Creating a Comic

To bring, or not to bring; that is the question. Or in less pretentiously douchey terms: should you bring guests to your open mic performance?

Comedy venue owners will uniformly answer with a resounding “YES!” In some cases, they’ll throttle you for even having the temerity to ask such a dipshit question; of course you should bring people, you idiot! It’s their stage, and they’re not running a charity show here! And so on.

It’s not that simple, of course. The number of people we can bring to our shows is a limited resource. The problem is especially acute when you’re brand new—if you bring people when you still really, really suck, then a) they’re less likely to come out again in the future; b) discouragement could sap your will to continue the whole comedy endeavor.

The newbie paradox

Here’s the paradox in a nutshell:

• In order to get better, you need to get stage time.
• You’re less likely to get stage time unless you bring people.
• But you’re less likely to bring people until you get better.
• But in order to get better, you need to get stage time…

An underlying assumption here is that the aspiring comic in question is an introvert with a relatively low shame threshold.¹ Introverts have a lot harder a time of this than those lucky-ducky extroverts. For an introvert, simply getting up on stage is terrifying enough; the idea of having people they know in the audience compounds the terror by a factor of ten, making the ordeal that much harder.

To bring, or not to bring

So should you bring people? My own decision at the beginning, with several exceptions, was not to bring people. As a result, it took me about 30 visits to open mic to get my first dozen times on stage; the rest of the nights, I was bumped. Two hours of travel, two and a half hours at the club, and no stage time to show for an evening that is basically lost. If that sounds like an utterly insane use of one’s time, I can’t really argue.

I’m a big pussy, though. My own emotional cost/benefit analysis was that having people come see me when I was so raw would be worse for my long-term motivation and skill development; depending upon your personality, and your capacity for shame, you might make a different calculation.

The number of friends that you have is also an important variable. Part of the reason I used to be so reluctant to bring people is that I just moved back to the Seattle area, and have a relatively tiny number of friends in town to draw from. Since the same few people are unlikely to come out to see my same little act every week, over and over, I decided to be strategic about saving the “please come see me” card until I think it’ll have more impact (e.g., a weekend show).

On the other hand, you may have—in fact, you probably do have—a lot more friends than me. If you’re an immensely popular person and have a fuckton of buddies willing to come out and see you at open mic, and you can spread them out over a lot of different nights for maximum stage time, that’s absolutely something you should consider. You could also bring some of them to see me, too, you well-liked bastard.

1. Most people are surprised to learn that the majority of stand-up comics are introverts. A recent scientific paper studied the psychological traits of comics, with introversion—and narcissism, less surprisingly—found to be chief among them. [↩]

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