Three minutes to glory
I watched a friend of mine flame out on stage at Harvey’s a few months back. A friend of his gave him an opening slot just so he could cross it off his bucket list. I came out to support my friend and to see what local comedians were up to. It was equal parts enlightening and depressing.
Comedy is a tough thing. If you don’t believe me, go watch Comedian. It’s taken me until the last few years to develop a coherent thought on what makes comedy so difficult. Here it is. You know how you can flip on the olides radio and hear a song from twenty, thirty, or even forty years ago and you still enjoy it even after you’ve heard it a hundred times? And how you’ll pay over $100 to go see that guy sing that same song again (*cough*Springsteen*cough)? Well it doesn’t work that way with comedians. Every time you see that person, you expect to hear something new come out of their mouth. And if they spend a night telling old jokes, they’ll get booed off the stage. And if a comedian rips off another comedian’s joke, they’re instantly blackballed. But if Johnny Cash sings Nine Inch Nails’ “Hurt”, he’s hailed as a genius.
I saw Dennis Miller several months ago at Spirit Mountain Casino. He did about a 45-minute set. He kept it together by working off a wrinkled sheet of paper he kept on the stool on stage. He’d tell a couple of jokes, then refer again to the sheet to remember what the next joke was. It’s the same thing any band does when they’re on stage. Yet when I saw Miller do it, I cringed just a little. And he told at least one joke I’d heard him tell when I saw him two decades ago at the Schnitz when he opened for Louis Anderson. A sin? Heck no. It was still a good joke. And if you can go twenty years between telling the same joke, you’re a better man than I.
I’ve been listening to the Adam Carolla podcast for the past few months. I like Carolla because he can riff on anything at any moment. And the podcast format suits him to a tee because he can go on for as long as he wants on anything he wants. The guy is equal parts genius and fool. I dig him.
Anyway, he had Brad Garrett on last week. They talked about their various TV projects and started riffing on unfunny executives. In the middle of his rant, Carolla gave me a little nugget to chew on. He said something to the effect of “rather than taking some time and working up a three-minute bit for an open mic night, TV executives are concerned about story.” The “three minutes for an open mic night” thing got me to thinking. Could I put together three minutes? Getting back to the music analogy, it’s sort of like writing a single song. Yeah, it’s different, but the craft and care are similar, aren’t they? Not that I’ve ever written a song…but…
I digress.
So add that to the list for the summer. Come up with three minutes to perform on someone’s open mic night at the end of the summer. Where do you even do open mic in this town?
THe bar that is one block south of the Dixie (I can’t remember the name) does an open mike for comedy every month.
Too bad you didn’t say something sooner – you would have been a shoo-in for this month’s Back Fence PDX.
You could have done 6 minutes of improv on the theme ‘CAUGHT RED-HANDED’, no? (I’m betting you’d have been able to make it work…)
You speak, I suspect, of The Boiler Room. I found about a half dozen little places around town that host open mic nights on various nights of the week. I’ll check them out and get back to you.