustrated comedians in the audience than usual. But I like to think that my success was at least in part the result of my giving a better performance than usual.

But I digress. What I really wanted to share was a little magic moment I had. As a comedian, the single biggest thing you want from an audience is laughter, and I got plenty of that. But there’s something else I notice a lot in comedy crowds, where something will resonate with a person, and they will playfully punch the person they’re with to signal something to the effect of, “Hey, you do that all the time,” or “isn’t that weird, we were just talking about that?” And for the very first time in my extremely short “career,” I saw that happening while I was on stage.

It’s great to get laughs however you can, but it’s also nice to be reminded every once in a while that they really are laughing with you rather than at you.

-TC