Open Discussion (longest blog I have ever written) A novel by Rory Scovel

Last night marked the start of my 3rd year in standup comedy. I have completed the 2 year beginner course and I feel as though I have learned more about standup and improv comedy than I could have ever imagined. Granted I don't really know a lot about the booking of shows or how clubs work or what its like to call clubs on a regular basis but I have learned a lot on the performance end of things and what the comedy community in DC is and what it could become. Soon I will venture into learning more about clubs and bookers and trying to get booked, for me personally I'm not ready to dive into that portion of the learning process yet, I'm too fixated on getting my performance style more polished as I still feel as though I don't have a firm grasp yet on how I enjoy performing. What about my performance/material do I really enjoy? That is one aspect of stand-up that is so fascinating to me. If you are open to brutally honest criticism and honest self-evaluation you will constantly learn new aspects of your performance style. Not just what to add to a joke or take away from one but how to build your delivery and overall uniqueness on stage. I have learned recently that some jokes that I wrote a while ago are still really good jokes and work 90 percent of the time but I haven't adapted the delivery to my current style and presentation. This has caused me to sort of go back and forth between delivery styles when I am on stage. I do a newer joke this way but then my tone and persona change for this joke because thats how I have always done it. I have some jokes that I will perform for a really long time because they work and I enjoy them but I do have to adapt them to my current style or otherwise I am performing from a script and just denying the evolution of my style. I don't enjoy being on stage and feeling as though I have to do my jokes the way I have always done them. I don't ever want to appear as though my joke is set in stone and this has to be the way it is said. I am a huge fan of open ended ideas in a joke. I have seen a lot of comics do the same joke the exact same way. Each word in the joke will be said in the same tone as the last time they performed it. I noticed that I do this by seeing that others do this and I'm sure vice versa for them. There is a lot to learn from watching others not just pros at clubs but other open micers. I still perform some jokes like they are set in stone, its a tough thing to get away from. Hopefully I will be able to do so soon. That is sort of where my head is right now. Sort of frustrated because I haven't enjoyed my last couple of performances. I can't figure out why I didn't enjoy them or why I couldn't just turn "it" on when I was on stage but I was unable to. Standup is great because no matter what you think you are doing that works, you will be humbled and thrown right back to the bottom of your confidence barrel(its a real thing in some countries). That is unless you don't give yourself honest evaluations. If the audience didn't laugh, did you have fun? If the audience isn't laughing but you're having fun, I think thats a great thing. With time I believe you will learn to mold the two things together and be really fun to watch. If they aren't laughing and you aren't having fun, you need to reevaluate something you are doing. Its easy to say "they just don't get me," or "the room isn't good tonight." I haven't gotten laughs or had fun the last few times, so I have to reevaluate what I'm doing. Sometimes it is the audience and the room is weird, but if you are saying that to yourself everytime as I did when I started out, you'll get absolutely nowhere and you'll learn nothing about yourself. (new topic) I can very clearly remember the DC comedy scene and open mics and talent level when I first started comedy 2 years ago. I started by going to all the open mics I could to watch and sign up for future dates. I was on a month long waiting list at almost all of the open mics. I didn't even care though. I continued to go and watch. I thought it was the greatest thing in the world. Coming from SC where nothing like this was happening, it felt great to be submerged in a comedy environment. When my month long wait finally ended I was put on stage for five minutes and was plenty happy to get what I got. I was so competitive then. My sister Natalie and all her friends would come to my open mics and we treated it like it was a performance at the improv. I wanted to be the best comic on every show and I rarely conversed with other comics. I didn't move along very fast in the learning process though because there would be 2 week to month long waits between performances. This caused me to wonder if some jokes were funny that one time or all the time. By the time I was on stage next I forgot how the joke went in the first place and would just try to remember it on stage. What is the point of this info? I look at the comedy scene in DC now and realize that things seem to be very different from those days. The 2 week to month long waiting list no longer exists unless you are a comic that can't get 10-20 of your friends to come out and see a show. I see new guys getting 7-10 minute stage time every single week simply because they are able to bring people to shows. Do they actually bring these people? Probably not, but they know if they say they will have a certain number of audience members with them, they'll get stage time. My philosophy is that if the quality of a show is high then you don't need comics to bring people, audience members will be attracted to the quality of the show and love that its free anyways. Newer comics whether they bring people or not will still get stage time and can perform but should work at dominating less stage time before moving on to 7-10 minutes. When I started I thought I had 30 minutes, I had 2 and I worked my way up from that. If you gave me 3-5 minutes I would work on dominating that 3-5 minutes than wishing I had 7-10. I am absolutely threw with watching very good comics that emcee and feature at clubs get rejected from open mics because some new person brings 10 people every single week. Some of these better comics could actually bring people to the shows but their friends are absolutely tired of the low quality of the show that they would rather stay home and throw a ping-pong ball at a wall for 2 hours. Granted there are times when you have to take a backseat and you don't get a performance spot, thats understood, but should be more common for a newer comic or awful comic before it is for an established comedian that can actually put some energy into the show. I realize everyone has to start somewhere. You have to see what it is like to be bad before you can learn to be good. I think everyone deserves stage time. Do they deserve the same amount? No, absolutely not. There are a lot of comics that should be doing 7-10 every open mic. There are some that should be doing only 3 until they learn what they are doing. I am now in the middle of possibly starting 3 new rooms. These rooms will be strictly for better comics getting more stage time. A lot of them will be my friends, some will be comics I don't ever converse with and some will be comics that are really new but myself and the other comics running the room want to get them on our show because they deserve more opportunity than they get at rooms where they are unable to bring audience members. We'll see if the quality and advertising of the show is enough to put people in the seats or if the "bringer" policy is a must to keep shows afloat. Maybe I'm completely wrong. We'll know soon enough. Any thoughts on the matter? (rory.scovel@gmail.com)