Get Your Stuff Together First!

The other night I was chatting with a magician that I had met at a zoom magic show. He was asking me about working comedy clubs.

There were a couple of things, first he didn’t know his Laughs Per Minute (LPM). That’s a huge thing to know if you want to work in comedy. It’s a good metric to how funny your show is. To calculate this, count all of the laughs in your show and divide that by the length of your show. So if you get 90 laughs in a 45 minute show your LPM’s are 2. A stand up comedian will get about 6 or more, however most magicians won’t get that high. Magic has information that needs to be conveyed for a trick to work. As Bob Sheets once told me there’s comedy time and magic time and they don’t overlap.

Then I asked this magician for his website and video and he said his “site sucked” and his video wasn’t good. I told him that you NEED the correct promo if you want to level up or move into another market. I guess the other option to move into the market is to be soo good that you get work, but that’s a much longer and harder road to take. You’d literally be doing garbage gigs to hope someone sees you that books better gigs and then keep stepping up. There’s nothing wrong with this way, but it’s a lot more legwork than just sending out video and having bookers visit your website.

In a nutshell, my advice for levelling up your show in your current market or to break into a new market is to look at what people who are already in that market have for promo and get your stuff to that level and then start selling! If you reach out to a booker and they ask for a 2-3 min sizzle reel and two 5-8 minute unedited full routines, can you immediately send that? No booker wants to wait a month for you to send them stuff. Sure there’s the odd exotic request for an unusual piece of promo that may take you a couple of days to make, but the booker will understand if it’s truly a strange request.

I know this isn’t a fun answer to how to get work, but it’s what most people need to hear. If you don’t like your promo, how do you expect anyone else to?

-Louie