20040303

March 3, 2006

Charlie’s Standup Comedy Journal

March 03, 2004: On the Hill? Sure! On the Hill!

This was an interesting show for me, for a couple of reasons.

First of all, I had essentially no time to prepare. I got an email at around 11pm on Tuesday night, asking whether I’d like to come do my set at the On the Hill. On Wednesday. As in, the next night. As in, after getting up for a 9am meeting, schlepping through a fuller-than-usual day of work, picking up the dog, zipping home just long enough to pick up the video camera, and then racing over to the bar for the show. As in, without practicing a single word of the set — assuming I could manage to come up with one — because there simply wouldn’t be time. As in, crazy talk. Pure and simple, crazy talk.

I wrote back, and said, ‘Sure!‘ What can I tell you? I’m a sucker for stage time.

As it turns out, all of that gallavanting around that I described above took longer than I thought, and I was late, to the tune of twenty minutes or so. The organizer, Teddie, was very nice about it — he even said that I mentioned that I might be late. I don’t remember telling him that, but it’s certainly possible — based on my typical Wednesday, I could have predicted it easily enough. Anyway, the upshot of it is that I arrived late, so I went on late. Next to last, in fact, in a group of about a dozen comics. And that was fine with me — on stage is on stage, no matter where or when it happens.

The good news was that there were still several people hanging out at the bar and tables around the stage when I went on. Of course, the bad news is that only a handful — maybe ten or twelve — were actually interested in the comedy. As you can hear on the tape, there was an awful lot of yakking, and yammering, and even a fair amount of jibber-jabber going on in the background. Still, the folks that were there for the yuks were nice enough, and I did manage to get a couple of laughs.

All in all, it was a pretty good time at On the Hill, even if it was a helluva hectic twenty-four hours or so in getting there. It was nice to go onstage with almost zero prep time and not completely bomb, though. As a matter of fact, I was able to work in some material that I thought of that day; I’d never actually tried that before (my usual ‘deer in headlights’ expression notwithstanding), and I built up a bit of confidence ‘winging it’ for a while up there. As far as I’m concerned, Teddie can email me the night before a show any time. I’ll be ready.

Download Clip of 03/03/04 Set —

On the Hill Tavern, Somerville, MA (5 minutes, 12 seconds):