I did Freak Train last night. It was a good time. I’ve been spending most of my working time lately finishing up the screenplay, so I haven’t gotten around to bothering to write a standup-routine. I had been thinking Freak Train was next week, and I’d have plenty of time to write one during this week, but apparently I suck at calendaring. Such is life.
By the time I realized it was Freak Train day, I pretty much had to leave immediately so that I could stop by my Dad’s place on the way. I figured I could sign up for one of the performance slots toward the end of the show, and have plenty of time to think about what I was going to do during the other acts and the intermission. Unfortunately, only the first and second slots were still available when I got there, so I didn’t have a lot of time to come up with anything. I managed to sort out a few ideas about what I was going to say. Of course, dearly departing co-host Dave, co-hosting his last Freak Train, decided to do some of his standup before the show. Remarkably enough, he managed to hit some of the topics that I had half-thought out. Now, I can’t claim he stole my material or anything, because I hadn’t even said what I was going to do. He also did it much better than I probably would have, since he had obviously prepared his material in advance. So, for the sake of the audience, it was probably a good thing. Of course, this left me scrambling in my last few seconds to figure out some filler. I didn’t use my whole 5 minute slot, and I didn’t have a solid ending joke, so I just sort of finished by declaring, “That’s all I have.”
Maybe I’ll recycle some of the material into a routine in the future. It was just about the subjects of living in Boulder, jogging, and being terribly white and having no rhythm or musical talent, so it’s not like I would take his specific jokes. It’s just that covering the exact same topics scant moments after he did so would have been really awkward.