After a day of sightseeing with in-laws, Bill and Diane, my Bride and I set our sights on the Parktown Hotel for their new amateur night at the Laff Shop. The Parktown regularly hosts two Pro-com nights each week, on Friday and Saturday; for reasons unknown to myself they are just having professional comedians on Friday nights for the summer, and are experimenting with having amateurs on Saturday. I didn’t know what to expect, but, by the time the show began there were well over 100 people in attendance at $9.00 per head. Unbeknownst to me, they’d set the show up as a contest, the winner determined by the audience voting.
Our own Jester was emceeing the event, and the Headliner was a fellow named Mathew Murray whom I’d heard of but never seen before. In an unexpected diversion from routine they had the Headliner go on before the amateurs, and Mathew was very good. My Bride particularly enjoyed the Jester’s performance, as he was in top form last night. Contributing to ménage of mirthful mayhem were most of the, ‘Refuse to Sit Down’, regulars, but there were also three new faces in the mix. One was a fellow who regularly opens for Mathew Murray, and the other two chaps had both only appeared on stage once before. Appearing for his third performance was a young chap named, Franko, who I’d seen twice before. In total there were seven contestants last night.
Our audience was in great form, responding enthusiastically to all. Blair, the fellow who opens for Mr. Murray, was very good, but he does have the advantage of considerable experience. The two chaps who were each doing their second stand-up appearance were quite interesting. Shawn was first up of the two, and he’d confided that he began preparing his act about ten minutes before arriving at the club. He took a glass on stage with him and fed it a looney each time he uttered the, ‘F’, word, admitting that in his five to seven minutes he’d probably make donations sufficient to buy lunch for a third world nation.
Brian was the second of the two, and his was quite an interesting approach; he was selfeffacing in his presentation, and conceded that he didn’t understand the world! From there his act consisted of asking bizarre questions of the audience; “Have you ever killed your neighbour’s cats, then drove over them with your car to make it look like an accident?” It was very well received.
I was quite happy with, Franko’s performance; he was more relaxed than in his previous appearances, and his material much tidier in it’s presentation. Perhaps a little too wordy, but that will improve with time. He got some good laughs, and he does have a very audience friendly persona, especially for a 22 year old. Some of his material had a racial edge to it that made my Bride wince just a little; I’m not sure whether this is tempered by the fact that Franko is ‘Africanadian’. Franko confessed that he worked for the Native Gaming Conglomerate, noting that their employees were 75% native, but, they had to have 25% non-native in order that some work gets done! Besides, he added, if it was 100% native it would just be another ‘Pow-Wow’. All told, a solid third performance.
I drew the number two slot, following our Knight of the dark countenance, and it went fairly well. Unbeknownst to myself I had fans in the audience at a table right front and center, this was not so much evident while I was on stage, but became apparent afterwards, during the voting, when the one young fellow was showing me that everyone at the table had voted for #2! The same chap caught me afterwards and was quite effusive in expressing his enjoyment.
I was pleased with the reception of my material, and ran it past my evaluator software first thing this morning; I maintained a PAR score of 41, which means in my six minutes and thirty-five seconds of stage time I received an average of 24 seconds of laughter per minute. That is one second per minute better than the last time I performed at the Parktown.
The voting segment at the end of the evening was interesting, and, in the final analysis, the announced winner was Brian with his full quota of quirky questions! Pretty good for his second time on stage, and he certainly wins my admiration. The evening was, to my eye, a success for all concerned, and especially the Parktown. I asked the Jester whether he felt it was going to be continued, and he thinks that it will; all that’s restraining him from a full, enthusiastic endorsement of both the facility and function, is the annoying little matter of remuneration. As the Jester stated, “I can’t be always doing things like this for nothing!”
No comments:
Post a Comment