By 
Comedy is one of the easiest forms of entertainment … if done right. All you need is a microphone, a stage, lighting, and a focused audience. But if you have one of those things out of place, you will get a very different experience.
When I started entertaining at some tough bar gigs, my goal was to be so successful that I would never have to perform comedy in a room where the blender could be heard again. The waiters seem to have a great sense of timing – they always turn it on right when you’re hitting a joke. Nobody hears it and you look silly. Little did I know that there are room setups that make blender gigs look easy.
I once had the opportunity to do comedy at a company party on a record player or Lazy Susan for those of you over 50. The room was stationary, but the part of the floor I was performing on was spinning, turning 360. Degrees every 10 minutes. In a 60 minute program, everyone got to see my face six times. There was a wall behind me, so the people on either side of the room couldn’t see each other, which made it all the more interesting because it was slowly turning towards one part of the room, annoying people who had forgotten there were comedy. , and then it spun. Sixty minutes of this. The customer was drunk when I arrived so she didn’t see the problem. She was probably drunk when she booked a revolving stage and comedian, but I can’t say for sure. My only saving grace was that the DJ was hired through the same agency, so I had a witness to this mess. Needless to say, my turntable comedy didn’t resonate well with the group.
I had another chance to do some comedy twists at an event a few years later, but instead of tossing the floor, it was just me! The company that hired me said that since there would be over 1,000 people present, they wanted to make sure everyone could see the comedian. So they put me on a pedestal in the middle of the room, with people sitting around me, and they asked me to turn around while telling jokes. I always wanted to be put on a pedestal, figuratively, not literally. I didn’t know about the twist until I got to the event, and the customer would ask me before the show, “So you think this is okay?” I refused to say yes because I didn’t want to take the blame, so I simply replied, “I’ll try.” I ended up having a lot of fun with it, and while the comedy show turned out really well, I wouldn’t recommend the revolving comedy. That’s when I decided that being a famous comedian would be very, very helpful because I could put my foot down and demand that I not turn. But I needed the money and I’m not famous, so I did!
Of course, there are stationary room setups that aren’t conducive to comedy, either. Try telling jokes in the basement ballroom of a posh hotel with poles placed throughout the room. I started out trying to avoid each other and around them and alongside them, until I finally blurted out, “I went to college so I wouldn’t have to get a job dancing around a pole!” He laughed a lot and I could recognize the situation I was in. At least everyone in the room was experiencing my pole dance so it was fun and the comedy show was still great!
And sometimes the stage is a bit more improvised than I would like. I did a lunchtime college comedy show where I had to stand at a long, narrow table for lunch. These college concerts are called “noon” because they happen at noon in the cafeteria. Lots of comedians do them, and tabletop comedy is pretty standard. Strange. I don’t know how many decibels the noise level reached that day, but I’m pretty sure no one heard my jokes; the students were more interested in their burgers and fries than in my humor. But no one questioned why a woman in her late forties was standing in her cafeteria at a table. I did my act on the clock. When 45 minutes were up, I jumped up and left. Now, I do a lot of keynotes at healthcare events, and they have a term called “never event” for a mistake that should never have happened, like operating on the wrong part of the body or injecting the wrong drug. I think that term, never event, sums up these noon.
Besides these places, just a few other wacky comedy settings I’ve made jokes about are:
In a bakery in a gigantic bowling alley with people inside giant transparent balls rolling next to me in a cellar outside in a field next to a canal with huge barges passing on a floating dock on a lake with the audience on the embankment of lawn on the shore in a restaurant while people were eating in a restaurant full of hundreds of statues in a multi-million dollar gym with a $ 20 sound system on an aircraft carrier with the wall open behind me so you could see the ocean inside a museum, on the steps leading to an exhibit
WISDOM: Don’t overthink things. Some of these situations occurred because the client thought too much of the audience, such as “Comedy will make students eat lunch.” No, hunger will make the students eat lunch, but the customer was trying to fix something that didn’t need to be fixed. Thinking about things from too many angles can make your head spin, even if you’re not telling jokes to a Lazy Susan!