First of all, thank you to everyone who’s enjoyed my last few entries!  I appreciate any and all feed back about how great I am.  No other types though.  My self-esteem is pretty much moment to moment, which I should probably address at some point…

But not now, cause I feel great!  There’s a couple amendments to make about my New York theories.  If you’re gonna move here, it does help if you can minimally deliver a joke.  Boston has a lot of stages where you’re distanced from the audience and can just plow through a routine.  New York is a lot of small, intimate rooms, where you either have to be conversational, or very smooth and confident in your delivery.  You have to hide punchlines and perform more precisely.  And these back room audiences aren’t generally new to comedy, so they’re better at sensing small flaws in your act than a lot of Boston audiences.  If I had to pick a litmus test for people from Boston (who are the majority of my Persian-army-like fan base), if you can do well at the Green Dragon most of the time with “cleanish” material, you probably won’t bore the shit out of the New York comedians who have all been doing comedy (typically) 5+ years and have credits for something.  Which actually makes the open mics super fun for me, because I’m learning from each act that has a better stage presence, or may be a better writer. 

There’s a lot more professionalism in the open mic scene here as well.  The good people come with new jokes, or a rewritten bit, and don’t have breakdowns onstage, or make inside jokes very often.  A lot of them get off stage early if their prepared stuff went shorter than expected.  Again, these are the good comics here.  Depending on which mic you’re at, plenty of people are terrible and/or waste everyone’s time.  But I actually saw one comic start his set by riffing about a subject that people weren’t quite onboard with, and he said, “Don’t worry, I’d never start a show this way.”  And that struck a cord with me.  Because every other comic has a show here, so a booker is always watching.