Two Minutes On Television

Thursday June 10th, 2010 - Louisville, KY

Local television. How many places have I been on? It all starts to run together after this many appearances, but I’ll try to remember. Let’s see, there’s Albuquerque, Indianapolis, Kansas City, Tucson, Salt Lake City, Memphis, Reno, San Francisco, Cincinnati, Toledo, Akron, Pittsburgh, Colorado Springs, Winnipeg, Calgary, Chicago, El Paso and Miami.

Oops, and I forgot Louisville. I’ve been on here before too, and today I was on again. It was a local news/fluff show at the same station, but there were new hosts. I also think the time was different, but I could be wrong. I seem to remember an early morning show, but the one today started at 10am. We were on for the third segment, roughly around 10:25.

By ‘we’, I mean the new club owner Darrell Holladay and the feature act for the week, a very nice and funny guy named Roger Keiss out of Chattanooga, TN. Usually it’s just me, but today it was all three of us. Roger and Darrell were on the panel with the hosts while I was told to stand in front of a brick wall that was created just for these weekly segments.

The floor director told me to be prepared to get cut to at any time, and I was to be ready to either “do a solid two minutes or cut it when we tell you.” What does that mean? I did what I was told, glad I’d had a lot of experience in these situations. It’s always different.

Standup comedy is difficult enough in a club with an audience facing a stage. Standing in a TV studio staring into a camera and not knowing when I was going to start or exactly how long I’d be going raised the level of difficulty significantly. TV is a different animal.

They want short spurts of controlled content, preferably delivered with an upbeat energy. They want it for a couple of minutes, and then they want it to stop with a clean ending so they can cut to the commercials, weather or next bit. They have no desire to make it easy, they just want results. We’re content filler, and I get that. I’ve learned to adjust quickly.

Darrell and Roger bantered with the hosts for a minute or so, and then one of the hosts brought me into the mix. He didn’t bring up the ’Mr. Lucky’ angle, which I was ready to pounce on and run with for two minutes. If there’s one thing I can do it’s pack a punch in two minutes. I talk fast and get in a rhythm, and I challenge anyone to insert more jokes.

They came to me and I started rattling off jokes until they told me to wrap up. Everyone on the crew seemed really impressed, but they had no idea how many times I’ve been in a situation like that. Usually they don’t have us perform per se, but it is very similar having to do a panel or couch spot with a host for two or three minutes. Anything can happen.

I didn’t change the world, but I didn’t embarrass myself either. Coming into someone’s living room for two minutes or less and trying to establish my character and get laughs is no easy task. This one didn’t suck, but I don’t know how it helped, either. Maybe it might cause a few people to think about coming out to see comedy, whatever week. Gallagher is at the club next week, and they promoted him too. No problem, they have tickets to sell.