Night 1 of the People's Champ
July 10, 2012 at 9:21 AM
Well at long last this summer's People's Champ competition kicked off last night at the Kingston Tap House. This is Canada's biggest prize money comedy competition ever with a $20,000 top prize. I was lucky enough to be selected out of the 270 applicants to make the top 60 performers. From here it comes down to audience voting and performing 4 nights in a row this week with 14 other funny people in my heat.
Last night I got to mingle with the other performers for a bit before the show kicked off. There are some real pro comics in the group including Graham Clark who I've been a fan of for a few years now thanks to his podcast Stop Podcasting Yourself. Always a pleasure when I get to talk to him for a bit. As well Brett Martin and Dan Quinn are the other full on pro guys in this week's heat. The rest of the mix are a bunch of people with similar experience as me at the year plus of performing mark and a few newcomers who had promising videos they submitted. I reconnected with a few people I hadn't seen in a while and after we drew for our positions this week the show kicked off with Larke Miller doing the MCing. I had a couple people show up but Monday is not the best night for getting people out it seems so I didn't have much in the way of crowd support. I was hopeful to make it up on the other nights and I figured this would at least give me a baseline of where I'm sitting in the group without bringing people out.
My set was 8th in the pack which is pretty ideal, I don't like to go to early nor too late for this kind of a competition. I was a little concerned about timing as I knew I had only 5:10 to do my set in or I'd be penalized. Unfortunately I think I ended up rushing my set as a result and finished well under time. I didn't stop for any comedic pauses and I think that may have hurt a few of the jokes. The crowd was a bit of an older crowd than I'm used to as well so they didn't respond to my sexting joke the way I was hoping.
I had to leave before the scores were announced at the end but this morning they were posted and I'm sitting in 7th but not far out of 4th which is what I need to advance. I'm feeling good about my chances as I should have lots of folks out for the rest of the week's shows.
1.Ash Dhawan: 137 *
2.Dan Quinn: 120 **
3.Graham Clark: 85 ***
4.Aimee Beaudoin: 63
5.Mau Scantolini: 58
6.Brett Martin: 53
7.Chris Allen: 51
8.Andrew Maclachlan: 48
9.Tiberius Swanker: 42
10.Shirley Gnome: 40
11. Chris Garnier: 35
12. Ben McGinnis: 20
13.Mikey Wolfe: 13
14. San Aung: 13
15. Ray Estrella: 7