This was one of my first “Big Shows” in that, it was the first Non-Open-Mic where an established comic (Thanks Jim Meyer) that I respect actually asked me to perform on his show.

Jim Meyer used to run a night called “Bar Bacon Comedy” every month at Golden West, and I was lucky enough to get to perform on it before he stopped doing them.
He now writes a sports column for Baltimore City Paper and has other things going that you can probably find on his website.

At the time I was working with a “Comedy Census” concept wherein I was essentially working off of the typical filler and setup questions that comics use to get a vibe from the crowd.

It served a few purposes:
1) it was topical cause the 2010 decennial census (which I worked for) was still fresh in people’s minds
2) it offered me a structure to lay my material on
3) it gave me an excuse to not memorize my material.

People would actually get an extra laugh when they’d talk to me after the set and realize that I had actually written a full survey and was lierally reading it off and marking their responses.

I worked this concept for about three months until I decided I should move on. It was becoming too much of a crutch and the setup for it took about 3 minutes. – When you’re first starting out you rarely ever get more than 5 minutes so by the time I had the crowd on the same page as me and was really hitting the meat of my act, I was out time. That’s what happened in this video. I think I do have enough video from different performances that I could cut together a full length version though, so perhaps I’ll put that up one of these days.

I do think I’ll bring this format back in maybe 7 years or so when the census is relevant again, and perhaps I’ll be established enough that I’ll be afforded the 10 to 15 minutes I need to really see it through.