Yesterday in preparation for my change to the 9-5 grind next week I decided it would be a good idea to wake up at 7am, despite having not gone to sleep until 2am.
It wasn’t an overwhelming success because by 11.15am I was almost falling asleep.
I decided to put the extra hours I had discovered to good use and get some new material written, intending to try it out at a gig that evening. I actually managed to get quite a lot of stuff written but you’re never sure if it actually works until you try it out to an audience.
I selected what I thought was the most ready for public consumption and performed it to a room full of about ten comics and four real people hiding in one corner.
The majority of what I had written yesterday tanked and I received a better reaction for going off piste and deconstructing things, which was fun but annoying that the adlibbing which filled a couple of minutes received a much better reaction that the material I’d spent a couple of hours writing. But the thing with small open mic gigs is that the pressure’s off and if it doesn’t go well then no-one really cares and it doesn’t hurt. Plus sometimes you can find a new way of delivering a line because of the different pace of the gig. Last night I learnt that the way I said ‘GCSE results’ sounded like ‘Jesus results’, although I don’t know if I can actually get any usage out of this.
I really need to write some new material but if I keep writing regularly then I’m sure it will come into existence. To paraphrase the Doc at the end of Back to the Future III:
“My best material hasn’t been written yet… My future material is whatever I make it, so make it a good one.”
Yeah, that doesn’t really work… just like most of my new stuff last night.