Your Showcase Spot – Making an Awesome Video

We here at SuperEgo Comedy created our Showcases and SuperEgo TV to help our comics show off their talent. A good showcase video helps you promote your standup career, get attention, build a fan base and get booked. We've had comics get everything from club spots to lucrative college gigs from SuperEgo Showcase videos.

Here's a few tips on how to make a rockin' video that we'll be proud to help you promote.

DO's

• Make it personal. Showcase yourself and your stage persona, whatever makes you unique and interesting. Particularly effective is when your persona has some inherent tension, for example: sweet country girl in the big bad city, Puerto Rican Jew, meathead philosopher, hot fat chick, gay nerd. It is harder to distinguish yourself as a comic with observational humor. So unless you are totally committed to being solely an observational humor comic put yourself in your act.
• Make it accessible. Make sure a general audience will understand your material. Be careful with inside jokes specific to particular groups of people and with pop culture references unless these things are the foundation of your act. 
• Make us care. Before tellings us all about you, you, you, give us a reason to care. This is where tension, conflict and contradiction in your stage persona are useful. Another way to pull your audience into your act is by showing them how your experience relates to their experience.
• Perform your best material. Unless you have already recorded a set showcasing your stage persona, perform your strongest jokes, which may or may not necessarily be your newest jokes. Resist the urge to do the joke you thought up on the way to the club that sounds great in your head. 
• Do your time. If you're booked for a 7 minute set, do a 7 minute set, not 6, not 8. Have a "jump to closer joke" for your ending. If your closer is 30-45 seconds, ask the MC to light you at 1 minute. If your closer is 60-90 seconds, ask for the light at 2 minutes. Then when you get the light you can finish whatever bit you're on and slide comfortably into your "jump to closer joke" for the big finish. This technique will keep you relaxed and ensure your set has a strong, smooth, professional ending. It will also keep you from panicking if the light comes unexpectedly.
• Name your jokes after your setups not your punchlines. Then your set list will pull you forward through your set instead of accidentally causing you to blurt out a punch line and blow a joke. 

DO NOT's

Here are a few simple mistakes to avoid if you want your video to impress industry professionals and be eligible to appear on SuperEgo TV.

• Don't do too much crowd work. Respond to crowd participation and heckles as needed. But long segments of "what do you do?" and "where are you from?" crowd work tend to not make a good showcase video, even if you're awesome at it. Don't let the crowd drag you too far off topic or you'll end up losing time you'd planned to use for your best bits. 
• Don't beg for applause. Do one, "give it up for [whatever]" or "how ya doin'?" if you absolutely must, but don't beg the crowd for responses. It may pump up the energy in the room but it doesn't make for good video. 
• Avoid current events ... unless you are a current events comic and intend to record a new video every few months. They make your video stale very quickly. 
• Don't disparage the club, the host, the staff or other comics ... NOT EVER. No matter what you think of the club, the manager, the bartender, waitress and MC and no matter what drama happened backstage, do not disparage the venue or anyone involved in the show. Even what might seem to be an innocent joke about the decor says to any industry professionals watching your video, "this comic doesn't respect the people who put him on stage." 
• Don't take notes or a set list on stage. Period. Also don't take a voice recorder on stage with you. If you use a drink as a prop that's fine, but you should not have anything in your hands or on stage with you that isn't part of your act. It weighs you down and distracts the audience.
• Don't do call backs to previous comics' material. They won't make sense out of context.
• Don't call out the light. When you get the light, make eye contact with the host and give a subtle nod of your head so they know you saw it. But don't say, "I got the light" and don't leave the stage with "That's my time."
• Don't be drunk. Duh.