Bombing Kill Tony At The Mothership

Anddddd we’re back with another installment of Joel knocking things off his impossible list.

Usually this involves me doing something cool and having a great montage video to show you guys and looking cool (these are pretty fun to do).

Sometimes, it involves me falling flat on my face (these aren’t as much fun).

Well, you’re in luck – today we have a big serving of option #2.

This was supposed to be “Joel does well at the Mothership” – Joe Rogan’s new club in Austin – but instead, you get to see me bomb – with about 300,000 viewers online.

Fun!

Here’s what went down.

The Backstory

I’ve been messing around with comedy on the impossible list for a while now. I’ve actually done a bunch of places from Austin to Lisbon to Portland and Chicago and more. 

I’ve done a few featured sets but haven’t posted much content (I’ve seen comics say you shouldn’t post anything for the first 3 years). I don’t know if that’s too much, but at this point, I think I have some acceptable material and I know what works and what doesn’t so far. USUALLY. This doesn’t mean I kill it – but I have bits that work and bits that I’m trying out.

Kill Tony is a show where you come up and do a minute of your material, then you talk about it with whoever is on stage and Tony Hinchcliffe will usually make fun of you in some way.

My plan was to do one of the jokes I’ve had the longest – about therapy – but the problem is that over time – the joke is a mini-set (it can do 5 minutes). The problem is, you only get 1 minute on Kill Tony. I tried to cut it down to fit the time slot – but that was a bad decision. I ended up with all setup and no joke :).

Honestly, I’ve done rooms with a few thousand people before and for some reason (I’ll dig into my psyche later), I got super nervous running from the alley to the stage. I froze a little bit, and I knew my joke was already going to run long so I was playing catch up and never hit the punchline.

As Tony said – I just chewed all the fat off the joke. Nom nom nom nom nom nom.

Transparently – I think this might be the worst public speaking thing I’ve done in….ten years? Maybe, ever?

It was bad 🙂

I’ll break down more about what happened when I have a chance to watch it. I literally spent the next week every night waking up with a shiver remembering that this actually happened. Ugh this is gonna be bad.

You can watch the behind the scenes (I had been 10 times and resigned myself to the fact I wasn’t gonna get pulled). Of course, that’s the day that it actually happens.

You can see the full episode I’m on here.

Ugh – it was bad.

One thing down – bombing at the hottest comedy club on wreath.

Now, I just have to go back up and crush.

Easy, right?

Do stuff that forces you to get better. Oh by the way – sometimes it wills suck and look like a complete idiot.

That was me today. 

Life goes on 🙂

Joel

p.s. The night after this, I had a 10 minutes on a show in Austin and did pretty well. 

p.p.s. I know this can sound like cope-city, and I don’t think I’m terribly delusional (comedy lets you know when a joke concept is not good). The joke is a decent joke – I just screwed It up. If you want to see what it’s supposed to be like – I’ll share a version of it soon I did at the Lisbon Comedy Club. My fatal error was trying to do a 90-120 second joke in 60 seconds. I do not recommend. Write shorter stuff!