Blog #6: Tour Diary 10.11.24 (Also Announcement!) (Patreon)

Hey everyone! Before I share my thoughts on last night's show, I want to let you know that this month we'll be doing the livestream Q&A differently than usual. I won't be able to make it happen tomorrow the way I normally would, so we'll be doing it Monday instead, and at 8:30pm EST. Sorry for the change and late timing, it's just the only time I can make it happen with the tour schedule being what it is. So here's the link to that:

https://crowdcast.io/c/2gnlwn623ssf

^ October '24 Patreon Livestream Q&A, Monday 10/14 @ 8:30pm EST ^

I would say last night was about the most fun I've ever had with a performance. Boston, you were incredible. As a matter of fact, that most challenging part of the whole evening was getting y'all to STOP laughing. If anything, that was the lesson I learned tonight, that I need to focus on the other side of things more. To hold back some of the goofery even when I'm tempted to say something that I know will get a pop. It's hard to resist the urge, because getting a laugh is such an incredible feeling, but I think I need to make sure that I'm going into the softer moments with a similar confidence.

The show starts off so aggressively silly that it's hard to come back from, which means I have to take a moment early on to bring things to a quiet and more somber note without using it as comedic suspense by throwing a punchline at the end, and thus sort of conditioning the audience to expect a pop at the end of every serious moment. It makes it so moments later on that are humorous but hard to call "jokes" hit surprisingly hard, which makes the emotional momentum hard to maintain when taking things to less humorous places from there.

But the emotional moments still seemed to hit. The crowd was very vocal last night, a lot of laughs, and some "aww" moments during some of the sentimental bits. Which isn't what I'm going for precisely yet, but it's a huge success either way. It's so cool to see the way people engage with the material, and to learn how performing it in different ways affects that. I'm hoping that by the end of this tour I've figured out exactly how to perform the show to get exactly the response I'm going for, then figure out a spot to film it for a movie/special/thing. I'm still filming the tour because we might find that's the right way to do the movie, and of course for you guys to have videos, but it might be cool to find a really nice theater, book it for three nights, sell tickets for super cheap, and boost the production value. We'll see how it goes.

There was a moment where I made a joke about my stereotypically "jewish" features and in the quiet that followed the laugh some dude in the audience screamed "L'Chaim!" and I responded using my new strategy, which is pretending nothing happened. It was brutal. I felt so bad for the guy. He got no response from anyone. At one point I thought roasting an audience member or calling them out was the way to go but no, it is an act of absolute brutality to ignore it, because I'm pretty sure not giving him a response or creating a laugh amongst the audience created a new core memory for him. Sorry, bud.

I'm really floored how much of a difference the age limit has made, honestly. I remember there being a show once where during the black box warrior monologue kids in the audience starting screaming at each other over me and fighting about goodness-knows-what and just out of curiosity I stopped and let them go as long as they needed. It was a long pause. Once again, not all kids were problems, and not all problems were kids, but it makes a big difference. I was just talking to my TM (tour manager!) and he tells me apparently Stroudsburg was 21+, which I had completely forgotten. I'm curious to see how tonight goes, because it's a smaller show like Stroudsburg but it's 18+ again. I don't know what the culture's like in Syracuse, if it'll be more like Brattleboro (younger, more online) or more like Boston (edgier, more diverse).

My biggest concern is the standing room show at the beginning of the next stretch of shows, after my day off on Monday. 400 people in standing room is going to be so much more energy than this show is designed to handle. I might just have to wing it, assume it'll be chaos and focus on rock n' roll a bit more.

In other news, I'm not working with Say-10 anymore. We ended things amicably and wish each other the best. In the meantime, my online store is under new management: me. While on tour, too. So if you buy something, please bear with me if I'm slow with some stuff. Thanks for understanding <3

Anyway, that's what I got for today. Thanks for tuning in. I don't think I'll be able to keep up doing this every day, but I'm going to keep trying to! Either way, I'll talk to y'all on Monday. Thanks as always for the support!

Much love,

-ww