Blog – Megajon Comedy

THE FIRST TIME I BOMBED

I had performed at open mics where I got little to no laughs, but because I was satisfied with my performance and the crowd brought no energy, I didn’t consider them to be true bombs. Sometimes the audience is just a bunch of other comics waiting to perform and only really care about their own, and aren’t always willing to be supportive. It wasn’t until one fateful summer day that I experienced what I considered to be my first real bomb. It had been several months since I had performed at an open mic and the ring rust was starting to wear on my mind. A female comic that I had a crush on was hosting an open mic at a brewery in downtown Portland and it seemed like the perfect place for me to stage my return to the comedy scene. The first problem when I arrived was that there was no air conditioning in the brewery on an unusually hot day. The host I had a crush on was tending bar and when I arrived I had already worked up a light sweat. She served me a beverage and the open mic started shortly after. I’d been working on some new material, but instead of going with the new jokes, I decided to go with some safe material that I had some previous success with, which would later turn out to be the wrong choice. Each comic had four minutes to perform their set and I recognized some of the other comics from different open mics. They all seemed to be on top of their game, which motivated me to do well when it was my turn. The host introduced me and I strutted on stage with full confidence. I got some audible laughs with my first few jokes and I was doing pretty well at first, but half way through my last joke I started to get a funny feeling that I had chosen the wrong material to perform, which quickly caused me to lose confidence. The combination of my own insecurity, the summer heat and the lack of air conditioning, I started sweating uncontrollably. I started to forget the lines I’d carefully crafted and rehearsed and before I could finish my set, I mumbled something weird and walked off stage awkwardly and for the first time since I started doing comedy I felt like a failure. In retrospect the experience reminded me of something film director Christopher Nolan once said about how careful he is when choosing projects to work so he doesn’t get bored and lose interest in the material in the middle of the process. From then on I vowed that I would always find a way to challenge myself with my material and never go with something simply because it had worked before. I remember an interview with Steven Spielberg about how he lost his motivation half way through filming The Lost World: Jurassic Park, which may have contributed to the ill fated decision to have Jeff Goldblum’s daughter single handedly kill a velociraptor with her gymnastic skills.

MY FIRST COMEDY COMEPETITION

If it weren’t for the organizers of the annual Portland's Funniest Comedy Competition threatening to ban contestants from future performances at Helium Comedy Club if they didn’t show up, I may have chickened out and been a no show that day. I couldn’t be more pleased that I wasn’t. Hundreds of comics from the Portland area entered the competition and on that day I was competing against eleven of them. It was the first round of the competition and only three of the comics among would advance to the next round based on tabulated scores from the audience. Each of the comics had up to four minutes to perform their set and I had two jokes prepared for the occasion. Both of the jokes involved movies, which is a common theme in many of my comedy routines. The first joke involved the sequel to the movie Gladiator. I had performed the joke at an open mic before and it did a lot better than I expected, which is why I chose to include it. The second joke involved the movie The Whale, starring Brendan Frasier. I came up with the joke only a few days before the competition and tested it at an open mic the night before, but barely got any response. I had other material I could have chosen, but a single chuckle from an audience member and the fact that the joke felt fresh to me was enough to convince me to keep it. Because it was my first time performing at a real comedy club in front of a real audience, I made sure to rehearse my set to get the timing down. If I went just fifteen seconds over my allotted stage time I would be disqualified from the competition. I arrived at the club a half hour before show time and waited at the bar, where I saw many of the comics from the open mic scene. A coordinator for the event gave all the comics a rundown and I found out I would be the third comic performing, which I was pleased with. I’d learned from the open mics that going on stage too soon meant performing in front of a cold crowd, and going too late meant performing in front of a crowd with dwindling energy, so going on third was perfect for me. The stage fright was minimal as I waited in the green room for my turn to perform. A curtain separated the green room from the stage where the host told a series of jokes before introducing each comic. There were at least forty to fifty people in the audience, the most I’d ever performed in front of. When my turn came and I went on stage, the first thing I noticed was the bright light shining directly into my face from the back of the room. The light prevented me from seeing any of the audience members, which didn’t happen when I performed at open mics in bars and restaurants. I could hear the audience, but I couldn’t see them, which was a strange feeling. I’d heard a number of professional comedians talk about how they breathe a sigh of relief once their first joke lands, which is exactly what happened with me. The first joke did as well as I’d hoped, based on the reactions from the previous open mics, but my second joke had yet to be proven. The tension slowly built in my mind as I went through the elaborate setup and when I got to the first punch line and the audience laughed, there was another sense of relief and satisfaction that my theory had been proven correct. The few punchlines that followed got as many laughs as I could hope for and the performance was an overall success. Even though I didn’t advance to the next round of the competition, I had just put on a successful show on a stage where I’d seen professional comedians like Michelle Wolf and Margret Cho perform. The overall experience was unforgettable and would leave me with a desire to find larger audiences to perform in front of.

MY FIRST OPEN MIC

The day I did my first standup comedy open mic I began to understand what it must be like to run a sketch comedy show like Saturday Night Live. Growing up I heard stories about how sketches from that show would often get cut at the last minute, which is exactly what I ended up doing with some of the jokes I wrote for what would be my first on stage performance ever. I had moved to Portland, Oregon shortly before the pandemic and up until that point it had never occurred to me to try stand up comedy, despite how much of an influence comedy was on me growing up. I was trying to re-establish my tech career in my new city and was driving Uber for just a few weeks before everything got shut down. Throughout the pandemic I assumed that when things got back to normal I would resume my tech career, but that motivation never returned. After years of bad experiences with office gigs, I was desperate not to return to one. I had spent a lot of time isolated while doing food deliveries and ended up writing jokes in my head about the different things I would see while driving around and imagined performing them in front of audiences. When things opened back up it occurred to me that instead of just imagining myself performing the jokes I was writing, I should try actually performing them in front of a live crowd somehow. I googled “Portland open mic comedy” and found several open mics around the city. I had seen some famous comics perform before, but I had never been to an open mic. I decided I would do some recon and see what I would be up against before I started performing, so I attended some open mics and watched some of the other comics perform and it didn’t take long before I felt like I was ready to try my luck. The open mic I chose as my first venue allowed each comic five minutes on stage and at the time I thought it was a clean mic, so the jokes I wrote didn’t have any curse words in them. Had I not made the decision to sit in my car and rehearse the bits I had written into my phone, my first time performing on stage may have been a complete disaster and I may have prematurely given up on my new project. I had written several jokes that I was planning on performing and I incorrectly assumed I would have time to fit them all into the five minute set. Before I actually wrote the jokes I was watching a YouTube video of an old performance from Norm MacDonald where it seemed like the bit he was doing lasted for five to ten minutes, when in reality it was only two and a half minutes long. My misconception of time caused me to overestimate the amount of material I could fit into five minutes and I ended up severely overwriting my set and including jokes I ultimately wouldn’t have time to tell. The jokes I ended up cutting both involved movie stars, but were based on real life observations I made. The idea for the first joke came from a panhandler I saw on the side of the road at a stop light. He was an old black man sitting on a bucket and holding a sign that read “I Am Bradley Cooper”. I didn’t have the opportunity to stop and ask him, but to this day I believe that old man had the same legal name as the movie star Bradley Cooper and was simply wise enough to capitalize on it. Thinking the sign was odd, I came up with the idea that the pandemic had taken such a toll on the movie star Bradley Cooper that it turned him into an old black panhandler on the street. I expanded on the idea by writing a setup to the Bradley Cooper joke about the different types of panhandlers that I saw on the road. A few hours before the show I sat in my car and rehearsed my set on my phone so I could get the timing correct, and I quickly realized that I wouldn’t have time for all of the material, so I cut the intro about the different panhandlers and kept the Bradley Cooper part. The second joke I ended up cutting involved the actor Brad Pitt. I’d recently seen a tabloid magazine with a caption that read “Why he disappeared.", which I thought was odd because at the time there were promos all over television for a blockbuster movie he was starring in, he had a number of movies available on Red Box, and his face was all over the tabloids. Hardly what I would call disappearing. It was the first joke I ever wrote, but I never even rehearsed it, partly because of the time constraint, but also because it involved me doing an impression of a celebrity obsessed woman and I realized that I didn’t have the stage experience to pull it off yet and I should do something simpler for my first time on stage. After cutting the lengthy jokes and rehearsing several times, I settled on what would be my first set. My first joke involved technology. I had recently got a new iPhone and a new laptop and I was surprised how all of the new hardware included facial recognition software, so I came up with the idea that eventually electronic devices would know human beings better than we know ourselves. It didn’t get much of a reaction, but considering it was the first joke I ever told on stage, I was happy enough to get through it without fumbling the lines. The Bradley Cooper joke, which had become the center piece of the set, came next. I almost forgot the punch line in the middle of the joke, but I was able to recover and get my first laugh, which was a relief because it let me know that the joke didn’t just work in my own head. The last joke I did was a roast of professional golfer, Tiger Woods. The venue was called The Trails End Golf Center in Oregon CIty, Oregon, a driving range where the comics performed in front of a bunch of people practicing their golf swings. Before I actually began performing I had gone to a number of open mics to see what I was up against with the other comics and I had noticed there were a number of kids practicing their golf game, so I came up a joke about how in addition to practicing their golf skills, they should also practice having a sex addiction and cheating on their spouse and taking mug shots of their beat up faces after they’re assaulted for their infidelity. Roasting celebrities for their flaws isn’t normally my thing, but the fact that I was writing jokes in real time about my immediate surroundings was a good sign. The joke got a laugh from the host, and although I didn’t get as many laughs as I’d hoped, I didn’t screw up any of the jokes and I got just enough laughs and compliments after the show to justify continuing my comedy aspirations.