One of the most fun parts of all this hullabaloo is being onstage and just riffing with the audience. Mostly we have no idea what we are going to say between songs. I really love that. The problem is that we occasionally say something that really kills the audience and then it’s hard not to want to do that “bit” every night in the same place. I always remember I saw a famous star perform and he screwed up the lyrics in a song and made a joke and everyone laughed and enjoyed the moment. Then a month later I saw the show again and he forgot the same lyric and made the same joke in the same place and the little boy in me that believes in spontaneity died. Then the audience applauded, and just like Tinkerbell in Peter Pan, that little boy came to life again… only to die tragically later that same night in an industrial accident.

So we recycle a little… but mostly we try to just trust in our comedy instincts and see what happens. There are places in the show that stubbornly insist on not being funny. We have one show left in the tour and we have yet to find anything entertaining to say as an introduction to “You’re Not The Boss Of Me.” Last night Kenny simply said it was a song about the eternal struggle between the head and the heart. Very sweet. Very PG. It left a gaping hole that all but shouted “Insert Joke Here!”  I spent the night thinking and analyzing. I thumbed through my well-worn copy of “Captain Whizbang’s Book O’ Whimsy” to try to find something to fill the hole in our show… and our hearts. So tonight when Kenny said “This is a song about the eternal struggle between the heart and the head…” I started babbling something about the original title being “Between the Spleen and the Pancreas” and how Georgia insisted the heart and head were more romantic……

Crickets.

An actual tumbleweed blew from stage right to stage left. A very humbling sensation. If anyone reading this has a better joke to set up the song I would love to hear it. Shecky Burr is running dry. We can’t work blue because our audience demographic means that there are usually some kids in the crowd and we have to lay off the penis jokes. That is quite limiting. Like running the 440 with a stepladder on your shoulders. The music in our show is not what I worry about. We have put in the time and the energy and we know how that part goes. Where we punish ourselves is by insisting that we purposely try to ignore anything that smacks of rehearsal when it comes to our “patter.”  We are determined to charm and ingratiate the old fashioned way… by having the fear in our eyes be obvious and make the people pity us.

We have one more show to try and make the transition between “Another Spring” and “Boss” work. If we can’t come up with something… I have a nice break to go back to Comedy College and audit a class or two and come up with something to make the crowds chuckle. I leave you with this:

There once was a band from Nantucket
with a problem too massive to duck it
They were at quite a loss
For an intro to “Boss”
Till they finally said “Aw, f*#k it!”