Tonight I’m going to try something I’ve never tried before: stand up comedy. Oh, I’ve told jokes in public, if the definition of public is a bunch of friends sitting around a table and drinking lots of beer. But I’ve never tried to do comedy on stage. Well, not as such.
Yup. That's me, more or less
I go to poetry readings once a month and very often my poems are intended to be comical. But not always. Also, at a poetry reading I have it written down and I can read from the paper. That’s against the rules at this event.
Which makes it an entirely different discipline.
I also like singing at karaoke events so, as you can see, I enjoy being on stage but at karaoke, like the poetry readings, you get to read the words off the prompter, so you can’t actually screw up the words. You can screw up the melody, sure enough, especially when you volunteer to sing a song that you don’t know as well as you thought you knew, but you can’t screw up the words.
The only place where I stand up and perform before an audience unscripted is in front of a classroom. Even there, although I don’t follow a script, I’ve been teaching for 14 years and I’ve got a routine that I could follow in my sleep. My classroom patter is as unthinking as my signature.
Also, with my adult students, I am not trying to make them laugh. With my kids, anything up to about 4th grade, they laugh too much. They laugh at everything, they hide under the tables, they tease each other, they conspire. (One 2nd grade group, when I was drilling them on colors, conspired to answer all questions with “yellow.” They thought it was the most hysterical thing in the world.)
So, it won’t be easy tonight and I’ve decide to keep it short and simple. A couple of my poems, short ones that I’ve got memorized, and a very brief routine with a couple of classroom anecdotes. So that in case I totally suck, at least it won’t be too long.
Wish me luck.
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