Becoming a Pro
Becoming a Pro
My students always ask me,
“How do you start getting paid shows?”
It’s a totally different game now than when I started. There’s a lot less places to do comedy and ten times more comedians. If you’re good at what you do, eventually you will be paid for it. More than likely, your first paid work will come to you the same way it came to me…Somebody will offer it to you.
Starting the second week of November, I had done every open mike available in the area. By early December I had been on stage 10 or 12 times and they had all gone good. There was no stopping me.
There was Tickle’s on Monday, The Pittsburgh Comedy Club on Tuesday, and The FunnyBone on Thursday. Occasionally there was something on a Wednesday. That’s what happened in early December.
One of the local professionals was hosting a show at a bar in his hometown. There was no pay, unless you were the winner of the contest. He told me,
“I think you’ll probably win and get the fifty dollars.”
He probably told that to everybody because he needed bodies to fill the show. Forgive me for not realizing, I was still young and naïve.
Chrissie and I pulled into the parking lot of the place and there were quite a few motorcycles. As we entered the bar, it was rowdy and smoke filled. A lot of leather with gang names, facial hair and tattoos. The dream of winning fifty dollars was far outweighed by the hope of surviving. [Read more…]
Work? (The Journey Continues)
Work?
(The Journey Continues)
So, I had done well my first time on stage. Surely stardom was right around the corner. I figured I should get in a few more shows to work out the kinks before I auditioned for late night television.
I took the advice I had gotten at the Pittsburgh Comedy Club and headed out to Tickles on Monday night. Tickles was in the basement of the Holiday House in Monroeville. It was more like the downstairs, not a basement. The room was enormous and held 350 or more, depending on how many they could squeeze in to make more money.
It was the heyday of comedy clubs and we would usually get at least 70 to 100 people a week on a Monday night. Once over Christmas break we had 300 which is unheard of for open mikes. Comedians are now doing open mikes to each other when no crowd shows up, which is just a waste of time.
Some of my students have suggested they use these times to help each other work on material like we do in class. They can’t get the majority to agree, which is stupid.
One of the draws of Tickles was that all of the working comedians in town would show up. If not every week, at least more than occasionally. That’s where I first met Dennis Miller.
Upstairs in the main room national headliners would be doing a run of shows. Monday was dark upstairs and a lot of the stars would come down to check us out. I remember Frankie Avalon coming by one night. Another night, McKenzie Phillips was taking her mother’s place in The Mamas and Papas and popped in…I would’ve rather seen her mother but, you take what you can get.
The Drive
The Drive
They say when you die, your whole life passes in front of you. Having never experienced death, I can’t say whether that’s true or not. With a couple of stand up classes starting this week, I’ve decided to let my life in comedy flash in front of me.
Actually, I thought it might be a good time to share my own experience. This way my students won’t make the same mistakes I did and end up unemployed, like I’ve been since March.
Since this is the first of the series, I guess we should go back to the beginning…I really don’t remember much from the womb…I’m kidding, we’re not going back that far. We’ll start with my one year old birthday party…
I am going to include some of my childhood, because it’s an important part of the way we develop a sense of humor. For the majority of comedians, it comes as a defense mechanism. There’s some feeling of inadequacy we are trying to disguise.
For me, I was an overweight kid before video games. The invention of sitting on a sofa and holding a remote has greatly increased the amount of fat kids today. In my class, I was it.
I was shy and unpopular and the few friends I made was because I could make them laugh. It was never anything I would say out loud. I would just say it quietly to the kids sitting next to me in class. Some would laugh, others would say,
“Shut up fatty.”
The laughs were worth the tradeoff.
