Melt down?
I think you can be taught to write a joke and you can be taught to deliver a joke but I don’t think you can be taught to connect to an audience. That’s really an individual connection. I’m still getting used to being in front of an audience again and I did a night this week where there were a lot more people than I was used to and the jokes were working really well. This completely freaked me out. I don’t know what happened -- it was like I woke up suddenly from a dream and realized I was in front of sixty people who were laughing at me. I was very lucky that I had a ‘hijacked’ (see Jan 4 blog) buddy in the audience who was watching me nodding his head at me. It kept me grounded but I shudder to think what might have happened had I not had a familiar face in the crowd. I don’t know how to make this a universal lesson for others but to say ‘hey this happened to me too.’ I wonder if there’s a psychological name for this. But that’s why we do this open mic, to learn from our mistakes and get better.
Friday, January 11, 2008