This time I mean itI hate bringer shows. I vowed three months ago that I wouldn’t do any more bringer shows. Still, Wednesday night, I found myself at New York Comedy Club dying a slow death. So it feels appropriate to be posting onto a blog that looks like my vision of heaven (which has been heavily influenced by the flash of white when the body-of-the-week dies at the beginning of Six Feet Under).
(UPDATE: Rick has fixed the code. Now it looks like the establishing shot in a feminine hygeine product commercial. I kid! I kid!)
A “bringer” show is the sort of scam that P.T. Barnum or Tom Sawyer would have loved. To get stage time at a comedy club, you commit to bringing five (or ten or twenty) people paying the cover or two-drink minimum. It costs your friends roughly $30 each to subsidize your stage time. In exchange, you supposedly get a large, “real” audience (high civilian:comic ratio) and sometimes the opportunity to perform for industry representatives. It was the latter promise that convinced me to break my vow and left me raging against the club, the industry and myself on the drive home.
I have to start by saying that I don’t blame the producer, Buddy Flip.* He has been very honest with me and he organized a show that, when it started, was sold out. He promised that there would be people there that book road gigs, and there were people there that book road gigs. Unfortunately, despite Buddy delivering on what he promised, it was still a disaster.
The quota for this show was five people. There was a time that getting five people to a show wasn’t a problem. That time appears to have passed. First, my mother - who is usually able to convince her friends to come out - is in Florida. So not only do I lose the reliable “1” of my mother, I lose her marketing power. Second, not surprisingly, the novelty of having a friend who is a comic has mostly worn off. Begging my mailing list has been suffering diminishing returns for a little while now, and the response from the list for Wednesday’s show was nil. So I had to conscript Zinester and Brother of Ugarte into coming. (They come willingly, but I hate to keep imposing on them. They can do most of my stuff from memory.) A sad, desperate face got my friend Frank to come along and Frank’s date made four. But I needed five.
Before sending my posse in, I talked with Buddy and he told me that he would let me on with four AND he would tell the bookers to stick around for my set. Which he did. Unfortunately, he wasn’t going to put me on until after all of the people that brought five went up first. I understand it from his perspective, but with so many comics ahead of me, I probably would have been better off just saying thanks, but no thanks. The audience dwindles throughout the night as people see their friends perform and then leave; last night was no different. By the time I went on stage, a full house of ~120 had dwindled down to 12. A crowd with an average age of 25 had shifted to an average age of 40. A mixed crowd in a good mood had become an almost entirely black crowd** that was grumpy because they had to sit through two hours of (mostly) dreck to see their relatives.
Needless to say, it didn’t go particularly well. My first few jokes connected (one connected very well), but it went downhill rapidly. One joke missed by a mile. I followed it with a chunk that I have about skiing. It would have gone really well earlier in the night when most of the crowd were Philips Exeter graduates (seriously); not so well when they were the relatives of a comic that premised part of his set on his recent parole. Then I screwed up both of my Paris Hilton jokes and closed with a corny joke that is designed for smart crowds to groan at (and will soon be a blog entry when I retire it). A minor disaster.
Someday I’ll write a manifesto on how to improve bringer shows so that they work for comics and clubs, but today I just wanted to bitch about a performance gone awry. And announce that I have done my last bringer show.
Until I cave again.
* WARNING: The music on his homepage is really annoying.
** DEFENSIVE ASIDE: Ordinarily I really like playing for a mostly black crowd. That is why I love performing at Ripple. But there is a difference between a black crowd in a neighborhood bar and a black comic’s family watching you in a mainstream club while you do a set for the benefit of mainstream bookers. A BIG difference.
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