Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: Blane Savage, comedy, hypnosis, John O'Brien, nlp, Obie, Skid, The Griffin
Today I am on an adrenaline come down after the high of last night’s gig in The Griffin.
We had a great weekend, all of yesterday was spent honing our material and presentation. I can imagine few experiences stranger than delivering to a completely silent, dead pan audience, thank God it was just an exercise! Delivering in strictly limited time slots forced us to focus and cut material out. Surprisingly as the day went on we were filling our time with less and less material as the presentation became increasingly important.
What really brought home to me the importance of presentation over material was watching Skid’s set yesterday evening. I had never realised how funny the contents of one’s kitchen drawers could be! I suspect I learned as much from Skid’s set as from the course. Good material is important, but good presentation is essential.
Learning from each other was, to a great extent what made the course work so well. One does not know what is funny until other people give feedback. I cut quite a lot of stuff I thought was great because it wasn’t getting laughs, in the end my set was very different and considerably muckier than I had anticipated. (Notice the sneaky way I blame others for my dirty jokes!)
Blane’s hypnosis and NLP techniques definitely helped handle the nerves of live performance, personally I’d have liked a little more resource state anchoring, but perhaps that’s just me.
In the end the scariest thing about the gig was that both my wife Neelam, and my boss Sophia turned up. Performing to strangers is one thing, performing to friends and loved ones is something else entirely. Next time I think I’ll make my material cleaner…Did I say, “Next time”? I know this was meant to be just a chance of crossing something off my bucket list, but they say comedy is a drug, I might be hooked! Thank you and good night.
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