The bumpy road toward a full-hour comedy show

I’ve now performed my solo show “Act Normal” twice here in Barcelona. The show was personal and combined work I had been writing on for over three years. I’m glad I was finally able to turn all this work into a full show, although the road toward a full show was a bit harder than I would’ve imagined it.

Why I started doing comedy

First things first, how did I end up in the comedy scene in the first place? Well, honestly I just moved to Barcelona, without speaking a word of Spanish. I only knew two people in the entire country, so I had to look for a group of people or some kind of community where people spoke English.

On Facebook, I once liked some comedy shows in English and a random guy named “LLuis” asked me to come to watch some shows. Eventually, after complaining for a long time to my therapist about not having friends, I decided to give it a try.
I still remember the first time I went to a show, which was back in 2019 when no one even heard of COVID. It was an open mic in Pub Limerick in Barcelona, hosted by a comedian named “Marnie Manning”. The comedians seemed very open and welcoming, as well as a close community. This seemed a great community for me to hang out and escape all drama at work for a minute.

I went to watch more shows more and more often. Comedy shows, but also poetry and storytelling shows, as those apparently also existed, in English, in Barcelona! It was at the first poetry/storytelling show I went to, where I was legitimately asked to go on stage and share something myself. As I was not prepared for that moment, I read one of my older blogs on stage. Doing that felt great, it’s like you can finally share emotions and feelings you’ve coped with for a very long time. It tasted like more.

Around the same time, I also tried stand-up comedy for the first time. I asked one of the hosts of a show I went to if I could try it out. They told me “sure, but there’s a long waiting list”. I had an opportunity and had weeks to write and prepare for it. I started writing, but what is funny? What are other comedians doing? They talk about themselves, right? Tell some stereotypes about their countries, religions, gender, and more…
I’m Belgian and pretty much an atheist. What stereotypes can I use? What am I going to talk about? I eventually decided to rant about Belgian politics and suicide numbers for 5 minutes as this was something that interested me at the time.

That set was NOT good. People barely laughed. The audience clapped and was supportive, but that might’ve been because the host told them this was my first performance… ever.

Still, I liked being on stage. I loved the attention. Finally being able to introduce some people to something you created is an amazing feeling. So I kept on writing more and more jokes. The jokes I thought were funny. Simple punchlines, things everyone can understand easily. I got some laughs. Not a lot, just a few.

Gong show

A few weeks after that, I watched a “gong show”. A comedian could go on stage and try to make people laugh. Then with the help of some paddles, the audience would decide whether or not the comedian could stay on stage or if it was their time to leave.

During the show, a slot opened up, and obviously, I took it. Who could ever deny such an amazing opportunity? However, I had no idea how to do comedy, really.
I made jokes before, and I had written funny stories before, but I was completely inexperienced when it came to actually performing. It’s different. People stare at you and expect you to do something.

I went through all my jokes at an insane speed, because I had to keep them laughing. I went through them so fast, no one even had time to laugh. When the audience had a say, they decided to kill me.

That was rough! It felt like rejection. Why didn’t people like what I did? I wrote good jokes! Were they just too slow to understand it? There’s gotta be a reason why and that reason can’t be me. I did my best! I’m funny!

COVID

I started doing comedy around the beginning of 2020, a year that is now infamously known as a year when people didn’t watch a lot of comedy shows. Around mid-March, we had our first complete lockdown in Barcelona. One that lasted several months.
This hit me very hard, especially because I just moved here and barely knew anyone. There was nearly anyone I could call or talk to for a very long time. I couldn’t perform during the lockdown, but after lockdown, as bars were only open for a certain amount of hours.
After that, the number of shows was minimal and there were also very small audiences watching those shows.

Oral expression

Because of the pandemic, there were not many opportunities to perform, but there was a good show for poetry and storytelling. That’s why I decided to request a slot upfront and write a piece specifically for the mic. I was running around with an idea in my head for a very long time.

Back in high school, my English teacher asked everyone to do an oral expression about their “greatest fear”. Ever since, when I saw people telling vulnerable stories on stage, I was thinking about that moment. Mainly because I really didn’t do well back then. My English was of a very poor level and I had no idea what to say.

That time in my life was an absolute hell and I wished I would’ve used the oral expression to expose how I thought and felt at the time. Since I couldn’t do it at the time, I thought it would be a great idea to use the poetry and storytelling mic to do the oral expression as I should’ve done it the first time.

I wrote the piece while seeing a therapist which tried to help me overcome my traumas from that time in my life. The timing was perfect: I wrote the piece and performed it at the show. Super emotional, and unfortunately it was very hard to get through. I was crying while doing the piece.

After this performance, people came up to me. They felt related to what I said. Some people even hugged me. Even two weeks after, people would still come up to me and tell me how “brave” my performance was.
I decided that if I would ever do a full-length show, this would be the end of my show. I kept my word because this bit became the ending of my full-length show “Act Normal”.

Here’s me performing that same bit a few years later: https://www.tiktok.com/@dejakob/video/7160308944659860741

Let’s try again

Somewhere in between lockdowns, waves, and night curfews, I found a show on the weekends where I could perform almost weekly. I kept on writing new material and slowly got some laughs. One laugh at a time. I just kept trying and practice made, well not perfect, but at least slightly less horrible.

The most important thing was that I enjoyed doing it and kept on challenging myself to write something new each time. I slowly started to get better, but very slowly. It wasn’t always easy to get a slot to perform, even on the weekly open mics, it could be hard to get on as many others wanted to perform.

Knockout

I wanted more. More time on stage, more opportunities to perform. I believed that I belonged on stage. That I deserved to be on stage. Ambition is great, however, according to Newton’s third law, the higher the force you give (the action), the higher the reaction you will get.

At some point, a comedian started hosting shows in her hometown Sabadell, a little town outside of the city of Barcelona. Since not many comedians were that excited about traveling over there, I saw it as an opportunity I could not resist. At one of those shows, a lot of performers bailed a few hours before and only two of us were gonna make it. I said “great! Let me perform for 20 minutes then”.

I threw all of my previous sets together and ended up having 20 minutes of what I at the time assumed were “jokes”. This was still during COVID times, only a few people were in the audience, some of whom did not speak English. Still, I got a few laughs and kept my promise of keeping it up for 20 minutes.

After the show, I made the stupid mistake of bragging in a chat group of Barcelona comedians about this achievement. This did not get the reaction I was hoping for. Most people reacted a bit grumpy or didn’t care at all. One guy got upset with me for writing it. It felt like he was physically hurt by me writing this.

At the bar, he came up to me and literally said “no, you don’t have 20 minutes! Your comedy is shit”. I didn’t want to give it too much thought, but he kept insisting. I tried to prove him wrong with “some people laughed” and “no one complained”. The argument at some point got so heated that we went to an entire recording of the show together where he tried to point out every single joke and how bad it was. Truth be told, I don’t think I reused any of those jokes in my full-length show, but he’s still you know, a dickhead.

This, and the fact that I felt excluded and let down by the community of comedians, made me decide to stop doing it. I thought: “I joined this community to make friends, and I’m not making any”. My goals were not going to be reached. I was putting in a lot of effort and believed that I was getting nothing out of it. I wanted to just stop. I removed myself from the comedian chat groups, disconnected more from the community, and stopped doing comedy for at least some time.

Once more

At the end of 2021, I tried performing once more or so, just because I started getting bored. Since I left the chat groups myself, it got even harder to find stage time.
I was only able to perform once because new night curfews came into effect, the holidays were coming with restrictions and on top of that, I got the coronavirus myself at the very end of 2021.

Once I properly healed from the virus and became immune for a few months, I decided to pick up performing again. After all, I had plenty of time to write new material. I wrote a brand-new set, with some background music, which pretended to be an infomercial about COVID and its advantages of it. This set was perceived incredibly well and I performed it a few times. It gave me the energy again to keep performing.

Around the same time, the comedy clubhouse opened in a new location. They were systematically organizing more and more shows, some of them being actual open mics. One of them was “the shitty mic”, a comedy show on Mondays where everyone who wanted could perform for 3 minutes. The concept did usually cause more performers to show up than regular audience members, but hey, you got a weekly chance to perform and I performed on this show every single week.

Comedy Revolution

For most of 2022, I performed multiple times a week, but still wanted to create more opportunities. Not only for myself but also for other comedians. Around the time I was busy building a comedy platform, I introduced a new open mic: Comedy Revolution.

Unironically, I did learn a lot from hosting an open mic myself. While I would usually criticize other hosts for favoritism, taking all the money, and so on, I did start to realize that it’s actually quite a hard job. Especially if you want to do it well. When you start a new show, the audience doesn’t just show up. You will have to put a lot of effort into getting people to watch your show. If people pay money to enter, that money usually goes straight into promotion for the next show.

I tried to make my show open to everyone, where people could just sign up online to perform. However, I did notice that usually, the same people would sign up for this mic. Something I was, in a way, trying to avoid.

Nonetheless, comedy revolution, for the few editions it had, was a minor success. Plenty of people did show up and seemed to enjoy the show (at least in most cases).

I’m going to build my own show! With blackjack and…

At that point, I had a few decent sets, and I had performed a few minutes in other cities like Paris and Amsterdam, but I was still having problems with getting enough stage time to please myself. I usually performed for three or five minutes, occasionally seven, and only a very few times ten, but that was more storytelling. The “real” performers in Barcelona easily spend ten or fifteen minutes on stage and usually in front of larger audiences.

I believed that the only way to ever have a good fifteen minutes was by trying out fifteen-minute sets multiple times. However, there was never an opportunity for me to try out fifteen minutes of comedy. The best opportunities were usually given behind closed doors. You had to know people, be best friends with them,…
I as an impatient person believed that I would never be given one of those opportunities, as people don’t like me THAT much. I also couldn’t organize a fifteen-minute show myself because it would’ve been too short. A split show with another comedian? Who would ever do that with me?

So I got stuck. There was a glass ceiling above me that I believed I would never break through. However, I wasn’t going to back off. I asked the comedy clubhouse to do a tryout for a full-hour show, a little over two months later. That’s why I attempted to do it. I wanted to do a full-length show out of spite, jealousy, frustration, and pain. Which are horrible motivations for doing anything, really.

Feet back on the ground

Now I had set a deadline and I was going to follow through, no matter what. The worst thing that could happen was that I did a bad show, no?

I quite quickly got the idea of doing a show around the topic of “acting normal” and already had the title. This was something I had struggled with for a long time as I was always considered “abnormal” primarily during my childhood. At first, I wanted to write a completely new comedy in the two months around this topic and then performed it at once. This was a completely foolish idea as I would have no chance to test it out and it would highly decrease my chances of putting down a proper show.

So I started looking into my archives. What did I actually do well in the past two-three years? I found some decent pieces, but they weren’t comedy sets. Some of my best-perceived bits on stage happened at storytelling and poetry shows. However, I was not sure if that was a bad thing. I am Belgian and I’ve seen Flemish comedians getting serious for large parts of their shows. Comedian Michael Van Peel ranted in his 2017 conference for several minutes about people with down syndrome, people living up to physical perfection, and suicide being the highest cause of death between 15 and 50. That part got super real, and maybe wasn’t “hilarious” on its own, but was part of an amazing comedy show.

However, I felt I needed to be more cautious. I started marketing the show as a mixed show of storytelling, comedy, and ranting. In the end, it was still a comedy show, but a large part of it became serious and relatively dark. I decided to put some of my most recent stand-up comedy at the beginning, then storytelling made funny and end with some of the darker stuff.

Before I knew it, I had a genuine concept of a one-man show in front of me. I just had to prepare it and keep improving on it. A few weeks after that, I was performing this concept in front of around 25 people at the comedy clubhouse.

Backlash

The few people that watched the first tryout, including Matt and John (owners of the comedy clubhouse), were quite supportive. I actually received positive reactions from the audience. It wasn’t the best thing ever, and there was still a lot of work but the show had some potential at least.

The main backlash came from people who did not watch the show. Other comedians from the community, people who hang out at the bar, people who saw me perform once two years ago and didn’t like it. They told me I should not do a one-hour show. It was a bad idea and could only be bad because my jokes weren’t good, I was inexperienced and should try fifteen minutes first (get the irony?).

I got mainly insulted and criticized for simply trying and being ambitious rather than the actual performance. This hurt badly because I’m never going to convince those people. They are convinced my comedy is bad, but also refuse to actually watch the show every time I invite them to.

Aaaand another one!

I felt hurt because of all the backlash and anger. That’s why only one month after, I performed the show a second time at another venue, with some improvements and Matthew Murtha as the opener for the show. I once again got 25 people to watch the show, and reactions were quite positive, but none of those 25 people were the ones who criticized me earlier.

I got so fed up with getting a community to like me, and getting competitive with other comedians that I lost sight of the progress I actually made. I definitely am still not making any top-quality comedy, but I am definitely 100 times better than when I started.

I started to get so busy with what other comedians thought that I almost forgot about the most important thing: the audience. As a comedian, you perform for an audience. The audience makes you a performer instead of an idiot screaming into an empty bar. I made a show that at least some people enjoyed, which is in fact better than no show at all.

After doing my show twice, I got significantly better at smaller performances as well. I gained more and more positive feedback from my 5-minute performances at “Comedy Bomb Shelter”. Even if I never do the full show again, I gained experience. I got better. I improved. I shouldn’t have compared myself to what others did, or the opportunities they were given, because that made me feel awful. Instead, I should’ve looked at where I am today compared to where I was a year ago because that gives me confidence.

Bo Burnham once said, “if you can live your life without an audience, you should do it”. I’ve probably shown now that I can’t, so I will keep at it. One way or another.