Tony Cowards
Wednesday 13th January 2010 2:40pm
Wiltshire
1,762 posts
Quote: Dolly Dagger @ January 13 2010, 9:12 AM GMT
I wouldn't recommend a gong show at all; they can be pretty nasty and completely knock your confidence.
My advice is also not to have any friends or family in the audience. This will give you the opportunity to pretend to be super confident instead of the shy person they know and more importantly if it all goes badly at least you'll probably never see the audience again.
At my first gig the compere told me to not give a f**k about the audience. It's not so much contempt, but if you don't care about making the audience like you (my default setting is being true to myself whether other people like that or not) you immediately have a lot of the worry lifted. My first gig went really well btw.
Pretty much this.
Before I started doing stand up I was incredibly shy and had very little self-confidence, looking back now I have no idea how I managed to get up on stage those first few times. The first 50-60 gigs I did I got on stage terrified but eventually you get used to it and as your material and stagecraft improve then so does your confidence.
What I would say is try to do as much learning as you can before you get on stage, practice holding a mic, getting it out of the stand, practice your material until you can say it backwards without a second thought, watch good and bad stand up and try to work out why it works (or doesn't).
I was a comedy fan for ages before I ever got on stage and through watching a lot of bad open spots I was able to avoid a lot of the obvious mistakes that first-timers make.
Most of all though, just do it, book yourself in for a friendly open mic night (preferably not a Gong Show, although there are actually some quite nice ones), if you need support take one friend with you and then enjoy yourself. Once you get that first laugh you'll be up and away and probably will have started an addiction.
Good luck.
Oh and something worth remembering is a Golden Rule that I was told early on;
Look at the audience when you are telling your jokes, don't let your head drop at the punchline and if possible look in this sequence.
Set up - Look left
More set up - Look right
Punchline - Look straight ahead.
That way you are engaging with all of the audience but delivering the punchline to the maximum number of people, no-one feels excluded.
Thanks for the reply to my other post by the way
...This means I will no doubt be pasting bits on to here quite often.