Becoming a Stand-Up Comedian: All About Bombing

As a comedian, you live every show with the specter of bombing - of spending an entire set telling jokes with no laughter, no response, and no interest from the audience. It's what makes standup scary, exciting, exhilarating, and occasionally painful.

Painful, because bombing hurts, as evidenced by the words comics use to describe it. Comics don't "struggle"; they don't "have a bad day"; they "bomb", they "die", they "eat it." But bombing is a part of comedy, particularly as a beginner. If you choose to become a comic, you WILL bomb. Repeatedly. No matter how good your material, how solid your stage presence, or how quick your wit, your day will come. Here's how to avoid it, how to get through it, and how to learn from it.

Avoiding Bombing

A key for every comic, at every level, is to open strong. The standard wisdom is to open with your second-best joke, and close with your best joke. Like every other "rule" in standup, this rule gets broken, but it remains solid advice. Road comics often open with a "local" joke (which may be basically the same everywhere, simply tailored to that city's highway system or questionable neighborhood), but regardless of the topic, you want to open strong. If you start with a few strong minutes, the audience will begin to believe that you are funny. They'll pay closer attention; get less distracted by the waitstaff and their friends; most importantly, they will be on your side.

On the other hand, if you open with a weak joke or two, the audience can be lost very quickly. They start to think to themselves, "I hope this guy doesn't have a half hour of those jokes." Then they start thinking about something else; five minutes later, they're talking to their wife about their vacation next month and you're up a creek without a paddle.

Not only should you start with strong jokes, but with short, tight jokes. Start strong and you will earn the audience's confidence, giving them the patience to sit through a thirty-second setup, believing that the punchline will be worth it. Upfront, that patience may not be there. You want your opening jokes to be short, funny one-liners (or close) that grab their attention and get them laughing as soon as possible.

Starting strong also gives you a safety net should a joke not work later on. If you try a new joke - or an old joke that you like but doesn't always get a huge laugh - and it fails, you can survive it easily. Just say, "Well, that one didn't work, huh?" or "OK. My bad. Not funny." It sounds silly but it works; if the audience has come to believe that you're funny. Starting strong will give them that faith.

Surviving Bombing

There are times, on stage, where it just doesn't work. You've put your strong material up front, and they won't come along. Some audiences are just quiet, and don't laugh loudly (or even out loud); sometimes, hecklers or talkers are disruptive; and sometimes, as a headliner once told me, "It's just a bad date." It's frustrating, and annoying - you know this stuff is funny. It's worked before! Sometimes you can't get yourself out of that funk, but there are a couple of tricks you can use to try and save your set.

First, you can bring attention to the fact that you're bombing. Once. The old line "Is this thing on?" exists for a reason. You can go after the audience - lightly. "Hey, this stuff is funny. Loosen up." It's a fine line to walk - and you'll learn to see the line better with experience - but you want to chastise them without yelling at them. Self-deprecation works, too, but only at a minimum - it doesn't take long before self-deprecation turns into self-pity and desperation. My best advice is to say exactly what you're thinking - I once told a crowd in Louisiana that they were staring at me like I worked for FEMA. Some people laughed, a few gasped, but at least I got a response.

You may also have jokes in your act that always get some sort of reaction, even if it's not laughter, that can bring some energy to the audience. When facing a quiet audience, any reaction is a positive step. If you're nimble enough, you can jump to that joke, get the reaction, and jump to a strong joke, and continue from there.

The most important thing to do, and the most difficult thing to do, is to maintain your composure. Avoid getting flustered; keep your cool, and project your confidence. When you lose your confidence, you'll speed up your delivery and begin to "ask" jokes, and it's all downhill from there.

When facing a tough audience, you need to project more, stand straighter, move more (if you're stationary on stage, you can use your hands more) and change your voice inflections. If you're comfortable enough with your set, try going into the crowd, then back to your material, then back into the crowd if need be. With a tight crowd you need to keep your jokes tight and minimize the time between jokes. You're trying to build energy in the room, and you need to provide the beginning spark, then find ways to fan that flame.

Learning from Bombing

I remember - vividly - the first time I ever bombed. It was at a bar called the Three of Clubs in New York City. I was supposed to do ten minutes; I was pulled down at the five-minute mark, without getting a single laugh. It was awful. I questioned everything: whether I was really funny, whether I was wasting my time, whether I had just been lucky up until then, a bad comic supported only by good crowds. I went and got drunk.

I woke up the next morning and continued on in the business. I look back at that set now and I laugh. Most importantly, I learned a great deal from that set. I learned that when I lost confidence in my act, the audience did, too. I learned that my longest joke couldn't go second in my set list. I learned that I needed to bring more energy, to be more confident, and to be more comfortable on stage. I didn't fix everything overnight, and I've bombed again since then. But it was a learning experience, and the most important thing I learned was this: If bombing once forces you out of the business, you'll never make it. This can be a frustrating business in a myriad of ways; I love it nevertheless, but it's the truth.

If - perhaps, more correctly, when - you bomb, take a night and nurse your wounds, then wake up the next morning, laugh about it, and learn from it. It's happened before, and it will happen again. But every time you bomb makes you a better comedian, and if every show you do makes you improve as a comic, you're on the path to success.

This article was originally published on Suite101.com. Subsequent changes have been made.