“Loved your jokes. Here’s some bitcoins.”
That brief e mail was exactly where it all started. Some stranger was sending me some bitcoin due to the fact he liked my routine about fiat currency.
It was a quick stand-up piece that I’d performed on an Australian Tv show and then posted on YouTube. I bashed fiat fairly tough and it must’ve hit a chord simply because I got fairly a handful of emails.
One of them was from this guy sending me bitcoins…
I was vaguely conscious of Bitcoin, but didn’t genuinely know as well significantly about it.
But now a person was providing me some of this strange new currency I began obtaining curious.
Clicking on the link in the e-mail took me to coinapult. This guy was sending me .007 of a Bitcoin, which at the time was about $ two. Ultimately I figured out how to set up a wallet and accept this little adjust.
I’m not positive if it was the method of figuring out how to set up a wallet, or the fact I now owned a bitcoin (well, .007 of one particular), but from that point on…
I had bitcoin fever. Negative.
More than the subsequent handful of months I read every thing about bitcoin I could discover.
All the difficulties I hated about fiat currency bitcoin solved: private, practically no transaction charges, no government or bank interference – it was all so excellent.
I knew I had to do a stand-up routine on bitcoin.
If you are not a comedian that may possibly seem like a strange thought, but all my very best routines have been on topics I’m passionate about.
Writing a stand-up routine about decentralized cryptocurrency wouldn’t be simple, but I thought if I could figure it out it might be a truly fantastic routine.
I also realised some thing else…
Even although I’d spent hours researching bitcoin and watching bitcoin associated YouTube clips for days I’d in no way noticed a stand-up bit about it.
Stephen Colbert had done a quite funny report on bitcoin and in a Q&A Josh Blue had mentioned mining bitcoin was a hobby, but as far as I could inform no one had done what I was trying to do.
Was that due to the fact bitcoin is nevertheless so new and I was the initial to get to the topic?
Or was it simply because it is such a complicated topic that “writing a funny Bitcoin stand-up routine is not possible?
I carry out frequently on an Australian community Tv show (it’s known as Reside on Bowen. Think about a low spending budget Letterman).
I realised if I came up with some jokes and performed it on the show, I’d be the first comedian to ever do a bitcoin stand-up routine (on Television at least).
“I have to do a segment on Bitcoin.”
Each and every Monday the writers and I meet up to plan out the segments for the show. When I walked in and mentioned that issues got weird.
Normally 1 of us pitches a topic, say “iphones”, and the writers will throw out jokes and concepts for the subsequent fifteen minutes.
Not this time.
“What the hell is a bitcoin?” a person asked.
We spent the subsequent forty minutes discussing cryptocurrencies, mining and who Satoshi Nakamoto is.
I think I gave them a great education on what Bitcoin is, but we didn’t come up with any jokes.
These are writers who often come up with sketches along the lines of “What if the president of France was a watermelon?” but obtaining their heads about a decentralised cryptocurrency was too a lot.
Perhaps writing a comedy routine about bitcoin was impossible…
If I couldn’t get the writers to comprehend Bitcoin in a forty minute meeting, how could I clarify it to an audience in a three minute Television spot?
Nevertheless, I had about 3 weeks to come up with a routine about bitcoin and I wasn’t about to quit now…
The race was on…
I started writing jokes about bitcoin and performing them at comedy clubs. At very first I got a lot of blank stares.
Imagine explaining Bitcoin to your parents. Now imagine they’re drunk and anticipate you to be funny.
Other comedians suggested I drop the routine, which is crazy simply because comedians are a pretty forgiving bunch.
If I was attempting to develop a routine about Hitler they would’ve told me to keep attempting, but a single joke about SHA256 dies and they’re telling me to give up.
In the finish this doubt was what pushed me to preserve going. Now I had to prove to them (and myself) that I could write a routine about bitcoin.
Bitcoin became my Moby Dick.
I kept performing the routine, rewriting it and performing it once again.
I’d go house following shows to read bitcoin blogs in the hope that I’d choose up just one little angle that could assist me enhance this routine.
I also kept seeking for any other comedians performing bitcoin routines. It looked like no one was.
Apart from a few memes, and some pretty amateur sketches, I couldn’t uncover any bitcoin comedy.
I just prayed yet another comedian wouldn’t come up with a bitcoin routine first…
Then as the day when I’d have to carry out the routine on Tv drew closer, one more thought hit me…
I’d rewritten the routine about a hundred occasions by then and it was acquiring laughs at comedy clubs, but those audiences didn’t know about bitcoin.
How could I be confident the stuff I was saying in the routine was factually correct?
If only there had been some specialists I could test my stuff on…
Then, the day just before the taping of the show, I was browsing meetup.com and saw there was a Melbourne Bitcoiner’s group.
They had been meeting that night!
It was like a sign from God.
I shot the organiser an email “Hi, Can I come execute a stand-up comedy routine about Bitcoin at your meeting?”
I was fully ready for them to create back asking if this was a prank, but rather I got a reply saying they’d let me give it a shot.
That evening, soon after a pretty heated discussion about alt coins, Asher Tan (CoinJar co-founder and organiser of the Melbourne Bitcoin meetup) handed me the mic.
“I hope you know what you are doing…” he said.
“Me as well!” I thought.
I walked out to about a hundred bemused stares, but when my initial joke got a wave of laughter I knew this was going to be OK.
Right after the show I sat about with some of the nicest people I’ve ever met sharing bitcoin stories and listening to their recommendations about how to enhance my routine.
Twenty-4 hours later I was on stage in front of a reside studio audience.
The host gave me an introduction, the camera swung onto me, and it was show time.
How did the world’s very first ever bitcoin stand-up routine go?
Well, I think it went great, the studio audience seemed to like it, and I’ve had nice feedback from viewers, but do not take my word for it.
Like Bitcoin I don’t anticipate you to trust a third celebration – go watch the routine on YouTube and make up your personal mind.
The post How to use Bitcoin for Stand-up Comedy appeared 1st on Bitcoin Magazine.
How to use Bitcoin for Stand-up Comedy
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