Sunday, February 11, 2018

Submission 6

Comedian Bio
Adrian N. George had a bunch of break-ups with comedy, but gigging fully for less than a year. His highlight is doing the Leicester Comedy Festival.

Story
By this point, still roughly 8 months into London, having moved here from Bucharest, and still learning the scene and all that, having a job that didn't really allow me to do stand-up, I applied for a spot at the London King Gong, and if you don't know what that is, it's a notorious confidence crusher. Anyway, I had only had 3 gigs in these 8 months, two in a competition that I didn't pass to the second round, and a normal second gig that didn't go well at all. So I figured I'd try something so audacious as this KG gig. I went there, said hi to the people in charge, and was given a spot in the second half. I never rehearse my material, I have ideas of where it's gonna go, but it's usually winged massively. Anywho, I was gonna talk about sex in my spot, and during the first half, a bunch of comedians also talked about sex, and they were booed off the stage badly. Again, if you don't know what KG is, basically, you have up to 5 minutes to do your set, but 3 people from the audience have a sign, and if they don't like your stuff, they'll raise it prompting you to get off. After seeing what happened to them, I was even more nervous, and I figured I'd go with a joke about foreigners instead of the sex stuff, a joke I knew and figured it'd go down well. So, I go on stage, knees weak, arms heavy, sweat on the nape already, and proceed with the joke, only to forget it half-way. Before that, some guy shouted at me to get off the stage, prompting me to tell him to "fuck off" which got cheers. But me flaking on a joke I knew, and remembered after I stepped down was frustrating, and destroyed my comedy confidence in a big way. I took a break from comedy after that, but went into depression about a month or so after (a number of reasons, probably this gig "helped" too), and finally wanted to do comedy again in the winter months (mind you, this gig happened in April), but whenever that open mic gig came, for which you had to be there half an hour before to sign up, I was ready on the day, every week, for over two months, but an hour before I was supposed to leave I got the chills, anxiety, and a bunch of things that prevented me from going out. So instead I found "solace" in junk food. I had to move away from London (11 months after this gig) to hopefully recover from depression (which I eventually did, about 6 months after I moved), and it took 1 year and 5 months to get a new gig. Funnily enough, that gig was another gong show called Beat the Frog, in Manchester. I had discovered Mitch Hedberg by this time, and he inspired me to try some one-liners of my own, so I went on stage with a different persona, and spouted some one-liners that got some giggles, and despite not lasting the full five minutes due to a lack of material, I had recovered some of my confidence, and felt good for doing comedy after a very long and bumpy road. I wouldn't recommend that feeling to anyone, and I've had worse ones, too.

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