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Traveling

I hate traveling for my current day job and I’m wondering if I’ll like traveling for comedy any better.

My current job’s traveling:

I leave every Monday morning and return Thursday night, usually going to the same city for weeks on end. Most of the people I interact with are also traveling in every week, so there’s no social circle to plug into. I work 830am until 6 or 7pm, and by the time I go to the gym and grab some food, it’s dark and I can’t see anything in the city, except the bars, which are almost always dead on Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday nights. 

Comedy traveling, as I imagine it:

You usually perform 2-3 weekend nights in a row in the same location. You either do some local radio/tv during the day to promote the show, or you get the day to sleep in, take in the city and prepare for the show. The bars are packed, you can bring a friend with you for the trip, go out with the other comedians, or since the bars are packed, at least have more people to strike up a conversation with in town. This sounds slightly better, but I can see it being tiresome. Especially if you go on a one or two month tour. Then again, you can treat these two months as an adventure, since you could rest for a few weeks before going on tour again. In my current business travel, you don’t get a month to take a break from traveling, ever.

 

This post will be interesting to look back on once I’ve been traveling for comedy gigs to see if my expectations match up with reality.

Are there any topics that are off limits?

A friend of mine: “Basically I’m an admin in sexual health for men with prostate cancer. They have erection issues and all of that fun stuff after the chemo.”

Me: “So your work has a barrel sized viagra dispenser?”

Friend: “Nah, their issues are more serious, they either need injections straight to the penis, have curvature that requires surgery or worse. I also get to ask people about the intensity of their erections on a scale of 1 to 10. 5 is where they’re barely able to penetrate.”

Me: “Wow, you must really like boners… This could be comedy gold. If you could take such an uncomfortable topic, and make an appropriate joke that releases the tension, it’ll kill.”

Friend: “Nah, nah. I don’t like to talk about work during stand up. It’s not good to make fun of people with cancer… Almost everyone knows someone who’s had it… AIDS jokes are okay though.”

Me: “I don’t think any topic is off limits. Just some topics are much harder to make funny. But those topics have the most payoff potential. And this is so uncomfortable, if you could make it inoffensive, it’ll be great.”

DISCUSSION FOCUS: What topics, if any, do you consider off limits for comedy? Death? Diseases that you can’t avoid? 9/11? God? Why? If nothing is off limits, why?

Wanna try stand-up comedy yourself? I teach a Comedy Class in NYC. I also do private one-on-one comedy coaching (in-person or via Zoom).

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