Comedy is one of the easiest forms of entertainment…if done right. All you need is a microphone, a stage, lighting, and a focused audience. But if you have one of those things out of place, you get a very different experience.
When I first started entertaining at some tough bar gigs, my goal was to be so successful that I would never again have to do comedy in a room where you can hear the blender. The bartenders seem to have a great time – they always get it going right when you’re hitting a finisher. No one listens and you look silly. Little did I know that there are room setups that make Blender gigs look easy.
I once had the opportunity to do comedy at a company party on a turntable or Lazy Susan for those of you over 50. The room was stationary, but the part of the floor on which he performed rotated, making a 360-degree turn every 10 minutes. In a 60-minute show, everyone got to see my face six times. There was a wall behind me, so the people on each side of the room couldn’t see each other, which made it even more interesting because it slowly turned towards one part of the room, annoying people who had forgotten it was comedy. , and then I would exit. Sixty minutes of this. The client was drunk when I arrived, so she didn’t see the problem. She was probably drunk when she booked a revolving stage and a comedian, but I can’t be sure. The only thing that saved me was that the DJ was booked through the same agency, so I had a witness to this mess. Needless to say, my comedy on a turntable did not resonate well with the group.
I had another chance to do some comedy spins at an event a few years later, but instead of the floor spinning, it was just me! The company that hired me said that with over 1,000 people attending, they wanted to make sure everyone could see the comedian. So they put me on a pedestal in the middle of the room, with people sitting around me, and asked me to spin while telling jokes. I always wanted to be put on a pedestal, figuratively, not literally. I didn’t know about spinning until I got to the event, and the customer was asking me before the show, “So you think this is okay?” I refused to say yes because I didn’t want to take the blame, so I just said, “I’ll try.” I ended up having a lot of fun with it, and even though the comedy show went very well, I wouldn’t recommend doing comedy. That’s when I decided that being a famous comedian would be very, very useful because I could put my foot down and demand that I don’t turn. But I needed the money and I’m not famous so I did it!
Of course, there are stationary room setups that aren’t conducive to comedy either. Try telling jokes in the basement ballroom of a fancy hotel with poles placed all over the room. I started trying to dodge between them and around them and next to them, until I finally blurted out, “I went to college so I didn’t have to get a job dancing around a pole!” He laughed a lot and I was able to recognize the situation I was in. At least everyone in the room was experiencing my “pole dancing” so that was fun and the comedy show was still great!
And sometimes the stage is a bit more improvised than I would like. I did a comedy show at a college, during lunchtime, where I had to stand on a long, narrow table. These college concerts are called “nooners” because they happen at noon in the cafeteria. Lots of comedians do them and tabletop comedy is pretty standard. Weird. I don’t know how many decibels the noise level got to that day, but I’m pretty sure no one heard my jokes; the students were more interested in their burgers and fries than in my mood. But no one questioned why a woman in her late 40s was standing at a table in her cafeteria. I did my act to the clock. When they gave the 45 minutes, I jumped and left. Now, I do a lot of keynotes at healthcare events, and they have a term called “never event” for a mistake that never should have happened, like operating on the wrong part of the body or injecting the wrong medication. I think that term, never event, sums up these middays.
Other than these places, just a few other wacky comedy settings I’ve cracked jokes in are:
In a bakery in a giant bowling alley with people inside giant transparent bowling balls rolling past me in a warehouse outside in a field next to a canal with huge barges passing by on a floating dock on a lake with the audience on the grassy embankment on the shore in a restaurant while people ate in a restaurant filled with hundreds of statues in a multi-million dollar gym with a $20 sound system on an aircraft carrier with the wall open behind me so you could see the ocean inside a museum , on the steps leading to an exhibition
WISDOM: Don’t overthink things. Some of these situations arose because the client was thinking too much about the audience, such as “Comedy will make students eat lunch.” No, hunger will make the students eat lunch, but the customer was trying to fix something that he didn’t need to fix. Thinking about things from too many angles can make your head spin, even if you’re not cracking jokes on a Lazy Susan!