Becoming a Stand-Up Comedian: All About Bombing

As a comedian, you live every show with the specter of bombing - of spending an entire set telling jokes with no laughter, no response, and no interest from the audience. It's what makes standup scary, exciting, exhilarating, and occasionally painful.

Painful, because bombing hurts, as evidenced by the words comics use to describe it. Comics don't "struggle"; they don't "have a bad day"; they "bomb", they "die", they "eat it." But bombing is a part of comedy, particularly as a beginner. If you choose to become a comic, you WILL bomb. Repeatedly. No matter how good your material, how solid your stage presence, or how quick your wit, your day will come. Here's how to avoid it, how to get through it, and how to learn from it.

Avoiding Bombing

A key for every comic, at every level, is to open strong. The standard wisdom is to open with your second-best joke, and close with your best joke. Like every other "rule" in standup, this rule gets broken, but it remains solid advice. Road comics often open with a "local" joke (which may be basically the same everywhere, simply tailored to that city's highway system or questionable neighborhood), but regardless of the topic, you want to open strong. If you start with a few strong minutes, the audience will begin to believe that you are funny. They'll pay closer attention; get less distracted by the waitstaff and their friends; most importantly, they will be on your side.

On the other hand, if you open with a weak joke or two, the audience can be lost very quickly. They start to think to themselves, "I hope this guy doesn't have a half hour of those jokes." Then they start thinking about something else; five minutes later, they're talking to their wife about their vacation next month and you're up a creek without a paddle.