I remember an initiation ritual when I was in university, it was called, “The Centurion”. A ‘Centurion’, in the Roman Legions, was, literally, “Commander of one hundred”. In University it meant gathering a bunch of first year boys together in a small room, and letting them drink beer out of a shot glass; one and a half ounces of beer, every minute, for one hundred minutes! (Yours’ facetiously never partook ...didn’t much fancy beer!) I suppose the theory was, that if you could command 100 shots of beer, you’d be, (to distort Rudyard Kipling), “a man my son!” I don’t know that it ever proved masculinity, but, I do know that by the time those being initiated hit the eighties or nineties, the dorm was permeated throughout, by the off-putting putridity of puke.
When I began my experiment of being a comic, I decided to give it a fair shake; I decided that I’d do it one hundred times before even considering giving the experiment a ‘thumbs up’ or ‘thumbs down’. A single, first paper does not make or break an academic career. A single, first shot of beer does not make a dipsomaniac, (nor even give a buzz!). Nor does a single first ‘set’, done well or poorly, a comic make!
Over the course of the past year I’ve seen many people screw up the courage to take a turn treading the comedy boards; very few returned for a second venture and almost none for a fourth or fifth. Ok, there were a couple that maybe didn’t, for one reason or another, merit that first attempt, but most showed talent and humour! What did they lack? For the most part they lacked confidence, experience and, most important, tenacity! I don’t know where a person finds tenacity, but I know that you don’t find confidence and experience in just one attempt ...at anything. The only thing worse, in my eyes, than not trying a second time, would to have never tried at all!
Be honest now; what have you ever done that you excelled at the first time you did it? For myself, I’d have to answer, “Nothing!” Not even something as central and elemental to our shared humanity as sex; my first time I was awful! (ed. note: Here I mean, “sex with another person,” I was always pretty good single handed!) My Bride might say I was no great hell the last time, but, even so, in my mind, much better than the first time ...good thing I kept at it!
Right now I’m just short of 50 comic performances, and, yes, at the end of many ‘sets’, I still detect a whiff of that ‘off-putting putridity’ I recall from my dormitory days, but I am better now than I was at the beginning. The idea of one hundred performances I cannot take credit for; I got the idea from John Cantu of the Holy Zoo. Cantu said, ‘It’s impossible to judge yourself after a single attempt; do one hundred sets. For the first twenty, don’t even worry about getting a laugh! From the twentieth to the fiftieth, try for a couple laughs each time out. Don’t worry about anything till you’ve done it one hundred times. You still won’t be a great comedian, but you will have enough experience to judge how you are doing, what you want to do next, and how to get there. After your first ‘set’, you don’t have the experience to qualify you to judge anything done by yourself, nor what your comic potential might or might not be!’
My daughter may one day be a PhD, and write a paper that wins her a Nobel Prize, and the significance of that 77% first paper will be nil; you just never know. But, one thing I do know; if she doesn’t sit down and write the second, the third and the fourth she’ll never get that PhD; she’s off to a good start.
Tomorrow night is a Halloween, “Jesters’ Ball”, at AllyKatz in Saskatoon; it will be, I think, my forty-seventh appearance. If I don’t go it will be the finish of me! So, “Hold my nose and off I goes!”
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