Sometimes a gig goes well, sometimes it doesn’t. That’s the nature of stand-up and anything else you might call a gig.
For example, on Wednesday I drove for over 7 hours in a round trip to Plymouth to have fun with a lovely audience.
I came off stage after having had a lovely time with them and said what I sometimes say after such a lovely gig. I know how funny I am, and I know how much more funny they made me appear.
Don’t get me wrong, steering a lovely audience who are doing most of the work for you is still a craft, but only a bad comic claims the credit for a lovely audience and blames a tougher crowd. I’m the other way around. Whether I’m a good comic is not up for discussion, either way.
The long drive on Wednesday gave me a chance to listen to School of Rock the musical and do lots of Jack Black style singing along. I went back to the Tenacious D album and tried to remember enough to sing along.
That led me yesterday to record a short, not brilliant, cover version:
There’s a lesson here about learning and rehearsing songs before releasing them to the internet, but this is a throwaway age of fast disposable content, so meh. My claim is that I was testing out a new selfie-stand. Disprove it.
The takeaway message about the evening out in Plymouth is that, on the way home from the gig, I looked at myself for a moment, and felt like me again. For various reasons I’ve really not been feeling myself particularly consistently, and in that moment I felt in harmony with my world.
So What About Last Night’s Gig?
Good point. How can we mention the long, mindful, drive to Plymouth without the shorter drive to Slough last night?
Last night I was due to perform with 4 other acts.
I think the language gives away some of the ending here.
I knew the headline act of old, and realised that I’d already met and had a lovely chat with one of the others once we were in the same room and did that where did we meet, again? conversation. Lovely chap.
The other two I’d not met before, but they were great guys and the right sort of people to team up with in a crisis… which is kind of what we encountered.
Let’s be clear, attending a pub in Slough is not, under most circumstances, a real humanitarian disaster. It’s just something that might not end the way you planned.
In this case, the worst thing that happened is that I set up a PA system in a room that was meant to be turned into a comedy performance space, but which only ever contained families eating, then the absence of those families as I announced the imminent comedy, which cleared the room of people who wouldn’t want to be in there when a grown up stand-up comedy show started.
Turning up to what seems like the wrong room for comedy can be daunting. There’s an existential dread in the soul of most comedians about being asked to go ahead to do a show in a situation which does not afford performing a show. The problem is that this so often happens.
As I had the PA system and was MCing, I also took on the role of show manager. Why not? I promoted myself. Live with it.
I told the acts that we clearly weren’t going to perform in a dining room with families in. Which is why we put a certain amount of effort into announcing what was going to happen, allowing the room to empty, moving furniture around to make it look like a performance space, and then waiting to see if anyone attended.
Quick aside, there’s something absolutely lovely about turning up to some remote location where you see a poster with your name or face on it, and find a room, perfectly set up with an expectant audience to receive you.
In this instance, there was a poster… though somewhat out of date… but the rest was just not there.
I think the worst outcome for a comedy night is to go ahead against the odds and make a nuisance of oneself in a venue. However, there’s a small problem when you show up to a gig, of being paid for your time. If I show up to a venue, take a look at the crowd and go nope, then I cannot expect to be paid.
So, I managed the situation. I worked with the staff at the venue to present them options.
- Go ahead regardless – to a room with nobody in the seats, but about six people on the periphery who weren’t there for the comedy, but didn’t mind if we did it
- Get paid for NOT doing the show – because there was no audience
- Drum up an audience from the rest of the people present
The staff member attempted to drum up an audience and then came back to tell me they’d decided to pay us off.
The other acts and I were unanimous in our feeling that this was the correct decision and that we all got to leave with our dignity intact. We’d discussed how managing the situation and giving such simple options was likely to give us a good outcome. Apparently this is Choice Architecture. I just thought I was being slightly manipulative.
Don’t get me wrong. Had there been the slightest percentage of a chance of actually performing a show, I’d have taken it. I don’t just go to Slough for fun, you know. However, I think in some gigs you have to weigh up the pros and cons of going ahead regardless, compared with calling it quits.
A Stop and Check Moment
Many of us are eager to please and say yes to things. In our work we don’t want to miss out on being paid for our services. We don’t want to let people down.
This means that momentum and peer pressure can lead us to agree to things we don’t really want to do, or can keep us in situations that don’t promise to work out well for us in the mid-to-long-term.
Stand-up is something I do both professionally and for fun. A good gig matters enormously to me. A tough gig, in the right circumstances, is formative. A tough gig in the wrong circumstances is probably a write off. I don’t need to have my moment in the spotlight. I’m an attention seeker, but not that much of one.
The thing about being this experienced on the circuit (nearly 20 years and over 1400 performances) is that I enter a random situation, good or bad, and quickly go ah… it’s one of these. That experience means I usually know how different options will play out and what the smartest next move might be.
From experience, the likely best outcome of last night was to be paid off, with drumming up an audience a close second. My gig radar told me that there wasn’t an audience to be drummed up. People weren’t at the venue for a comedy night, so any one drummed into it would need working hard to stay engaged.
The thing is, I dropped into Slough last night with a 90 minute investment of time to get there. I didn’t feel under much pressure to do one thing or another. I was chilled out about it. The stakes were low. My only concern was not to compromise the contract between the agency and the venue by being a dick about how we managed the situation. If the acts all show up to perform and the gig can’t go ahead, that’s bad luck, but contractually it’s not the acts’ fault.
However, in most other situations, the stakes are usually higher.
My wife’s setting up a business. I think it’s fair to say that we are setting it up. There’s a lot of cost. There’s a lot to be done. We need to drum up business. Saying no to things is a bad thing to do at this stage. However, saying yes to the wrong things is probably worse.
So, we’ve also been working on what turns out to be Choice Architecture with her business. I’ve been advising her not to give her potential clients a list of all the no she needs them to hear about their impractical requests.
Saying Yes to Mean No
Generally, if someone asks you to do something and you say no, then you’ve got very incompatible positions. They can say ah go on and you can say no some more, or they can say well screw you and that’s that.
This doesn’t often lead to much success for either side.
That said, there’s a lot of failure for both sides in going ahead with something doomed to failure.
So, the trick is to say yes if. In the yes if case, we create an option for yes but the variables are controlled so it can be successful.
For example, we could say I’ve no time this month to come to your house to measure a seat cushion, nor make it. This would leave the customer with no option for their own success and might make them feel like they’re being told off for asking for such a service.
Or, we could say I’ll have time in a few weeks to make that cushion, if you’d like to drop off the old one at your convenience, I can have it measured and the materials ordered in time for when I can do it. In this instance (entirely fictional) there’s a route to yes. The customer may want a rapid home-visit service, but rather than ruling the whole thing out entirely, they’ve been given an option that could work. The available yes may not suit them, but it’s on the table.
Let’s Just Not
However, some tasks that we undertake might still, despite best efforts, prove to be fruitless.
The need to stop banging your head against a wall can be a tough realisation and a grown-up decision to take.
But deciding not to do the wrong thing is as critical as deciding how to do the right things.
Ashley Frieze 