A Tough Act to Follow?

[Collin]

I was listening to last week's This American Life and act one was a story about a comedy duo in the 60's that thought they got a big break, but soon found themselves in a nightmare scenario for any performer.

I won't spoil the story, but it did get me thinking about this sort of situation that I'm sure everyone's experienced: Have you ever been in a situation where you had to follow an act that blew everyone out of the water? Ever thought you were walking into an un-winnable situation only to triumph in the end? Thoughts, opinions?

-Collin

[kbadr]

Walking onto a stage after another group has just knocked it out the park is never a bad thing. It's not a competition, so all it means is that a badass group just warmed up the audience for you. I'll take that over following a group that made the audience cringe and cool down any day.

[nick]

I think the important part of that TAL story was not that comedy duo had to follow the act, but that the crowd was waiting for the act to come back out and perform again, which they were set to do immediately after the duo finished. Doing comedy for a crowd that is waiting to see a band is always tough.

But as for following a great act: At the Del Close Marathon in 2008, Midnight Society was scheduled to perform right after Bassprov, with special guest Matt Walsh. But because of the way the DCM is set up, you buy a ticket for the whole festival, not individual blocks of shows. So crowds come and go from one theater to another throughout the night, and after Bassprov, people immediately started to go. So before we even took the stage, the packed crowd that had been there for Bassprov had shrunk to about 20. Plus, for the first couple minutes of our show, people were still trying to file in and out of the single exit/entrance. That really threw us off (or it threw me off, at least), and we ended up having a not so good show.

In general, though, I agree with Kareem.

[DollarBill]

Last night on Conan he told a story about how he had been picked out of obscurity to host Late Night. He had to go to a party with like 200 NBC brass types and Jonny Carson got up and did 15 minutes. Then people started yelling for Conan to say something. Apparently it went well.

Anyway, I agree with Kareem. A good opener can only help you. It's almost shooting fish in a barrel. Sometime it even feels weird and undeserved to be getting insane laughs from an extremely warmed up crowd. I'm way more proud of a show if we win a crowd over.

[Asaf]

Imp performed two years ago in the Chicago Improv Festival and we opened for the UCB, the ACTUAL UCB. The crowd was huge and not there for us. In fact, we got heckled. With Imp, it is really hard to deal with hecklers, but I managed to find a way in a later scene to call it back.

That show is pretty much why we don't want to go back to CIF.

[Jastroch]

A morbid part of me wishes I had more nightmare performance stories. I have a couple, but not nearly enough.

[Lants]

I had an early morning corporate gig on September 11th, 2001... right before I was supposed to go up, they made the announcement about the towers falling.

I still followed the news with my act and I got a good deal of laughs, but it felt a little awkward.







this did not happen

[mcnichol]

These are more like the people in the TAL story than the triumph you're talking about, Collin:

After going through classes at IO for a year and playing on independent teams and working hard, we were put on the Harold schedule. I couldn't wait for our first show on Thursday September 13, 2001... Turns out, people weren't so into laughing that week...


About seven months before that, a group of us that had been going though classes together decided to put in for a cagematch slot. We rehearsed hard for it, we found a form of sorts that we worked on, and we tried to think of some way to make a mark on the audience, some way they would remember us when it came time to vote (aside from our improv, i guess). Since our group's name was Spongecake, we decided to throw Twinkies out at the audience as we took the stage. This idea seemed genius to us. We all agreed we'd each buy a bunch of twinkies (wrapped) and bring them to the show. When we meet up the night of the show, our teammate Dave let us know that he couldn't find twinkies on the way home from work that day so he got the logical replacement: small boxes of raisins. These are the type that have sharp corners and are entirely unrelated to cake or cream filling. These ones:


We're all nerves beforehand -- we find out we are up against this loose amalgam of the funniest dudes at the theater. In hindsight, this was probably just some throw-together last minute thing for them, but at the time it seemed like this unstoppable force of hilarious people we all looked up to. We lose the coin toss and so go first. We run out onto the stage in front of a packed audience (this is midnight on a Friday night) and start launching these twinkies into the cabaret-style seated, packed audience. Oh, and Dave is throwing small boxes of raisins. After maybe the first handful thrown I start to realize that the mood in the theater isn't "Oh hey, free twinkies!" but more a "What the hell just hit me in the head?" and "What just splashed in my beer?" I remember watching, in what seemed like slow motion, Dave's boxes of raisins leaving his hands and flying through the air, hitting faces and pint glasses, with sudden head turns and furrowed brows directed our way.

"Hi! We're Spongecake, and to get started..." ...it didn't matter. We'd lost them entirely. And just to be sure the mood remained that way for the next 22 minutes, we put on some of the most nervous, not-listening, alternately showboating and hiding-on-the-side-of-the-stage improv we could muster. When it was over, the other team came out and just ruled. Within seconds, the mood they gave off was "It's cool everyone, we're here, you can relax." And they were hilarious, effortlessly. We lost 80 million to 4.

We sucked about as bad a team could -- and it was a great night.

[kaci_beeler]

I think I've told this story before, oh well -

When I was in high school my high improv group The PITS performed a shortform set at a talent show during a cancer walk at the Dell Diamond.
We followed a little girl who sang some sad song, I think it was about clowns? People loved it because it was a little girl singing her heart out. We were also at a cancer walk.
Anyway, our set totally bombed and was weird and no one in the audience understood what we were doing or why we were doing it. Also we had Doug host for the first time and he kept saying, "Oh, sorry about that, we promise the next game will be better." We should have just lip synced or something. Several years previous when I was 11 I lip synced and danced to Barbie Girl by Aqua for the talent show at the cancer walk and totally won 2nd place and a hat. I still know the choreography from it.

I love warming a crowd up and coming into a show with the crowd warm. As long as they are willing to try and be engaged I like to try and engage them.

[Jessica]

I have several nightmare shows clowning, but I actually like this one.

So I get hired to do a Birthday Party, but his birthday was actually 6 months ago, he was just in the hospital at the time. And it looks like this might be the last birthday for this poor guy. The grown-ups try really hard to make it special, the food is awesome, the jumpy - jumps, a ton of kids and me. But, understandably enough the mood was very weird and mostly depressed. I made a bunch of balloons, because the b.day kid was too tired to come out. So finally, it's time for the magic show. The grown-ups are fluttering around the b.day boy like he is breakable, the other kids know something weird is going on but they don't know what so they have this weird, kinetic energy. And the birthday boy can barely keep his head up. So, I start and direct the first joke straight to the birthday boy, who actually laughs out loud. That chills out the grown-ups and they finally realize that it is a party. Then I get the rest of the kids on board, they are just happy, cuz they know how to respond to a clown. By the end of the show everyone was relaxed and happy. The kids were acting like kids again. The birthday boy had laughed so much he had to go back to bed. That was when I realized that being a clown really means something and I started to respect my art a bit more.

Tough crowds be dammed, I have a job to do!

[terrillific]

Oh man I could I could write page and pages of all the hell and horror gigs I've done in my life. THere are a lot both from my standup and improv shows. Just try doing improv or stand up in anyplace where the crowd doesn't want to see it and you got yourself a hell gig.

But back to the topic of following a killer performance. We once had to follow a band at a christmas party where we were doing an improvised roast for the CEO of a now Defunct High Tech company. (dave wallace will remember this nightmare show because he was in it)
It was La Zona Rosa and right after we went on I started telling some roast oriented jokes and got NOTHING. Zip...silence. THe CEO and his senior people all came over to front of stage staring at me like they were going to take me to a slaughter house. Dave and I did an improv game with a volunteer who happened to be very drunk. Bad idea! One word expert and we couldn't get it to work to save our lives. The other improvisor with us ran off stage and refused to come back on to help us do anymore games. We tried some other game but it failed miserably, and then the person who booked us bailed us out by telling me they were bringing back the band. Basically we got kicked off stage after 10 minutes of pure sucking performance hell.

But hey we still got PAID!

Sometime I'll write about doing an improv show for a packed room of drunk army rangers who were about to get shipped off to Afghanistan in 2002. This one got scary, but its for another time.