Back To The Scene Of The Crime

Tags: comedy, comedy scene, core values, Saskatoon, Saskatoon comedians, stand-up comedy, stand-up diaries, The Stand-Up Diaries, trevor dean, Trevor Dean comedian, Trevor Dean Los Angeles, trevor dean saskatoon

This will probably be the last post of 2017, so I will take a moment for reflection, with an eye towards the future and a major announcement.

This year has probably been the most difficult of my life.  I would almost put it right up there with the year of the trial and trying to get Nicki back (the first time).

I have already gone through challenges on the employment front, which unfortunately have resurfaced and I now find myself back on the job hunt.  I decline to engage in specifics about the most recent job.  Every story has two sides, and after a while I’ve found that if the same thing keeps happening to you over and over, even if it hasn’t been your fault, people will eventually start to form conclusions about you behind your back, regardless of the facts.  It gets tiring after a while, always feeling like you have to explain yourself to keep from people thinking you are too incompetent to have a job and support yourself.

On the contrary, however.  For a person to have tenure with a company, two things should take place.  First, you have ability to fulfill a need for the company through your skills and ability.  Your work ethic and competency is part of the equation.  Secondly, and more importantly you need to surround yourself with the right people to help you grow and succeed.

Anyhow, during the almost two weeks I spent at this last job, I started to get my confidence back.  Not that I had much to begin with, but confidence about a feeling of self-worth and knowing I have ability to get things done.  When that feeling came back, the wheels started to turn again.  My creative comedy writing wheels.  I probably have three or four pages at least of new ideas to hash out from the last couple of weeks.

To say that I have enough material for a half hour now is a serious understatement.  My new half hour will follow the tried and true comedy formula.  The tried and true at the beginning, new stuff in the middle and the tried and true at the end.

When I am in conversation with friends, I really love telling them something they didn’t know on a subject they haven’t heard before, or maybe a piece of unique news.  With my material I am taking the same approach, where I’m starting to craft material from topics that others aren’t talking about, yet are a part of our everyday lives.  Things you deal with on a regular basis, that if you stopped to think about it, you’d see the humour in it too.

Given the way things have gone in the past few days, I’ve come to the decision that I will be returning to Los Angeles in 2018 instead of waiting until I had a year of working underneath me first.

I’m sure you remember the scene of the crime, right?  It’s where I impersonated a stand-up comedian, poorly.

The plan is to go down after my birthday, possibly in July.  I have a few options at my disposal.  There is the clean comedy club in San Diego that I was in contact with before, the Comedy Store in Hollywood and the comedy competition in Oakland, once again.  This time however, I will make sure to have a rental car for the entire length of my trip, thus making it a bit easier to hit up open mics every night.  I would use L.A. transit again, and had a good impression of it, up until the homeless drifter was kicking the bus and making gang signs to the Mexican dude and his woman sitting in front of me.  Yeah.  I need a rental car.

The last time I was in Los Angeles, the only available night I could do the Comedy Store was the Saturday night.  That same Saturday night I already had committed to the competition in Oakland.  There’s always the possibility of hanging with the Dope Fades gang and maybe doing a live set in person.  Although, the comedy competition and Flappers are probably the top two spots on my list to tackle.

It doesn’t bother me that I went to Los Angeles and shit the bed, then went to Oakland and laid a goose egg there too.  I prefer to look at it from a different point of view.

I am not embarrassed like I first was about failing.  Instead, I am slightly disappointed because I know that I have the potential and ability to do better.  When you shift your focus and gain a different perspective on something that didn’t quite work out, you in effect, change the way you allow that failure to affect you.  

I cannot say that I will win the competition in Oakland when I go back, but I do know that I’ll do better the next time around.  The positive moments haven’t been many in my six years doing this shit, but enough small pockets of good exist that give me the necessary hope to turn things around.

At the very start of the comedy journey, I gave every opportunity to the local scene to make me feel included.  Instead, the exact opposite happened.  So, from that moment forward I’ve forged my path.  It’s a path that others are scared to follow, or maybe they just don’t want to succeed bad enough to try.  Who’s to say?  Usually when a comedian goes out on a limb to do something different, another comic will follow in their footsteps.  Nobody dares to follow in mine, or come along for the ride.  Maybe I am some sort of comedic pariah that nobody wants to be seen with.

Maybe, they think if they came along with me for some of these unique opportunities that I’d write about that person.

At some point however, you need to stop giving a shit about what others think.  Would you rather compromise who you are and be a phony, just for the sake of getting along?  I have come to terms with the fact that I will never be accepted by the comedy community at large, and that’s okay.

I have a feeling it’s because of who I am, meaning I take a stand when I am being slandered or bullied.  Like I have said before, my drivers license doesn’t have my name listed as “doormat”.  Then again, I am the one who probably has the most contacts of any comedian in this province in Los Angeles.  I’ve got places to recommend a comedian go to perform.

It’s also my plan to have my first set of 2018 at The Laugh Shop, which may happen in February at the earliest.

This year of 2017 has been a circus, a gong show and far more trouble than it was worth.  Good riddance.