March Madness 7 - Laughs Open Mic

I totally forgot to put up a post about this one. My bad. Actually it's my work's bad, I've been pulling 10 - 11 hour days at the "real" job, and it hasn't been pleasant. That has spilled over into comedy this week for sure, as Tuesday is probably the one and only time I'll get up on stage. Anyways, forget it, just pretend that I'm writing this Tuesday night. TIME WARP!

I need to stop going out when I'm so tired, I don't get anything really good accomplished and it's not like I'm catching up on any sleep when I do that either. It's hard to resist the pull of the open mic though, especially at Laughs, since I know so many people there and I enjoy shooting the shit and talking shop the whole night. I like helping people with jokes and talking about gigs and stuff. There is also enough (non comic) audience to get a decent reaction out of new material too. I tried a new tag to an old joke, which I think went well and I'll try it a couple times as I wrote it. My closer was pretty weak though, but it was new and I worked on it right up until the point I got on stage. That being said, I should have probably done some more writing than I did last weekend. Also another point to (not) going.

I'll say this though, I really like where my stage presence is going. Even without any jokes I felt very comfortable on stage and talking to the audience. I felt that even though I wasn't delivering punch lines people were still enjoying themselves. The problem was, without strong, relateable material, enjoyment never really translated into laughter.

One thing that was kinda sad was I wrote this joke about how I'm a "Magic the Gathering" ex-addict that I was really excited but I knew had slim chances for success. Most people don't know that Magic the Gathering is a strategy collectible card game. So not only do you need to know how to play, but you also have to buy all these packs of cards hoping to get the ones you want in order to beat your friends. The genius is, if you haven't found the card you're looking for, you have to, you guessed it, buy more cards. I was into it for about 2 years in various shapes and forms and probably spent a couple hundred dollars on cards. So for the joke, I wrote a tag (relating to the fact that it's like a drug), which was that "in 6th grade I had to stop because I was up to a five 'booster' pack a week habit." Pack, like cigarettes, but not, cause their cards. I think its freaking brilliant, but I think there are only a few handful of people on the planet that understand what a "booster pack" is. This little gem will possibly never see the light of day again (for a while). That being said, if I ever do a MTG conference, I'm going to blow the roof off that place, and then tap two green mana to bring it back into play. Ya, that just happened!