My first time compering this year, and its pretty clear I'm a little rusty. After a couple of months working on keeping to tightly scripted material, I was a bit reluctant to really interact with the audience.

I opened with some tried and tested material, which went down really well and got the night off to a nice start. For the first section, I just rattled through the acts without saying much in between. Although when I did say anything I hadn't scripted, I felt massively out of my depth, which hasn't happened to me before. I kept stopping and laughing at how ridiculous what I was saying was. Not good, and a clear indication to the audience that I didn't really know what I was doing.

I tried the phrasebook material I did last week in the opening of the second section. Its getting better, but I really need to tighten up the gags, get rid of excess words, etc. Again, all down to rehearsal. Unfortunately, I think that doing something so new at the opening of a section was a bad move in this case, and it got the section off to a low energy start, which I felt pretty bad about. There were a few places where I could have dropped in a gag in between acts (or said something) to get the energy back up, but I really didn't have any material that was short enough. I keep saying I need to write more short-form material, this is just another reason.

By the third section, a lot of people had had to leave (with sincere apologies from most, so I guess it wasn't because they weren't enjoying the night). But paradoxically, this left the remaining folks determined to have fun, and everyone got a great reception. Including my horrendous attempts at pun callbacks to other people's acts (mental note: don't do that). Special mention has to go to Liam McKay for improvising some great audience interaction after his set's main topics had been covered earlier (even if I'll be detagging the photos should they ever make it to Facebook).

I think the biggest thing I can take from this is that I need to have something of a plan for everything I say beforehand, even if I want it to seem totally spontaneous. Even for audience interaction, which feels like something you need to do a hell of a lot of to get good at. While I want to get some practice with it, I should probably ease myself into it by making a "flowchart" of sorts for conversations (having responses for each possible answer to a question). Engaging in a few improv games would be well worth a try as well.