Spent 2 years telling jokes wrong before a mic drop at the Laughing Owl taught me the pause trick

I was at open mic night at the Laughing Owl in Cincinnati last month, bombing for the fifth time in a row. I realized I was rushing through my punchlines because I was scared of silence. Then this old comic named Dave pulled me aside and said you gotta let the setup breathe for a real 2 count before hitting the punchline. Now I actually get laughs instead of crickets. Has anyone else had a weird specific tip that flipped their whole delivery?

3 comments

3 Comments

riverh4925d ago

Nah, rushing keeps the energy up. Silence kills momentum for a crowd that's already distracted.

the_drew25d ago

The Laughing Owl in Cincinnati huh, that place has a weird echo off the back wall (I did a set there in 2019 and my voice bounced back at me like a half second late, threw off my whole timing). Dave sounds like the real deal, my breakthrough came from a waitress at a dive bar in Dayton who told me I was blinking too much on stage, like every time I said a punchline I would blink, so the audience missed my facial expression. So I started practicing in a mirror with a metronome app on my phone (40 BPM, one tick for setup, two ticks for the pause, then the punch). It felt robotic at first but after maybe 15 shows it became muscle memory. Also turns out blinking less makes you look more confident even if you're dying inside, so that's a bonus.

jakeb8125d ago

Does the metronome trick work for counting how long you've been dying inside on stage, cause I could use a timer for that too? Great tip though, now I just gotta find a waitress brave enough to watch my act twice.