All About Eating It: How to Survive, Avoid, and Learn from Bombing
Starting strong is also important because it gives you a safety net should a joke later on not work. During my show on Friday night, I tried a new joke, and it did not work. At all. It REALLY did not work. This is a verbatim quote after that joke, which got a huge laugh: "Well, that was a waste of time, huh? My bad. Let's move on." The audience had seen three solid minutes, were into my act, and believed I was funny, and gave me the benefit of the doubt. It's not a well you can tap several times during one set, but if you've started strong, you get one free bad joke.
A mistake that many beginner comics make in their opening few minutes is to use profane or controversial jokes upfront. If you're going to be a dirty comic (as discussed a few weeks ago), that's fine. But if you have one or two profane or controversial jokes, push them to the back end of your set. If you've been up there five minutes, the audience will start to like you and will go along with some of your more questionable material. But if you go up and open with a profane joke, you can turn off audience members that otherwise would happily come along. You need to gain the audience's trust before you can push the envelope.
Surviving Bombing
There are times, on stage, where it's just not working. Some audiences are just quiet people, and don't laugh loudly; sometimes, hecklers or talkers are disrupting your set; and sometimes, as a headliner once told me, "it's just a bad date. It just doesn't work out." It's frustrating, and annoying, and tough to get through. Sometimes you can't get yourself out, but there are a couple of tricks you can use to try and save your set.
First, you can bring attention to the fact that you're bombing - once. Self-deprecation is an excellent tool. The old hack line of "Is this thing on?" exists for a reason. You should try and come up with something a bit more clever, but make sure you say that you're struggling. Don't blame the audience. It's your job to make them laugh, not their job to show up and make you feel better about yourself. Call them names behind their backs after the show, but don't show them up onstage. It's certainly not
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