Aus|buhen - To Boo

To be booed for doing a shoddy job at making people laugh, especially if they’ve paid for the non-privilege, is an expected part of the whole stand-up comedy thing. While most people will just sit quietly, feeling the classic expressionless stare will do enough to register their lack of amusement, if some weren’t willing to vocalise their distaste, stand-ups would quickly get comedically complacent. Given, my experience is limited to two gigs thus far - admittedly a pitiful amount - but the fear of someone finding me so unfunny they’d be prepared to stand up, mid-set to boo or shout out an insult, is enough to make me work a zillion times harder on my material. Actually, the fear of those expressionless stares contributes to those zillion times only marginally less. Even more actually, the fear of silence for even a single punch line contributes to those zillions times only a bit more marginally less. Which is silly, because clearly not everyone is going to find everything funny. Still, if you know the venue, you should be able to have some idea of what to expect in the crowd. Common sense dictates you’d avoid clever jokes in the company of thick people, cancer-based quips at Jade Goody’s funeral, and of course dead, spazzed-up kid jokes at the Conservative Party conference. I’ve mentioned to several friends that during my unplanned fortnight in North America (that should be poorly documented on my blog, improvisednorthamerica.blogspot.com as of next week) I’d love to perform at least one open-mike gig in front of a foreign audience. I’ve got at least ten minutes of mildly humorous crap that could potentially be tailored to work in the US, but I’m not sure. One joke I was going to try out at my next local performance was about me being poor and my mates bragging that they’re more well off. A friend smugly says to me, “I’ve just come into some money.” I say “Man, that’s just ostentatious. I have to come into value bog roll and Nuts magazine,” Working backwards, ‘Nuts’ could be exchanged for any local low-grade tit mag, and ‘value bog roll’ to a cruddy American toilet tissue brand. The main question would be whether they’d use the expression ‘come into some money’ - if not, the joke would die completely, leaving me open to heckle and/or handgun attack. Were the whole gig to go totally balls-up, it’d still definitely be an experience! A ton of rappers make getting shot look well cool, and even when they don’t survive usually end up having distinguished posthumous careers anyway. Which would be nice. But this ought to end soon, and I just wanted to say apologies for turning this into another one of those dull talk-about-me pieces. I’ll try better next time. After all, the thought of you - one of my four readers - booing into your computer screen makes me want to cry tears of salty eye-liquid. That’s basically your standard stuff. For tears of blood you‘d need to be enraged enough to send me a strongly-worded letter bomb packed with sharp, peeper-piercing goodness. That’d certainly teach me good. Or well. Whatever.