Pump Up The Volume
or, On Doing Five Sets In One Night
You don’t know the last time you did five sets in one night, but as soon as you find out that’s now the plan for your Saturday, you’re thrilled.
SPOT #1
You get asked to do a spot on the 6 PM show at East Austin Comedy Club. By the time you see the text message it’s 6:30. You quickly change out of your dogwalking clothes, spend 5 minutes looking for the house key you misplaced – it’s in the same box where the leash goes, right by the front door – then hustle over to the club just in time to get on stage. You’re a little out of breath.
Your set goes just fine, fine in the kind of way where nobody goes out of their way to acknowledge you once you get back to the green room. A base hit. Not a strikeout, not a home run. You hit a single. You note that you could be a little more intentional about your breathing next time. You always forget to breathe up there. It’s so much easier to forget than you ever imagined it might be.
SPOT #2
You park your car in the garage attached to the Episcopal church, realizing as you pull in that you could try to whisper one of your punchlines from the last set, instead of shouting it. Maybe this will work better, modulating your energy like this, adding some vocal variety. You vow to try it out like this in your second set of the night, at Black Rabbit, where you have a great set. Doing the whispered vocal act-out instead of belligerently bellowing winds up working like a charm. You’re pleased with yourself. Fist bumps abound. You charge your phone for a little while, watch some more comics, then head out for…
SPOT #3
You get a Ditty Dog on the way, an Austin street food delicacy. A hot dog loaded up with four sauces, crispy bacon and onion bits, and cream cheese is the perfect between-sets fortifier, just enough to keep you satiated without overstuffing you.
You arrive at the Velveeta Room, where, like you do every single time you come to Austin these days, you are greeted by a mix of comics you know and comics you don’t, all kind and energized. You’re taking the bullet on this show, going right after a host who does a great job of getting the audience to remember that they’re at a comedy show now, not on 6th Street where they should keep their wits about them. They can relax. They can laugh. They can get on our wavelength.
You have a great set. You’re more patient now. You’re focusing on taking a moment to breathe when you hit a punchline. A joke flops, but you flip the moment back on yourself, a maneuver you are trying to be better about doing these days. You’re getting better at not being defensive when a joke doesn’t land, instead trying to respond to their reaction instead of reacting right back. You used to lash out at them, then at yourself. Recently, you realized you don’t need to give anybody the lash. It’s a realization that’s served you well on stage.
Of course, you’ll strike the joke from your set later. Funny – when you first wrote it, it worked like a charm every single time, for like a month, before it quit working all together. Funny how that happens. Into the “REVISIT” folder it goes.
You call a Lyft, say your goobyes, and head right back out into the world for…
SPOT #4
But you put the wrong address in for the Lyft for East Austin Comedy Club, so you have to call another one as soon as you realize that this abandoned house you’re being dropped off in front of is not the comedy club you were at earlier this evening.
You get there in time to see your friend Dean do a set before you go on. Dean – who has previously given off exclusively good ol’ boy energy, fueled by the westernwear-only aesthetic and his known affinity for race cars and rodeo – is going more quiet and introspective than you’ve ever seen him before. You think exactly what the audience must be thinking as he does his set: “he’s going to therapy?” It’s a calm, confident performance that knocks you for a loop. You will never get tired of seeing someone’s comedic evolution.
You talk to Dean and the comic who’s following you outside for a few minutes after his set, the conversation breaking up mid-sentence as all three of you realize that you’re being called to the stage. You sprint back inside and practically leap to the stage, accidentally knocking the stool into the audience in your rush. The couple in the splash zone catches the stool mid-fall, helping you reset it back to its starting position. Inadvertently, you’ve given yourself the perfect place to start your set: talking to these two.
You’re connected with the crowd right out of the gate, present and in the pocket. The jokes are landing and the riffs are flowing. It turns out to be your favorite set of the entire night, even though you don’t realize that until after you’re finished at…
SPOT #5
Which you make it to literally right before you are supposed to go on stage. You have enough time to collect yourself and think about what jokes you want to tell at the show where you know you can go dark or dirty because the crowd is expecting it. You decide to bust out a classic: the one about going to Tokyo to shoot a game show and using a Japanese sex toy. Perfect!
But the set isn’t. It’s not terrible by any means; the punchlines generally hit, and you earn a few big, room-shaking laughs, the kind that your Apple Watch notifies you might cause hearing loss if you’re around them too long. But a lot of the little punches in the story that usually get some laughs are met with silence, and the closing line doesn’t work almost at all. You acknowledge it, which gets a laugh, then get off stage, trying not to Monday morning quarterback the set in the immediate aftermath. This winds up being easy: you’ve got plenty of friends on the back patio at The Creek and the Cave that you can talk to until your parking is up, then another phone call with your wife from the P. Terry’s Drive Thru, where she pines for their cheap, delicious french fries and thinks out loud about whether or not she should use her extra ClassPass credits on 60 minutes of compression therapy.
The necessary reflection comes the following morning, after you’ve fed and let out the dog you’re housesitting, then fallen back asleep for another two and a half hours, and woken up again. In your morning pages, you remind yourself that your sets are better when you give yourself the room to genuinely connect with the crowd, to be patient, to loosely plan instead of tightly trying to control an outcome. This, of course, is a pretty base-level analysis. You’ll get into the nitty-gritty later when you listen back to these five sets, take notes, and cross-reference the material with the transcripts.
For now, though, you can take solace in the volume of sets you were able to do here tonight, and appreciate the volume to come. Three sets tonight, another three each on Monday and Tuesday, and a cap to your five days in Austin with a set on one of your all-time favorite shows, Buzz Kill at the Buzz Mill.
You’ve been thinking a lot about making good use of your time on stage lately, having returned to LA a month and a half ago, where by the very nature of your place in the scene, you are forced to focus on quality over quantity. There, in your home scene, you aim for a floor of five sets a week, usually a mix of booked spots, drop-ins at workout rooms, and open mics where you can trust the taste of the comics who show up. As you sit drinking your cold brew coffee and watching the dog sunbathe, you are grateful for a chance to hang out in the pressure cooker for a few more days, to let quality meet quantity for a brief moment in the late-spring humidity of a long holiday weekend.
WHAT ELSE?
I’m still in Austin until Wednesday night, then I’m in San Diego on Thursday, and Dallas on Friday. Check out my full show calendar here if you want to see what else I have coming up for June and beyond.
After a post-Netflix Is A Joke Festival breather, WRONG! is about to kick into high gear for the summer. Check out our tour dates below and come see us if we’re coming to your city.
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Until next time, thanks for reading, I’m glad you’re here!