I’ve recently been doing some thinking about my persona on-stage and have come up with a few ideas about “Stand Up Drew.”
The first big point is that there are some key differences and similarities between my on-stage and off-stage personas. If I had to identify some differences, I’d say they were:
- I’m more outgoing on stage than I am in real life – but only to some extent. To even do stand-up and improv is pretty different than how I was in high school, but I’m slowly becoming more outgoing every day. At the same time, I am still way too reserved in front of an audience and need to learn to commit more.
- My sense of humor is bluer (dirtier) in real life. I’ve tried (for the most part) to stay clean whenever doing stand-up, but my natural tendency in improv and every day situations is to go for the blue. I wish it wasn’t true, but it is. However this is one area that I don’t want to just accept and start doing bluer material, I’d rather learn to make my natural self more clever.
- In addition to blue humor, I seem to stick to puns/play-on-words to make people laugh – both on and off stage. I don’t think this is bad, but I need to learn variety (such as characters) in order to keep things fresh.
And while there are many things that “come through” about me on stage, I think there are few things that are key to my persona:
- I’m in my own head a lot. On stage (improv and stand-up), I’m self-conscious of how a set/scene is going, and what I “should” be doing. Off the stage, I think about how others perceive me and also over-analyze everything.
- I don’t retain emotions long (at least the negative ones). I rarely stay upset with someone for more than a day, and will always try to avoid burning any bridges. My brother’s knew to be mean to me in the morning, because by the time my mom got home at night, I was already past it and everything was hunky-dory (whatever the hell that means). This makes it difficult for me to carry through on a joke that relies on my emotional standpoint on a subject (such as “hating” people that say the word “so” at the end of a sentence).
- I am always trying to think logically. Back to the previous point, I believe that emotions are fleeting and shouldn’t affect you negatively. After one particularly hard break up, I was pissed at myself after a week of still being sad about it because I thought to my self – “life happens, move on, get over yourself.” If only emotions listened like that. This makes some particular jokes even funnier to me, because I really visualize certain things actually happening (like ravens with x-rays).
- I have a rather odd perception of self-pride. I don’t drink alcohol or use medication often because I have this feeling that I should be able to create the same result without outside stimulus (I’ve always thought of alcohol as “steroids for your personality” – and I wanted to be Ken Griffey Jr). But at the same time, worry about what others think, and doubt myself comedically. Which is weird because I truly believe I could do anything that I set my mind to and 100% wanted to achieve (save maybe make it in the NBA or NFL).
I’m not really sure where I wanted this post to go, and didn’t mean for it to be like a “journal” entry, but it is was it is, just as Popeye was who he was. So to bring back the funny, lets end on a joke:
A man goes to a therapist for the first time and is laying down on her coach. She tells him to “start at the beginning” and so the man does. But after every thing he says, the therapist lets out a “sigh.” After 20-30 minutes of this, the man finally gets irritated and asks “Why do you have to keep doing that after everything I say?” The therapists replies, “Didn’t you know, I’m a sigh-chiatrist.” (ba don cha – how do you like that long set up for a pun, haha).
