Getting Started

ok... so a number of potential blog topics ran through my head, and I am beginning to believe this isn;t gonna to be as difficult as I convinced myself it would be... primarily derailing me from any potential commitment to working at anything on any kind of regular basis.

People often ask me where I get material from, how often I write, how I work at it. The shameful answer is that I rarely "work" at it, that most of my "bits" just come to me, and then I might put a little effort in to sharpen them up and tuurn them into comedy.

In thinking about the upcoming Boston Comedy Festival, (http://bostoncomedyfestival.com) I spent some time reviewing my material, plucking out my best punch lines and trying to figure out how to get the most out of six minutes.

It is daunting.

I realized I was going to have to work my ass off... re-write a lot of jokes and change them, condense them re-learn them...argh!!!

This sounds frightenly like...gulp... WORK!

My comedy isn't really designed for contests, for 6 minute sets and for jokey-joke type punchy-punch lines. I have to find a way to craft my material to fit the setup without changing the part of the comedy that makes it mine.

Truth be told, I am lucky to be in the thing, and I am smart enough to know that. Many fine comedians didn't get in, many of whom have more experience and better networking than I have, since I have zero networking right now.

Terrified by the task ahead, I decided to lay out the set I will be performing as the feature at a club called "Liquid Blue" in Portland, ME this Saturday night and focus on that show, which seemed much less intimidating. As I pondered which material to use, I would up with about 45 minutes of material for a 25 minute slot. The process of weeding down the bits to something managble always seems to bring me to a point where nothing is funny, nothing ever was funny, and why am I in comedy anyway?

Fortunately, I have phenomenal avoidance skills, and I hid out in on-line poker tournements for several hours, seqyestered from the danger of productivity. The notion that I am one day into my blogging career and already slacking brought me out of my poker-stupor and into a state of mind closest to the first few moments of consciousness after a bout with thorazine...but here I am, typing away.

Dammit... it feels like time to go review that set list for Saturday.