Bombing

What is bombing? To me bombing on stage is when I am up there talking and the audience is not responding to what I am saying. It’s that empty feeling of dread like I have made a terrible mistake. Hundreds of eyes are staring blankly back at you with no change or effect no matter what you say. Silence. It’s like you are strumming a guitar but no sound is coming out of it. It is an awful feeling. The more years I spend doing standup the more I realize that bombing, like fun, is a choice.

 “When you start, you have all these bombs inside you and it's about getting them all out as quickly as possible.” –Brendan Lee Mulligan.

Getting all the bombs out of you.

This is something that my improv teacher at UCB told me and I have found it to be incredibly true. The more times I perform the less I bombed. The less I truly bombed. Because eventually I didn’t let myself bomb. It was like I just didn’t let the audience reaction get to me. To get to this point the only way is to perform and, well, bomb a lot. Eventually I got to a point where I love a bad crowd. I almost feel at home when I have to grab the attention of the audience. I actually love watching a terrible open mic audience. One of my favorite things to witness is a large audience at an open mic but no comic has been able to crack it. It’s like watching a bunch of dads trying to start an old 2 stroke lawn mower after a long winter. Each man wants a crank at it, till they can’t anymore then pass it on to the next and they rip on a bit. Every dad’s thought is I can do it. I'm going to be the man today. One after another cranking it, some getting a little sputter and you think they have it, but we all know the engine is flooded and it's hopeless. It's an open mic on a Monday night and football is on in this bar. The joy comes in watching them try.

Everything changed when I had this shift in attitude. When I started comedy I would let the audience tell me if I was going to have a good time or not. If I got a big laugh then I would have a good set, I needed that first good big laugh. If it never came I would just get smaller and smaller until it was over. It wasn’t until I took control and was like, I am having a good time regardless. The way I got there was when I realized this thing.

Create the fun table.

Growing up while in the nightmare that is the middle school lunch room, I would sit alone and hope that someone would come sit with me. Maybe if I looked sad or pitiful enough someone would throw me a bone and take a risk on the kid in a ninja turtle sweatshirt and overalls. This plan never worked. There would be the loud fun table with people laughing and just having a great time. I wanted to be at the fun table so bad. Even when I got my group of friends together we just complained about how loud and dumb the fun table was. Then my friend Jarrod entered the group. He was goofy and loud and pure confidence. He made our table fun. I was finally at the fun table. I was more fun. I was loud and confident. What I learned was the fun table is created by the members of it. I learned that I create the fun table!  When I do standup I get to create the fun table but for a whole room of people, I am there to create the fun room! To bomb you have to allow the room to control how you feel. The mantra I have before going up at a particularly difficult room is: “you are funny, create the fun table”

Bombing is part of the deal with standup. But there is a difference between pausing and playing with pauses and silences and bombing. A big part of learning the art of stand up is being able to take a pause and hold the tension of silence in the room in your hand. When I started I would feel like I was bombing all the time. The thing is because I was new I did not know why. There are so many factors with standup that could be happening. No room is the same, every audience is unique. It’s a lot like surfing in the way that the art of it is learning to understand and anticipate what the wave is going to do and control how you react to it. The more experience I have, the more skills I have to adjust to each unique situation. It took me years to learn that sometimes I am just not commanding the attention of people and that’s why they are not reacting. Sometimes it's late and everyone here is tired. Sometimes you have an audience full of people who don’t speak English and I was not animated enough to make them laugh. There are so many factors out of my control, yet this challenge is part of it. I personally have begun to love digging out of a hole someone before me dug and is why I love hosting an open mic.

Every time I begin to think that I have standup figured out, I am immediately brought back down to earth with a challenging set. But I have listened back and oftentimes it was not as bad a set or a bomb as I thought in my head. It might have been that I zeroed in on one person who wasn’t laughing and felt like I bombed because I could not get them to laugh. But everyone else was laughing, so did I bomb, no I didn’t. But in my own head I bombed. That is why oftentimes the bomb is inside you, and it’s about getting all those bombs out of you. The tightrope walk of “I could bomb at any time” helps me get more energy when I am on stage. It’s the danger. The more I perform the less I care about it, I just figure I will learn from this and get better, and I have.

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Thank you for reading, You’re doing great.

Bjorn RG.