I’ve been meaning to write about my hour-long comedy special that I recorded on June 19th, but I’ve just been slammed with work and other projects. But now’s the time to sit and write about it. (hey, you should buy a copy!)
Here’s a table of contents for this lengthy post :
- Gearing Up
- The Daunting Task
- Something Different
- Gathering A Crowd
- The Show
- The Aftermath
- The Advertising
- The Future
- Buy My Album (the “shameless self-promotion whore” dichotomy)
Gearing Up
You’ll have to understand that, prior to this comedy special, my longest set was around 35 mins long. I’ve done three sets that broke the 30-minute mark, and none that have broken even 40 minutes. I set out to do 45 minutes for the album, and found out a week prior to recording it that I was alloted 70 minutes for my set. Naturally, I took that opportunity to write even more material. (golly, doesn’t that sound like a lot? maybe you should buy a copy to get the full effect!)
The Daunting Task
I wasn’t altogether worried about filling up 60+ minutes of time, so much as I wondered if I could fill up 60+ minutes that I would be proud to charge money for. That’s a big deal for me. I’ve done a lot of little projects for the purposes of entertaining the masses – several bands when I was younger, performance art, Aural Salvation (my hour-a-weeknight Internet TV show from 2005-2008), Mitcz The Expert (which I’m still doing on YouTube), 9 years of blog entries, every standup comedy performance — all of those things, I never personally charged for. Sure, people have paid to access them (either paying a door man, or paying for an internet connection) but I never asked for a dime. So, to break my 31-year-streak, I needed something special. That’s what I considered the challenge. (which reminds me – you should buy a copy!)
Something Different
With all that time to kill onstage, the freedom to go anywhere I wanted with it, the ability to stretch out ideas and bits to their bitter ends – that was exciting. I was finally free to tell lengthy stories, as I often do in my private life but almost never do onstage. This was a chance to do something different with my comedy. Moreover, I didn’t want wall-to-wall dick jokes. That would be “too easy”, I told myself.
My father and I talked a few months prior, and when I told him about the special and asked if he could make it out for the show – he said “is it just gonna be a bunch of cursing and sex stuff?”. Taken aback as I was, I realized… he was right. The way my set was written at the time was little more than a series of wordy dick jokes. Sure, I’ve made some socio-political commentary here and there, and I’ve done entire sets based on current events, but the gigs leading up to The Big One weren’t even rehearsed. I’d just go up onstage and rattle off the easy sex stuff, cause it always gets a laugh and I could tell those bits in my sleep.
I wanted something my dad might laugh at. And my sister. Something that ran the gamut of the weird shit I spend my lonely hours locked away in my apartment of solitude obsessing about. So, I basically picked out two or three “sex stuff” bits that I wanted to keep and wiped everything else. (doesn’t that sound neat? did you know you can buy a copy?)
Gathering A Crowd
Leading up to the performance, I must’ve bothered everyone I’ve ever known about this gig. I sent out MySpace invites, Facebook invites, email invites, Eventful announcements, Twitter updates, text messages, phonecalls… you name it. I had only a rough idea who would show up for the gig. Ultimately, fewer showed than I’d expected, but there were also a lot of surprises. I’d give “shout outs”, but I don’t want anyone to feel left out, nor do I want to fill this blog entry up with a long list of names. For those that showed – know that I’ll never forget it, and I thank you from the pit of my blackened little heart. While I’ve always felt like a cast-aside nerdy little pervert, that night made me feel better than I’ve ever felt. At the same time, and for reasons I don’t wish to reveal publicly, it also in many ways cemented a number of negative feelings I harbor about myself, my life, my career, my social status. (aww… how sappy – cheer me up and buy a copy!)
The Show
What’s there to say, really? I flubbed a couple of lines, forgot a few bits here and there, added entire rants in other places, got laughs at non-jokes that I was surprised by, and walked offstage thinking “holy shit. I did it”. For a guy with no agent, no manager, and who’s done maybe 60 shows in his life (a sad number, considering most comics do more than that in their first 6 months) – I’m proud of what I accomplished that night. (curious if I have the chops? buy a copy!)
The Aftermath
I woke up the morning after it happened feeling lonelier than I’ve felt in a very long time. Anyone close to me that I could actually see and hang out with was at the show the night before, so there was nothing new to tell them. Anyone I was close with that wasn’t at the show was out of town, and out of touch. Everyone else, I figured, was probably not the close friend I thought they were; they’d have been at the show if they were. I then shed some tears for my mother. She would’ve been so proud of her little freak. (bla bla bla buy a copy)
The Advertising
As I said earlier – I’ve never sold anything for myself before. I’ve had a shitload of projects in my life where I thought “ohman, if this takes off – I can sell (items)!”. Now, for the first time in my life, I have an actual product to sell. And, while I’ve worked in web-based advertising for most of my life, I’ve never really had to rely solely on my own traffic, my own world, my own ads, my own… everything. It’s a crazy world out there. Crazier still is that I have 1000s of people out there on the web who have expressed interest in the album, but no easy way to get ahold of them all. 6,000+ MySpace friends – how the fuck do I contact them? And would it be “spam”, enough to get my account deleted? I’ve tried putting alerts on Facebook to fans of my Rev. Mitcz page and my Mitcz The Expert page, but even actual friends of mine on there didn’t know the album was available for pre-order yet. The same goes for my hundreds of Twitter followers, my 100s of Eventful Demanders, my 100s of YouTube subscribers. I’m trying to find ways to let them all know about it – but it’s tough to actually connect and contact any of them without feeling like I might get an account deleted for “spamming”. So, basically, I’ve just been trying to think of all the myriad ways I can put the word out (ya know, like I’ve been doing all throughout this entry when I tell you to buy a copy!)
The Future
To be honest, I’ve been considering just throwing in the towel on comedy. Don’t get me wrong – I love it more than anything else in the world. But, really, I don’t know where to go from here. Building up a “local following” is near-impossible at the rate I perform. I can’t perform more often because after a bout of financial woes and deadbeat clients, I had to give up my car and I can’t exactly walk to the Improv. Not that I’d get booked there – cause I’d need to bring people out to the show, and I can’t keep asking my friends to cough up hard-earned money to hear me talk for 10 minutes at a time. Especially when I can just have them spend less money to buy a copy of me talking for an hour straight.
The future, basically, rests in how well the DVD/MP3 copies of my performance are received. If there’s a high demand – I’ll rise up to meet it. I consider it to be the Greatest Thing I Have Ever Done (emphasis on “I”, which might make it “not all that great” in the grand scheme of things I suppose) and I’m very proud of it. On the flipside, I don’t feel like relegating myself to performing once-a-month as I currently do and pretending It’s A Career. Standup Comedy deserves better from me than that, and I just can’t give it – not right now, anyway. After all, I have a number of not-ready-to-discuss-yet projects I’m doing this year (like my book for instance) as well as work that needs catching up on.
Buy My Album (the “shameless self-promotion whore” dichotomy)
I’ve never been one to push my projects onto people. I’ve always been a “here’s what I’m doing – I’ll tell you about it and then leave you alone. If you like it – cool. If you don’t, I will bother you no more” kind of person. I don’t fill my Twitter feed with endless links to my shit, I don’t spam friends’ comment fields and Facebook walls with announcements about what I’m doing, I don’t even send out invites to events I’m performing at unless I was specifically told by that person that they wanted to know (or, in the one-time case of my comedy special — if it’s a Major Fucking Event).
Now, I’ve long thought that was Taking The High Road. Being a genuine person, and not a shameless self-promotion whore. I don’t want to distance myself from people and be in marketing mode 24/7. I’ve known people like that in my life (especially here in Hollywood) and they make me fuckin’ sick. When I was doing Aural Salvation, there’s a number of people who would kiss my ass trying to get on the show and I’d brush them off because, to me, they were just walking billboards for their Product, and I wanted People on the show, not Products.
The other side of this battle is that you hear all the time about people who Made It Big On The Internet. Apparently, Justin Bieber got his start because some record exec happened across a YouTube video of his. Tila Tequila and Jeffree Star got “big on myspace” (by “friending” everyone on the site) and turned it into a career. The same goes for Hollywood Undead, Soulja Boy, Dane Cook. Hell, Jersey Shore is on the air partly because an agent at a very well-known agency that a close friend of mine works at saw my Douchebags PSA, read some of the 1000s of comments on it, and said “Wow! People HATE these guys! what a great idea for a reality show!” and went in search of people who were just as douchey.
I’ve done research on a lot of these “success stories”. Turns out, most of the time, these people are shameless self-promotion whores. What marketing shitheads call “engaging their audience” turns out to be “spamming the fuck out of anyone who shows even a passive interest”. Clearly, that works wonders. Fling enough shit, and something’s bound to stick.
To put it another way – even if you hate any of the aforementioned people, there’s still 6 billion people on this earth and if you appeal to even 5% of them – you’ve got a market cap of 300 Million People (conveniently, that’s also the population of these United States). Even the combined sum of every Beatles album ever sold is less than 300 million. That should put things in perspective.
The projects I’ve done get really positive responses from people, and I’m very proud of the reactions they elicit. It seems those who dig what I do really dig what I do. They just.. don’t have any friends. Or, they don’t tell their friends. But, more than anything, I don’t actively try to recruit people. That will be my downfall. Taking The High Road, it seems, means fuck-all.
So, uhh… here’s my being a shameless self-promotion whore : buy my album.
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