Harnessing the healing power of snark
As you may recall if you’ve been reading this blog for a while, last spring I participated in Jeff Justice’s Comedy Workshoppe. For graduation we each performed a 4-minute routine on stage at the Punchline, and while I don’t yet have the video I do have the audio, which I have handily turned into my next podcast offering.
Enjoy!
Last week, the final week of our comedy class, was grueling. We met Monday and Tuesday nights in order to hammer out the final version of our routines, and even though I was a lot better at the writing, it was still a lot of work.
After the whole Having To Swallow My Pride thing the writing was actually the hardest part for me, because I have what I would call a very hedonistic approach to writing. I love words, especially adjectives and adverbs. I love sentences that run on for an entire paragraph, building up in a gradual crescendo that leads to a big humor payoff at the end.
But if I learned anything over the past 6 weeks, it is that writing for stand-up comedy is definitely more of a “wham, bam, thank you ma’am” proposition.
Last night I successfully performed my very first stand-up comedy routine at the Punchline here in Atlanta. Even though I did start to lose all feeling in my hands and feet two people before I was supposed to go on, and even though after 6 weeks I still could not work the microphone correctly, I did remember all my lines, and people genuinely laughed.
It was a pretty huge experience for me, and I still haven’t taken everything in yet. So I’ll be back with a more detailed story after I’ve processed things a bit more and figured out how to get all of the spray wax out of my hair (more on that later).
But I did want to let you all know that I survived, and to say THANK YOU!! to everyone who has been so nice and come by to leave me encouraging comments, and to tell you about this one way cool thing that happened last night.
As I was standing outside the Punchline waiting for the show to start, I looked over at the people standing in line and who should I see but the amazingly awesome Miss Doxie, who it turns out is good friends with one of the other members of my class.
After the show I went up to talk to her, and even though she was having a wonderful time preparing for a fun evening of Not Being Accosted By Me, she was totally gracious and friendly, and did not at all mind the fact that I and my spray-waxed, 1980’s-style, frizzy, bushed-out, bouffant-ish hair (pivotal to one of my jokes) came up to confess our undying blog-love for her. Miss Doxie TOTALLY ROCKS!
