Holiday Gigs!

This week I performed for two Christmas parties. One opened with a prayer, and it wasn't the party in Utah. I suppose it is a religious holiday after all. It's always tricky telling jokes at a party where you know there's probably a couple of Bishops or Priests in the crowd, interestingly enough they usually are the ones that laugh the hardest at the "iffy" jokes.

I learned a lot about myself as a performer this week. The audiences for these parties have higher expectations than ones for a regular night at a comedy club. First of all they pay a lot more, secondly the people who book the gig for you usually talk you up a lot. So I was a little nervous and it made me talk really fast. I told 45 minutes worth of jokes in just about 35. It's easy to get caught up in the philosophy that your strength as a comedian is based off of your ratio of laugh time to set up time, so you end up racing through the setup of a joke to get to the punchline. This can make you come off as more robotic and rehearsed, which is not what you would want from a live performance. Part of the appeal is to feel like you are part of the moment. So another thing I have been working with is engaging the audience a little more, just enough to make them feel a part of the show, but not too much that you loose control to hecklers. Talking with the audience helps make me feel in the moment more as well. I hate catching myself on autopilot and then realizing that I forgot to set up a joke. It's weird when a joke that usually kills gets crickets.

I have one more holiday show planned for new years eve. I think everyone will be drunk so I probably will be doing a lot more jokes about nudity and bodily functions, it's going to be an awesome night of comedy in Twin Falls Idaho!

Venues Opnening and Closing

So the gig at A Bar Named Sue only lasted about a month. The gig at the Complex is still going on on Tuesdays nights though, and since they don't have to pay any of the comics there is not really much risk for them to keep it going. The payoff for the comedians is that hopefully they will build up the fan base for the shows and start paying the comedians. There is also a huge potential for seating capacity there, in the thousands! They are looking at booking bigger named comedians for their larger rooms. If and when they do that the local comedians will have an opportunity to open for the bigger names in front of much larger crowds than Utah comedians are used to having.

In other news, I landed a New Years Eve gig in a country club in Twin Falls Idaho. The last time I performed there it went really well and they put us up in a nice hotel. I'm also booked to headline the West Valley Wiseguys January 7th and 8th.

Comedy VS Football

Whenever football season rolls around you can see a drop in audience attendance on Saturday, Sunday, and Monday night.  Most comedians I talk to are pretty big fans of the game, myself included. It is America's most popular sport. So you would think I would have more football related jokes, but I don't. The only one I have is a pretty lame Micheal Vick joke. It's not even worth me typing it out here. As far as social cometary on the subject I could work on the premise of how popular the sport is but how non of the mother's want their boys playing the game. My wife pointed out how that might be different if they had woman's football and how many girls would love to tackle one another. Personally I would love to see more woman's football. The powder puff games were awesome! I would have been a bit intimidated though if they had girls football in high school to ever ask out the quarterback, especially if she was on steroids and had a mustache. Maybe I'm a bit shallow.

Week off for Halloween

This week I didn't do much as far as performing. I have been building a computer with my brother so I can have more power to write. It is good to take some time off though, there is a point where you are just spinning your wheels. This week I've just spent brainstorming about new things to write about. I have come up with a few new things to rant about...mostly how annoying it is after playing Fallout New Vegas for 20 hours my wife gets all up in my face about not being "productive enough".  She doesn't realize that our new project for the Writing for New Media class is to come up with our own video game idea. I was doing research babe!  I think I have about 120 more hours of research to do for this assignment before I feel like I'm ready to move on to the writing phase. I better get a few more games to play as well. I don't want to pigeon hole myself.

By the way how many times can the Mario Brother's franchise get away with the same stupid set up. The princess should go into hiding. At least the Zelda franchise comes up with different characters to represent Link. I guess it all comes down to brand recognition. Maybe I should work on branding myself. From here on out all of my jokes will be about kidnappings. 

Canceled Gig, Oh Well

So I didn't get to go to Boise this weekend. Apparently the Booker didn't tell the company who hired the comedians that the original Headliner had a family emergency so they hired me and my friend John Moyer. Everyone was cool with it except for one lady from the board of trusties. Private shows are tricky like that, but the booker should have cleared the switch with the company before booking us. Oh well what can ya do.

On a brighter note I got to see Kevin Nealon from SNL and Weeds. He announced that he doesn't really smoke Weed and all the pot heads in the crowd moaned. He said he was getting old and if he smoked weed he would probably get real tired and hungry and how that's a dangerous combo. You could fall asleep with food in your mouth, and that could be really bad cause it could spoil by the time he wakes up, and when he wakes up his first instinct would be to chew the food and swallow it resulting in food poisoning.

I'm working on booking my next WiseGuys headlining gig. Right now it's scheduled for January 7th and 8th. It may move up to November though depending on a cancellation. Either way I need to write some fresh jokes.

New Jokes

Over the Fall break I performed at an open mic and then at the Trolley Square WiseGuys with comedian Karen Rontowski. She is one of the best female comedians I have worked with. You should definitely check her out.

I worked on a couple new jokes this week. My wife helped me with the wording so I have to give her some credit... "One day, my home town had so many childbirths that the water tower broke."
Pause for applause... thank you. Thanks you for reading my newest one liner. I hope it has brought you great joy and will give you something to talk about at thanksgiving dinner. I'm still trying to find out if the joke hits home more in Utah because of all the big families or if it would work anywhere. Well the only way to find out is to test it on the road. Luckily this Saturday I get to travel to Boise to perform for a private gig. We'll see how it works there. 

Also a little side note for Boise, if you are ever there go eat Breakfast at a place called Goldy's it is awesome!  

New Venue "The Complex"

This Tuesday 15 or so local comedians showed up to the first open mic at a new live music and performing arts venue in downtown Salt Lake City, "The Complex". The room set up for comedy nights fits an intimate sized crowd of 200, but the cool thing about this venue is that it has 4 different sized rooms. The same people who book Saltair and The Avalon are booking bands and DJ's for The Complex. There are many artists out there who will draw different sized crowds and you don't want to put 200 people into a room designed for 1200. The largest room at The Complex seats 2500.

The comedy shows are set up for Tuesdays and Thursdays right now. Tuesdays are open mic and you can look up Ben Fuller on Facebook to sign up if you are interested. Or if you want to see a variety of working comedians you can go on Thursdays, shows start at 7:30 and go tell whenever the show ends.

I'm working on a new joke that I tried at open mic this week, "I want to create a reality TV show called 'Kingdoms at War' where groups of people are given Kingdoms to Take over. And here comes the punchline...ready, as the producer I would keep the 'Royalties' HA! get it?"

Anyways puns are the lowest form of comedy they say, but when you can't think of a fart joke, a good pun works great with drunk crowds. Here's a new sports joke for all you soccer fans out there...if you love soccer you'll love my comedy cause I have one really good punchline every 45 minutes.