The show began with a bomb; not with a bang, or a blast, or any other kind of bright eruption that might signify the start of something story-worthy—but a bomb, that unfortunately familiar, haunting silence that trails every failed punchline like dust clouds behind a car on a back dirt-road: ugly, and painful to the point of shielding the eyes.
It was karmic that it happened last night of all nights. My friend Anna was on the lineup, and just this past Saturday, after a string of seven sets that week in which I had committed bona fide murder unto Manhattan corpses yet (still) to fulfill their two-drink minimums, leading me to believe that laughter is the best medicine only in the way fentanyl is a medicine (e.g. not in the doses I hand it out for money), I had drunkenly ranted to (at) her about how I’m one of the best comics in the city, and should be a regular at every comedic establishment.
Standup comedy is a very humbling art form; crowds sense, and are repelled by, overconfidence, and one of the most valuable skills a performer can develop is one of retaining humility after a great show. Letting good sets get to your head all but guarantees their finiteness.
But bombing is not a bad thing in itself—every comedian experiences it with some regularity, and it is a paramount hurdle when it comes to developing an act. To never bomb is to be too palatable, to avoid risks. A comedian’s act should be a snapshot of his inner self, a window into his soul. If one is being authentic in conversation, not every person in the room should love him—likewise, if one is truly performing as an artist, neither should every crowd.
I was hosting (opening the show and introducing each comic after), which is always difficult. To be an effective host, one must, in a sense, hypnotize the crowd into laughing in the traditional setup-punchline rhythm serves as a metronome for the rest of the show. There is a common saying in standup that hosting is not an act, but a job. The performers are hired to kill; the host is hired to lead the audience to their guillotine, as a butcher relaxes a lamb before slitting its throat. It is the most important part of the show for this reason: if a host’s set falls flat, it sets a precedent for the rest of the night, causing the crowd to wonder, much too early, “Have we just signed ourselves up for two hours of this horse shit?”
There are several strategies for hosting effectively.
In New York, it’s standard practice to begin a hosting set with 3-5 minutes of crowd work (prompting audience members with questions and reacting to them in the moment) before beginning your written material. The theory here is that much of standup operates behind the guise of spontaneity, in that an effective joke sells the known-but-willfully-ignored lie that a comedian’s punchline has emerged organically in that moment, not having been rigorously tested and edited over months or years. By beginning the show with crowd work, the host instills this feeling of newness into the show, creating the hallucination that every joke will be as off-the-cuff as these ones.
Another approach to hosting, which is standard in most other cities, is to say hello to the crowd, then dive right into material. As the best time to dance is with music, the easiest way to get a crowd laughing at punchlines is to start saying them. Or so the theory goes. I find this to be more effective with bigger crowds who have paid to see a standup comedy show, as, to have bought a ticket in advance, one must already be somewhat familiar with conventional standup comedy, and therefore needs less of a primer on the symbiosis that is the performer-crowd relationship.
The issue with Monday’s show is that it was free, and several of the audience members had never seen a comedy show before. They were simply drinking at the bar, heard there was a show happening, and decided to come see it on a whim. Virgin crowds (meaning “first timers,” not Kill Tony fans) often find setup-punch jokes to sound contrived, and therefore need crowd work to ease them into the show.
I opted for the crowd work path. I generally have no issue with this—it’s a skill I have confidence in. I wanted to test some new jokes, but figured those were best saved for later, once the crowd had firmly settled in. One benefit of hosting is that you get to return to the stage between comedians, which would allow me six more opportunities to test my jokes to a warm crowd.
My crowd work was, in a word, tense. Perhaps I came across too brash, I’m not sure; but, for whatever reason, each audience member appeared hesitant to answer any questions, and I had trouble establishing a connection with them. There is a saying that crowd work is “giving an audience enough rope to hang themselves.” This crowd avoided my rope like a horse avoids Stevie Wonder’s lasso.
I got into a decent rhythm toward the middle, after I hit them with a bit about the time I went on a date with a Rabbi. It’s very punchy, and earned five solid laughs, which made me think that perhaps this crowd didn’t want crowd work. The best feeling for a host is identifying that a crowd is ready for material. It means the show is off the ground.
I couldn’t quite figure out what kind of jokes they liked—my Rabbi bit, tackling sex and religion, is equal parts dark, perverted and playful—so I chose to do the material I thought best complimented it, which I decided was my hair loss chunk. These are the oldest jokes in my act, and, having been tested and edited for nearly two years at this point, and dense with punchlines, I consider them one of my more reliable bits.
It was strange, how quickly they turned on me. I felt like Joe Pesci in Goodfellas, entering a slaughterhouse I thought would be my promotion. It’s normal that crowd doesn’t get a joke. You deliver it wrong, or forget an important part of its setup, and you stare at a sea of faces still awaiting a punchline; this is not bombing, as they aren’t even aware you said a joke yet (if a tree falls…) Feigning confidence and continuing to the next punchline will often yield the same laugh you previously expected.
This was not that.
This crowd followed every word. And with every word, they hated me even more. Here were jokes I had confidence in—the most confidence in—and, with every refined tag, I was met with growing looks of disdain.
In the movie Mistress America, when probed about her bad behavior, Greta Gerwig says to Lola Kirke, “It isn’t who I am, it’s just something I do,” to which Lola Kirke’s character replies, “But at what point is a person just…what they do?”
I think the crowd was asking themselves this same thing. Perhaps they considered the first few bits a fluke, a rare misstep that was not a sign of things to come. But at some point, they equated my material—namely, their feelings about it—with my actual self. They hated my jokes. People often talk about “separating the art from the artist,” to ask the question, if a bad person produces great art, can we still enjoy it? But last night, the crowd posed a different angle: If a good person creates bad art, can a crowd still think highly of them? They answered themselves with a resounding No.
The most painful part of a bomb doesn’t happen during a show, but after it, when, while conversing with another comedian, a member of the crowd will come up to congratulate the other comic on a job well done. They will then look at you, and awkwardly half-smile and nod, the way a distant relative acknowledges you at a funeral. This happened more than once last night. And to Anna and Abe, two comedians who were told, many times, they had much better sets than me last night, I say this:
I commend you, and I wish you the worst in life.
Sam Frank Jr. is a writer and standup comedian based in New York City. He has been published in The Bangalore Review, The Gramercy Review, and his standup comedy has been mentioned in the New York Times. He was named “Best Screenwriter” at the 2021 Austin Lift-Off Film Festival.
Sam is working on his debut novel about a traveling circus.
Sam can be reached at samfrankjunior@gmail.com