I had a full work day yesterday. I flew into Cozumel on a direct flight to board the Carnival Glory. I had three shows last night. Two main shows (50 minutes) and one late night (35 minutes). I lost my voice during the second show. Even when I lose my voice, I can still talk and be understood, I just sound quite a bit sultrier (I'm pretty sure that's a word, but not sure how to spell it).
We are doing the late shows in the lounges now instead of in the big room. The lounge last night was pretty packed, all the seats were full and there were folks standing up against the wall. Pretty much all of them had seen my other show earlier in the evening and came out to see more. I love going onstage in front of a crowd that already knows me and chose to come to the show. That is what it must feel like to be a famous comic. Everyone in the audience is familiar with you and choosing to see you, not just whatever comic is in town this week. When I work comedy clubs there are always about a table full of people who have seen me before or heard me in a radio interview who come out to the show, but the other 195 people in the crowd are just folks who decided to go to a comedy club. These folks have to be 'won over' early in the show. Last night was the opposite of a comedy club. There were about 295 people in the audience who had seen me earlier that evening and didn't have to be won over. Then, there were the other five.
When I showed up in the lounge it was already full about fifteen minutes to showtime. I was drinking hot tea to recharge my voice in the thirty minutes between when my last show ended and the late one was set to start. There was a drunk guy onstage wearing sunglasses and being cheered on by four others in the front row center table. These folks are real vacation party people. They were all drinking mixed drinks and ordering Jaeger shots constantly. They were loud. The two guys sitting closest to the stage had their feet up on the stage. I was tired, I was still sweating from my previous show, I had burned my tongue on my tea so even if my voice hung in there, my tongue was already starting to swell.
It is going to sound downright silly to lots of you, but there are things that I do mentally before my shows that work for me. They are affirmations, positive thinking and visualization about the show. I always look at the crowd and think 'this is potentially the best crowd I've ever had'. Then I think 'I am going to do the best show that these folks have ever seen'. Over and over I try to make myself believe that my performance and my audience are going to be the best they have ever been. I'm still creating some sort of backup plan in my head in case the Jaeger shot crew gets out of control, but at the same time, trying to believe that this crowd will be better than any I've had.
The drunks were disruptive for the first minute of my show. They shouted stuff twice but it wasn't loud enough or well timed enough to cause any real trouble. The other 295 folks, the ones who saw me earlier, were such a great, friendly crowd that the drunks fell in step and behaved for the rest of the show.
tommy on 07.01.08 @ 12:15 PM CST [link] [No Comments]