Supercute.ca blazes passed 10,000+ pageviews a month

April 18, 2009 by vongsundara · Leave a Comment 

When I relaunched supercute.ca at the start of November 2008, I was mainly hoping to recapture some of my past readership. The original version of supercute.ca launched at the start of my comedy career back in 2006 and became a fairly popular blog among the stand-up comedy community. In fact, it became maybe a little too popular, as I didn’t realize that there were some industry professionals reading my intimate thoughts, leading me into some hot water, but that’s a story for another day.

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Shooting video is very much different than performing stand-up comedy

March 26, 2009 by vongsundara · Leave a Comment 

I went into the studio to tape my first video production today, and oh boy did it not go as well as I expected. Luckily, we had a number of takes, so once they are spliced together, there should be one good performance.

Maybe I’m being too hard on myself. I’m used to single takes being perfect, because in stand-up comedy you only get one take. You can’t hit rewind when you’re on stage.

At first I thought it should be easy to record a video since I should be able to do single takes the entire way through the same way I do it on stage. I even resisted using the teleprompter for the first few takes because I didn’t know if I would come off as too robotic. Strangely, the opposite happened.

Minus the teleprompter, I had zero personality as I was trying to remember my lines. Once we switched over to the teleprompter, I at least showed some signs of life. Hopefully it was enough.

The other trouble I felt now that I think about it, is that I didn’t have the right timing on my delivery. I spoke quite a bit quicker than I normally do in stand-up. I haven’t watched the video back yet, so I’m not sure how easily my words will be understood.

I’m not really sure why I had so much trouble today, but I’ll chalk it down as a learning experience. Hopefully next time, I can be a little bit smoother.

Now comes the second part of the video, the actual production. I’ve got to decide how I want to take the video footage and make it into a complete package with sound and images. I went with my video producer because I believe in his talent, so I don’t want to step on his creativity too much, but I think he may be looking for some direction given the subject matter is a bit specific to me.

I’m really excited to show everyone the video once it’s ready, so please stay tuned.

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How To Stand-Up Comedy: Margaret Cho in I’m The One That I Want, Review and Analysis

March 16, 2009 by vongsundara · Leave a Comment 

I’ll be examining the ins and outs of stand-up comedy in my new series of articles titled How To Stand-Up Comedy (and yes, I’m aware the title is grammatically incorrect).

For this opening article, I decided to dissect Margaret Cho’s first feature, I’m The One That I Want, to try and gauge what it is that makes Margaret Cho so damn successful and applying those elements to my own comedy.

I first saw I’m The One That I Want during its initial run through independent theatres across North America. I was instantly drawn to Margaret Cho’s brand of humour, as I was a huge fan of her network television show, All-American Girl. If you haven’t already seen “I’m The One That I Want,” then you need to go down to your local video store and rent it immediately. If it’s not at the major video stores then try the video store in the gay village, I guarantee they’ll have a copy.

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Stand-up offers full creative control, improv offers collaboration

March 15, 2009 by vongsundara · Leave a Comment 

As a hardcore advocate for stand-up comedy, it took me a little while to warm up to the idea of improv comedy. If you’ve been reading this blog, you’ll know that I took the Level A class at Second City (which was great by the way).

I really enjoyed the class, and it made me want to look deeper into the world of improv. Despite this, I didn’t quite understand what it was about improv that appealed to me. At first, I thought improv would be a great outlet for me to help improve my stage presence and allow me to add extra dimensions (such as characters) to my stand-up act.

I still feel the same way for the most part, as stand-up comedy will always be my first love, but now I’m beginning to take improv comedy more seriously.

Thinking about it some more, I figured out why I so enjoyed my time with improv: creative collaboration. Now, this is somewhat contradictory for a stand-up comedian to believe, as the best part about stand-up comedy is the lack of collaboration. The entire stand-up piece is the comedian’s alone, no censors or network writers to get in the way. After getting over that initial mental hurdle, I came to realise that I rather enjoy collaborating with others.

I’ll always have my stand-up comedy as my primary form of expression, a place where I can express myself and my views on the world as a whole without dilution, but I must admit that I am going to have to make some room in my life for improv.

I’m still a ways off from forming an improv troupe or anything like that, but I am definitely going to work toward that goal. Stand-up comedy is necessarily a lonely process, but I’m happy to know that I can make some room in my life for some collaboration.

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Back at the Eton House, Standing at the Danforth hosted by JoAnna Downey

February 25, 2009 by vongsundara · Leave a Comment 

One of the great parts about moving to Greektown, Toronto, is that I’m right around the corner from Eton House, home of one of the best open mic comedy nights in Toronto. Standing at the Danforth, as the show is called, is one of two fantastic weekly shows produced by long-time comedy pro JoAnna Downey.

Standing at the Danforth is the second show I ever performed at when I moved to Toronto last year, so it will always have a special place in my heart. I wish I had recorded that performance, as it was one of my favourites. In fact, all my top performances in Toronto so far have coincidentally been hosted by JoAnna Downey.

Yesterday’s show was a special show produced for Mike McQueen, and his dad was in town. I was lucky enough to get to see three of my favourite Toronto comedians: Ted Morris, Nikki Payne and Debra DiGiovanni.

Ted Morris is incredibly likable on stage, and I hope to see a full set of his sometime soon. I’d love to see where his comedy goes when he has more time to expand his stories on stage. Nikki Payne, well, what can I say? Her aggression and energy on stage are absolutely unmatched.

Debra DiGiovanni is an interesting one. It took me a while to warm up to her style, but in the long run I think that’s a good thing as I appreciate her more for it. Debra is very wordy on stage and speaks very quickly. She also leaves no pauses for audiences to applaud. In fact, she’ll talk straight through laughter in a way that I’ve never seen before.

Now that I’ve gotten used to it, though, I think it’s quite amazing. With the speed that Debra speaks, she has to write probably double or triple the material to cover the same amount of time. I also quite enjoy her material.

Anyhow, that was my week at the Eton House. I can’t wait to be back on the stage, probably sometime in April. I’ll post the date once it’s confirmed.

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My first new stand-up comedy routine in six months almost ready

February 5, 2009 by vongsundara · 7 Comments 

Today I was able to overcome my short writer’s block from yesterday to put together a really solid stand-up comedy set that I’m really excited to debut. As I mentioned yesterday, I decided to write about my sister, as I feel the best and most balanced comedy version of me to present on stage is the one that is brought out when I hang out with my sister Anne.

Yesterday I tried my best to write but ended up with nothing more than half-page of unusable nonsense. I suppose I should have expected it after not writing for half a year. It took me until about four hours into my writing process today that it finally all clicked.

You see, I have a unique way of writing which doesn’t really follow the usual rules of comedy writing: set-up, punchline, tag, tag, tag. My style doesn’t completely follow classical literary narrative structure either, though I do try to work that in. When I first started writing comedy a couple of years back, I was able to develop a unique style that worked for the way that I think, which tends to be a little differently. Yesterday I completely forgot what the style was.

I started out by trying to speak the words and form my routine off of that. When that failed miserably, I tried more traditional free-form writing. I don’t know why it finally clicked later on, but boy am I happy that it did. I won’t go into detail over how I write (sorry, I have to keep some things secret still).

After getting together a rough draft composed of about ten short lines of text, I then tried sounding out the routine to my roommate and improvised a lot of it. Now I have to go back and write down some of the new ideas that came during the spoken improvisation.

I’ve submitted for time at a bunch of the open mics in town, so hopefully you’ll be seeing this new routine very shortly.

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Second City’s Level A improv class, week one, packed with great info

January 13, 2009 by vongsundara · 1 Comment 

My first-ever improv class at Second City’s training centre went extremely well. I had a lot of fun, and it’s gotten my creative juices flowing again, which is why I took this class in the first place.

You see, improv is quite the opposite of stand-up comedy. Improv is all about feeding off of an ensemble and going beyond yourself with multiple characters (think Mike Myers) while stand-up is about working on your own to be as believable as yourself as possible.

My class is made up of a dozen students. My teacher is quite hilarious and almost exactly like I’d imagine an improv teacher to be like. She’s very outgoing, talkative and agressive in the best ways possible. There are a couple of students who have already shown a lot of potential, and I’m looking forward to seeing how they develop.

Our first class was made up of a series of improv exercises. We kind of went through all the improv techniques in one day. Over the next six weeks, we’ll be going deeper into each of the techniques, and on our final day we’ll go through all of them again.

My favourite exercise consisted of having to answer questions in tune with a partner, speaking at the same time. My team decided to speak very slowly to try and figure out what the other person was saying. We ended up veering off in interesting directions, and some of our answers ended up being quite funny.

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