Reader, you and I both know by this stage in the game that I dabble in the world of amateur stand-up comedy (I will be able to remove the "amateur" part of that as soon as I get paid one of these days; but to be fair, I did a show in Little Falls, NY and was nearly paid with a nice breakfast, but being the jerk that I am, I picked up the tab and, unfortunately... well you get the idea) and as such I am incredibly familiar with "bombing;" which is, if you're unfamiliar with the term, what comedians call it when they fail on stage.
It sucks.
It hurts your soul.
It makes you wonder why you're doing what you're doing in the first place and whether or not it's time you took your Dad's advice and went back to college to get that degree in stereo repair, but it is an essential part of the process of making a stand-up comic what he or she will one day become. This could mean it makes a comic tough enough to endure any crowd, any situation no matter how dire and helps to shape his or her material accordingly. Or, it could mean it breaks a comic's heart so thoroughly that he or she never recovers and, overtime, develops a phobia of microphones so severe that he or she may develop hives whenever confronted with a PA system. (Yeah, it really is that bad.)
If you're running from the room screaming right now, you may have bombed a few too many times. I'm so, so sorry.
The absolute best thing about stand-up is how instantaneous the feedback is, because laughter is an involuntary reaction. If something is funny, you laugh and you really have no choice. You can stifle it as much as you want, but deep down your brain knows that joke about AIDS-zombies is hysterical and it wants you to laugh, but your better judgement, the type you do with your "thinking brain," doesn't want the people around you to know that you find AIDS-zombies hilarious and so you cover your mouth or do one of those weird, spastic silent laughs. Or, conversely, you think something is so unfunny that you sit there cross armed, smugly frowning, because you really think nothing to do with AIDS-zombies is funny, because you just lost a pet to the AIDS-zombie pandemic and the joke cut too close to the bone. But, here's the rub, no matter how the material lines up to your own sense of humor there's a better than average chance that you will connect with it on some level. So, the guy who thinks AIDS-zombies are the funniest thing in the world has been just as affected as the guy who would rather stab himself in the thigh with a fork than here another stupid AIDS-zombie joke. One of them is laughing like an asshole, the other is hoping whoever is on stage finishes as soon as he or she possibly can in the hopes that whoever is coming up next may have some other, non AIDS-zombie related jokes to tell.
Neither of them are wrong.
It's okay, guys! You're both right!
Now that all of you are well aware of where you stand as an audience member and how, regardless of your reaction, you're never in the wrong (it is, after all, the comic's duty to make you laugh, not the other way around) let me tell you what it feels like to "kill" (which is what comic's say when they've done really well with an audience) versus what it feels like to "bomb."
I really can't say that I've ever "killed," because I haven't been doing stand-up that long, my craft is not honed into perfection yet, so I'm generally spotty at best, but I have done well with some audiences before, so let me give this a shot. "Killing," is like having sex while eating spaghetti and watching the best episode of Mad Men ever, because there is very little that can honestly compare to the feeling of making a crowd laugh exactly how and when you wanted them to. You feel like a rock star. No! You feel like someone more in control of their surroundings than a rock star, because at a comedy show there aren't a bunch of guitars or drums to draw attention away from whoever isn't picking up the slack that night. It is just you, a microphone, some lighting and a bunch of chairs filled with people who came there to be made to laugh. These people are usually strangers who have no idea who you are and only know the barest history of stand-up comedy. They may have heard of people like Paul F. Tompkins, Patton Oswalt and Louis C.K, but, for the most part the average crowd knows the bigger named guys that play to much larger audiences; which isn't to say the audience should seek out the material available for the people I've mentioned, but they totally should, because I'll bet Paul F. Tompkins can make them laugh a million different ways than, say, a Dane Cook would. (Not to take anything away from Mr. Cook, who has done very well for himself) Having said all of that, when Joe Comedyseeker shows up, has no idea who you are or what kind of jokes you tell and laughs at you throughout your entire set, there is little in this world that makes you feel that good. It's amazing, really, and I have yet to experience a high even close to that.
On the other hand...
"Bombing," is, to put it lightly, hell on earth made out of acid, soaked in the saddest rainbow you can imagine; it feels like being raped by a syphilitic puppy. There's so much potential at the beginning of every set, so much that can go right, but sonofabitch if you don't know almost immediately if you're going to fall flat and that's when the puppy-rape starts. It's a slow, burning feeling within you that doesn't take full effect until you get to a joke you "just know" is going to work, going to win the audience back over to your side... and there's nothing. Silence. Not even the fucking crickets could bother to show up for this, and if they did, they're just sitting there not laughing because you fucking blew it, man. You couldn't even make the crickets laugh and crickets have a notoriously broad sense of humor. It hurts. A lot. More so than most anything a human being can put him or herself through short of losing a loved one. I'm not kidding. It is that atrocious an experience. It calls into question not just your existence, but your purpose, God's existence, God's purpose and it shines a light on every mistake you've ever made in your life that lead you to that particular point in time. You wonder if there's a way to reverse it, if you can get on stage again and prove yourself to the audience a second time, but you can't. You're time is up and you have to move along, because that's all she wrote, Jack, and there's another comic coming up that has to try and dig himself out of the grave you just dug.
Oh yeah, there's also that.
When you do stand-up, unless you're a headliner -which is almost a "bomb proof" position to be in, since it means you've crafted an act good enough to have people pay to see you based on name recognition- there's usually a person waiting to follow you. That person, if you bomb, will want to murder you for leaving the audience cold like you did, believe me I know this from experience. So, on top of disappointing the audience and yourself, you now have the added knife in the gut of making a friend or fellow comic have to work themselves out of your pile of shit. It sucks when you're the bomber and it sucks just as much when you're the guy who has to follow the guy who just made your job that much more difficult. Because, after a truly awful set, the audience is thinking "why am I here? I spent money on a ticket and drinks and this is what I'm paying for? Bah! BAH I SAY!" and so they're pissed off and unruly and want to laugh; which hopefully the follow up act can make them do, but it is harder than if, say, the person right before them didn't suck the life out of the room with their lack of funny.
I've done the latter a few times (probably more than that, honestly) and it has taken me days to realize what an asshole I was because of it, but you live, you learn and you move on. Otherwise you get stuck in this cycle of self-loathing you'll never be able to get out of; which is the worst, believe me. Most comics are depressed or mentally not all together as it is, so when you strip away something as meaningful to them as the laughter they try to create it can be devastating.
Luckily, most comics are also pretty delusional. They hang on even the smallest laugh as proof that they did an okay job that night. They go home and tell their loved ones it was "alright" and they keep at it, but the pain lingers. It festers. It is always there in the back of their minds clawing at their preciously delicate psyche waiting to scratch its way to the surface to blow their confidence out of whack and ruin their night. It's bombing. It's part of the deal you sign when you get into comedy, and it is something you can embrace or reject, but it is always going to be out there. That potential for utter failure is waiting around the corner of each comic's next set and, believe you me, Reader, it haunts most of us.
But, you live, you learn and you move on or you quit. I've seen extremely talented friends of mine not at their best one night come back a few days later and absolutely destroy, because comedy is a fickle mistress that will not be tamed like some common shrew. It needs work. It needs practice and it needs humility. Or, at the very, very least, a steady diet of delusions of grandeur in order to succeed, because without the taste of failure (and it is a wide palate of taste, I'll have you know) you're never going to know what it means to "kill."
Having said all of that, let me remind you -and any comics reading this- that I am very much a hack who just happens to love comedy more than almost anything else in his life, and so I've learned to stop caring and love the "bomb," because it is all a part of this incredibly stupid life I'm trying to make for myself. Make of this what you will, but if you want to experience it for yourself, find an open-mic in your hometown and see for yourself. Its amazing to experience. Trust me.
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