Recently, a former student sent me a panicked midnight email: “I did a show and completely bombed. It was awful. Does this mean I should stop doing comedy?”
My answer is: Yes. Your comedy license has been instantly revoked. You have ten days to return your microphone to the nearest Chuckle Hut.
But seriously, every comedian bombs. Beginners bomb. Professionals bomb. Famous comedians whose Netflix specials you watched last night eat it on a semi-regular basis. I bombed twice writing this sentence! The main difference is that experienced comics have bombed so many times that one terrible show doesn’t immediately make them delete their Instagram.
After a bomb, there’s a simple process that always works.
First, get blackout drunk. Second, never think or speak of the set again. Third, rinse and repeat as needed until you’re a superstar.
In reality, try to get back on stage as soon as possible, ideally the same night, even at an open mic. Doing it again will train your nervous system to not go into negativity spirals. The more reps you get, the less each one affects your self-worth. And if you can’t get on another stage the same night, watch a TV show that makes you laugh or something.
Then the next day, start an actual post-mortem. (Which you should do after good shows too!) “I bombed” feels like useful information, but it’s actually just the beginning of the investigation.
After a bad set, I recommend doing something comedians hate doing: wait until you’re slightly less emotional and actually listen to the recording. Where did you lose them? Were there any laughs you forgot about because you were busy remembering the three minutes of pain? What would you change next time? Pick one or two things to work on instead of deciding that your entire comedic identity was a clerical error.
Figure out what kind of bomb you had. Did none of your jokes work? Did your first two jokes fail and then you panic-sped through the next eight? Did jokes that normally work suddenly get nothing? Was everyone else bombing too? Was the audience drunk, tired and/or chatty? It’s somehow possible to have all three things happen at once. Were all thirty people sitting super far from the stage, or was the entire audience four people, three of whom were asleep? (That’s a real show I’ve done!)
If jokes that normally work suddenly stopped working, don’t immediately rewrite your entire act. One audience is one audience. Sometimes the room is bad. Sometimes you went up at the wrong time. Sometimes they just don’t like your face. I’ve had audiences hate me before I finished saying hello. Apparently my eyebrows have range.
On the other hand, if the same joke dies three shows in a row, congratulations: now you have data. Maybe the premise isn’t clear. Maybe the setup takes too long. Maybe you’re stepping on the punchline. Maybe the joke simply isn’t funny enough yet. This is why getting reps matters. One bad set can be random. Multiple bad sets in the same place usually means you should stop blaming Mercury being in retrograde and rewrite or remove the joke.
Also, bombing is its own skill. One of my best skills is what I call “bombing gracefully” where I’m not getting the response I want and deserve, I’m frustrated but the crowd, the other comics and the bookers don’t even realize it. Sometimes making a potentially horrible situation simply an “unremarkable” set is harder to accomplish than getting huge laughs with an already hot crowd.
When you’re new, the first joke doesn’t work and your brain goes: WE’RE DYING. EVACUATE THE BUILDING. Then you start talking faster, stop pausing, abandon your personality and stare at the audience like they’re personally responsible for your mortgage. You also mentally leave the room and do your jokes like someone pulled a string in your back.
With experience, you learn to slow down, acknowledge what’s happening in a funny way, change gears, try different material, and occasionally turn a terrible room into a merely mediocre one. Progress!
And sometimes you did everything reasonably well and still bombed. That’s one of the deeply stupid things about stand-up. You can write, prepare, rehearse and perform something that worked great on Friday, then say virtually the same words Saturday and receive the kind of silence normally reserved for someone reading a will. There are too many variables to judge yourself from one show.
The goal isn’t to reach a point where you never bomb again. If you keep performing, you’re going to bomb again. The goal is to get better on average, bomb less often, recover faster, and learn more when it happens. So no, you’re not fired from comedy forever. Unfortunately, you still have to come back to work tomorrow.