Just finished working and felt bad not putting something in today. The show was fun, the audience laughed in all the right places and managed to improvised a few new gags. Last year I did stand-up in New York and Montreal. I did one try-out night in a club in New York. One thing you notice since the anti-smoking laws have come in is that some of these old clubs without the cigarette smoke... Really stink. They stink of damp, kitchen smells, hell, sometimes you could smell the rubbish in the alley.
Anyway, the thing about New York is that they have these severe time constraints. Five minutes and you're off. I usually do two hours on stage. So you can imagine the talk about missing the red light by this nineteen year old manager. According to her I might never work in New York again. I think in the end I probably ended up doing about twelve minutes and got a good response for my first gig outside of Australia but , Man! The lecture I got. Also I'll never get back the half hour of sitting there to a semi-celebrity doing the worst material I have ever heard. One thing about American audiences they are polite. The same guy in Oz would've had a chair thrown at him. Hell we even boo comedians on national television.
Anyway it turns out that in the States the try-out nights work like this. If you bring in three paying friends, who buy two drinks, you get five minutes on stage. In some clubs if you bring ten friends you get eight minutes. So the place gets filled with the paying friends of the comics and nobody gets paid for the night.
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