The Stages of a Stand-up Comic

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Open Mic Night

The open micer is the first stage of a struggling comedian. Put up to the idea by coworkers either because he is legitimately funny or because it’s going to be an epically bad performance that everyone wanted to see on YouTube, out newbie makes his way down to the local Joe’s Tavern on Main Street on Monday night to bust out his jokes.

The performance will feature an over/under of eight highly uncomfortable moments of no one laughing followed by the comic getting angry as a result. This can lead to either vicious diatribes accusing the audience of being stupid, a total breakdown contemplating the futility of his life (funny!) or a stream of racist, sexist and dirty jokes as a fall-back plan.

The Bringer Show

After a few months of open mic nights, our young comedian will get tricked into performing in a bringer show. This means that he will have to “bring” anywhere from five to twenty friends in order to earn stage time at the comedy club. He will burn through every friend, relative and coworker who he will never be able to ask again for a favor. These soon-to-be-former-friends will spend fifteen bucks plus be forced to purchase two twelve dollar drinks to sit through thirty of the worst comedians they will ever see. At the very end, four hours after the show started, our budding performer will go on. He will bomb.

The Booked Room

Enough toiling at open mic nights and hanging out at clubs will net you enough connections to be booked on a show at a bar. These are glorified open mics that feature a list of booked comedians that don’t have to wait for three hours to go onstage. Instead they will have to wait an hour for there to be an audience of two people, then another hour to go on. But it is a spot, and it is experience.

Eponymous brick wall

The Audition Show

Four years after the open mic appearances and an endless stream of open mics, bringer shows and booked rooms later, our comic will finally get the chance to audition to be “passed” at a club. This means he can be considered a regular and will be able to call in his “avails.” Two hours of acts he knows, pretends to be friends with, and secretly hopes will fail miserably, the comic will finally get an audition. If it goes poorly, back to square one and wait another year. If it goes well, or he’s got some heat on him (call your friend at VH1 to be a talking head, in other words), congrats, you are passed. You can now not get your phone calls returned and can do five-minute sets at the ends of shows and on Wednesdays.

The Road

Now you have a half hour of material, and you can take your act Nationally. Get a good car with a comfortable place to sleep in back, and get ready to do shows in the middle of nowhere for the next three years. Some clubs might have you start as the emcee, where you’ll do fifteen minutes up front and introduce the other comics. Then you can become the feature and do a half hour of fart jokes for people in the middle of nowhere. Then if you’re good enough you can become a headliner. Congratulations. You can now perform an hour of hacky material for racist Midwesterners and southerners all across America!

College Gigs

Another good way to make some cash is to do shows at colleges. Using your usual hour-long set, but replacing marriage jokes to frat party jokes, and old person jokes to jokes about old people, you can now perform an hour of material about getting wasted and playing video games. They’ll love you. You might even get a good enough reputation to earn yourself a TV spot.

Wear your nice flanel shirt for TV

The TV Spot

If you get enough of a following and your act is solid, you can now have your chance to perform on Comedy Central or– actually that’s pretty much it. If you get your chance, you will finally get your opportunity to tell the world all your jokes and become famous. That is, after all your jokes are culled by censors and your set is edited down to an awkward three-and-a-half minutes of your safest material about how men and women are different.

The Sitcom

But no, let’s say your three-and-a-half minutes on dating are so revolutionarily different from everyone else’s that you garner a development deal at NBC. You are finally on your way to fame, a mere fifteen years after you started. You give up everything in New York and move to L.A., where there is no comedy. You tell everyone, you film your pilot, you get the go-ahead and just before your show premieres, NBC sweeps it out from under you because they’re going with another Matt LeBlanc show. Your dreams devastated, your life in ruins, your show in the toilet, you turn to drinking and go on a yearlong bender. You lose all your friends, your family ignores you, you don’t do stand-up, you just drink and shoot up for a solid year until you hit rock bottom. You decide to get back with your roots and do stand-up again just to find that the club owners have switched over and your material is dated. Undaunted, you start from the place where you can always get on stage and sign up to perform at an open mic.