I Went Outside Again!

I am a huge fan of Bill Maher. If you aren’t… fine… but you are missing out. However you feel about his politics, what cannot be denied is that he, and Jay Leno, are at the absolute apex a standup comic can reach… and they still do old school standup shows every week. My guy does over 40 live 60 minute shows a year on HBO with some of the most important people in American culture and politics… and sill puts in two or three live shows every week all over the country. Not to be discounted… he does not pander to his base. It’s not just Austin and San Francisco and LA and NYC… If you look at the upcoming tour schedule, you’ll towns like Lubbock, TX and Bethlehem, PA and West Palm Beach, FL. The point being… my man WORKS.

Prior to the collapse of the world’s infrastructure, Maher would close every show announcing where he was going to be doing live gigs the following month. As we have worked our way through the COVID global shutdown and slowly regained our feet, shows like Real Time have worked their way back from “LIVE FROM MY HOUSE” to “LIVE WITH NO ONE IN THE ROOM” to “LIVE… like… um… you know… we used to do it”

When Bill announced he was coming to Clearwater, Florida a few weeks back, I jumped on it to get tickets. Truth be told, I had tickets to his Orlando show in mid-2020 but… well… you know. I was excited to see someone who has been a major influence on how I write and produce my podcast and video content, but more importantly, I was excited to GO OUTSIDE! (Sidebar: Dunedin, Florida is a very cool town).

I have huge respect for him saying that he was nervous about getting back on the road. 

A key part of standing in front of a room of people is making sure the audience has unwavering confidence in what the speaker is presenting. For a 40 year veteran of standup and someone who has hosted major political talkshows for nearly 30 years… that was a very bold and honest declaration. 

But here’s the thing… if we’re going back to it… we have to actually get back to it. And that means we have to do the first thing the first time. We may have hundreds of reps under our belts, but when the world closed for 18 months… we just didn’t get to do the things that we used to do the way we used to do them.

Which brings us to the actual show. We had incredible seats. Front row, stage left… 15 feet from Bill when he walked to our side of the stage. I got those seats because I wanted to be close, but an ancillary benefit is that I was close enough that I could do a critical analysis of the performance in addition to just enjoying the show. What I did not know until watching Real Time the night before (literally the Friday night show he did in LA, then we saw him on the Florida Gulf Coast the following night) was that this was his FIRST live show with an audience in 18 months.

He was nervous… and it showed. He worked on-book (for my theatre folks out there, you know what that means). My guy literally had a loose-leaf binder that he flipped through while doing the show. I loved the show. But that doesn’t mean that he killed it. Some of the gags were recycled from episodes of Real Time. Some just didn’t land. But some really crushed.

The key is that he Got. Back. Out There.

I had the amazing good fortune to be one of the front-men for Cylance. For a few years, I was on the road in front of crowds three days a week, 35 weeks a year, all over the world. It was amazing. I learned more about our industry and its people from the time before and after those events than any time I could spend in a conference room at HQ.

Then the world closed. And everything changed.

Now that we are cautiously re-opening things, it’s time to get back together.  Black Hat, DEFCON and HIMSS are coming up soon and there are more things to come later in the fall. If a black hole doesn’t swallow the entirety of existence, we should be looking at CES, RSA, SXSW and all the rest in the next six to eight months. We are going to have to be ready.

It’s okay to be nervous and acknowledge that you are. It’s okay to work on-book. It’s okay to not be great in your first gig out of the gate. But we have to Get. Back. Out There.

Because if we don’t. You know what’s going to change?

Nothing.