Eggs and Endorphins

Sigh.

Re: Doing the same piece 3x during the con, that was "Poetry's Greatest Hits, Volume I." The 2x10 was "Volume II." I did it the first night to set it up, then the 2nd night and at the dead dog by request.

As for either or both running long, specifics of what and where to cut would be nice, along with what I need to do to improve my performance skills there or elsewhere would help. I thought I was getting pretty good laughs, but obviously when multiple people are bothered there are problems. I'm also getting the feeling it's one of those bits folks either adore or can't stand, but I'm not sure.

I also don't know how the material was "inappropriate." Specifics would be nice.

From what I heard of part II, it seemed to be functionally identical to part I.

Which was, after all, most of the problem -- the original piece was largely the same joke, repeated ad infinum.

(re whether it's something that some people like and some people hate...I think it's something that most people find enjoyable in small quantities but painful in large...but that there are a few who have a near-infinite capacity for it [and suspect that they are far from the majority]).

If you want to send me a full listing of the text of either, I can probably try to figure out what I'd cut/keep.

A lot of the problem is that each piece was, itself, a seperate filksong/performance. Which means that any given one wouldn't be a scarring experience, though most of them were very much showstopper pieces, best in the one-verse/half verse format; get in, deliver the punchline, get out [of my pieces, Blacksmith of Hali is very much of this type, frex, and I try not to overdo it since it pretty only makes sense to those who know both songs].

Another, related problem, is that there was a sort of intermitability to the sequence -- there was no real progression aside from "this sequence ended when Lynn ran out of ideas". Now, obviously, you can have no-progression pieces that work -- Argo is one, as is Old Time Religon and my own "What's a Filk?" (or "Martin Said to Dianne", as you will). The key to these it to have a very different joke in every segment, and to keep the segments short...-and- to, by an act of will, avoid letting things run on too long; my pattern with "What's a Filk" is that I'll do my own verses until and unless people start contributing their own verses, then alternate until things seem to be going long (which doesn't happen mostly because there aren't enough people who have alternative verses yet; less than half a dozen than I know of, I think); even if nobody has their own verses I'll always cut at least two of the original 8 verses)...and to have enough new humor for every segment to keep things hopping.

That brings me to the question of humor -- with the form you've chosen, there's basically two appeals, really -- the first is the surprise of "what did you scan to -that-?", and the second is anticipation (which works best in The Raven piece, from what I remember) of known lines in a funny setting. The thing is, you've got a lot of material that doesn't hit either appeal -- after the first line, it's clear what the scansion is...and until you get to the anticipated punchline (Which in many pieces, is several verses away), the only humor is repetition of the existing joke, which works as well as it usually does (badly). For the most part, the magic number is four, though for certain poems, other numbers in that range may work better, like 1 or 5...which is to say that if you either start four lines away from the punch line...or [if your punch line is the first line] start with the first line and continue 1-4 lines in, then stop.

For any given line, you really need to say "why is this line -here-?" -- if the answer isn't either "it's a joke, a new one" or "it's making a smallish be necessary space for the next joke", it probably shouldn't.

And, of course, the entire sequence shouldn't be more than 3 minutes -- given that you're starting with a sequence of very short jokes, you should be able to come up with pieces that deliver whatever their payload is, then retire before anyone gets tired of it.

The next issue is that of quality -- given that the primary joke is "X scans to Y" (much like the Gilligan's Island scans-to variations, though those usually restrict themselves to the length of either the original song or GI, which helps a lot), if X -doesn't- scan to Y -- if the scansion seems forced, as it was in a largish number of your pieces, it totally undercuts the joke, and turns it into "Lynn thinks X scans to Y, which it actually doesn't"...which isn't the kind of humor you probably want even if people -do- find it funny. (obviously).

Re "inappropriate to the audience", I mean that while you can get away with a medly of about 4-10 near-full-length pieces in a concert slot, even a 2x10 [since it's ok to do multiple pieces there in any case], it's not really appropriate to do the same in circle, where it amounts to taking multiple turns in a row, [something that the common trick of doing a short-short piece and a longer piece is on the borderline of]. And yes, that if a substantial portion of the audience finds it painful, it's inappropriate to said audience -- there is a time to repeat a piece by request...and a time to quietly take the requester off in a corner to give them, and anyone else who wants one, a private performance of the piece rather than risk trying people's patience by performing it pubically again (two is often ok, especially if one of the audiences was very small or there's simply very little overlap, but 3?)