A Month of Chucking

This past Sunday marked the one month anniversary of the opening of the Chuckling Priestman Comedy Club.  In that short time, the Chuckling Priestman has gone from a non-descript empty building in one of SL’s commercial districts, to the hottest comedy club in SL.  Offering live shows 5 nights a week, with more shows on the horizon, we have very quickly become the place to go for comedy in Second Life.

Opening Night at The Chucklin Priestman

This past Thursday night, May 8, 2008, one of my SL dreams came true … I ran the first show in my spanking new comedy club, The Chuckling Priestman. Co-owned by my RL and SL friend and colleague Chuckling Darwin (aka Derek Sweet), we hope The Chuckling Priestman will become the #1 comedy club in Second Life. As a club for comics, run by comics we hope to be able to provide the best comedy experience you can find in SL. If Thursday’s show was any indication, we are well on our way to achieving that goal.

The Late Show with Angelico Babii

Monday May 5th, I filmed a segment for the SL Late Show with Angelico Babii (for SLTV). The show was taped live at the Blarney Stone Irish Pub in “Dublin in SL“. Its an amazing sim, and a beautiful little pub, created by Ham Rambler. The Blarney Stone is a recreation of an actual pub in Dublin, and the entire sim is intended to be as faithful a recreation of Dublin as is possible in a place like Second Life. I’d been to the Blarney Stone a few times before, but this was the first time I’d ever performed there. Joining me on this episode of the Late Show was the Blarney Stone’s, and Dublin in SL creator, Ham Rambler, as well as SL and RL author Madddyyy Schnook and SL music star Rich DeSoto.

New content at GAS … First Life, Second Life, Third Life, more

By Lyle Bateman
Contributing Writer, [GAS]

My comedy and geek sides have been meshing a bit more lately. About a month ago, I popped into Second Life again, after trying it a couple of times a year or so ago and giving up on it. At the time I first signed up, the interface was very primitive, and truth be told, I was never able to quite “see the point” of the game. However, as my comedy career has unfolded over the past year or so, I’ve been thinking more and more of trying to find a venue online where I can showcase some of my work. YouTube and MySpace are fine for videos, but there aren’t a whole lot of places where you can easily do a “live show” online as well as easily generate an audience for the show.

To read the rest of this entry, check out Geeks Are Sexy, at http://www.geeksaresexy.net/2008/03/18/first-life-second-life-third-life-more/

Swinging from the rafters, SL style …

There are obviously a lot of differences between doing shows for a virtual crowd in Second Life and doing shows for a real crowd at a place like Dickens, but one of the similarities is that you can almost always find some humour in the crowd itself. One of the things that makes SL unique, however, is that the crowd is largely limited only by its imagination, and I end up seeing a few rather odd things at my shows. The picture that leads this entry off was taken while performing at Last Laugh Virtual Comedy Club on Saturday night, and close examination will show three of my audience members hanging upside down from the ceiling. While I can’t say that never happens at Dickens’ shows, we usually don’t get people swinging from the chandeliers until well after the show is over, and more often than not, its comics doing the swinging, not the audience.

Laugh Lines Virtual Comedy Club opens with a bang

Last night I did my third show in Second Life, at the gala grand opening for a new virtual club in Second Life called Laugh Lines on the private island of Freeport run by Crusader Arado, who also MC’d the show. Salamander Maroon opened the show at 7PM SLT (about 4AM for her in the UK) and despite the late hour for her, she did a heckuva show, with an appearance by her new character, de-motivational speaker Gail Warning. It was probably a much better show than I could have put on at 4AM, so good on ya Sal. Next up was my good friend Chuckling Darwin (aka Derek Sweet), doing the longest set of his career to date, RL or SL. He had a great show as well, and we both agree that his material seems to work better in the SL environment than RL. I ended up headlining the show, as the 4th comic who was supposed to appear wasn’t able to make it, and I had a great time on Laugh Lines’ stage. Its taken a few shows for me to get used to the timing with voice chat in SL, and I still need to work a bit on my use of animations and gestures during shows, but I am finding SL to be a very unique, and very fun, place to do comedy.

Elron and Chuckling in SL

This past Saturday I did my first full show in Second Life. I have a regular gig on Saturday nights at the Last Laugh Comedy Club, and Feb 23rd marked the first incarnation of that. My good friend from Dickens, Derek Sweet, popped in under the guise of Chuckling Darwin, his SL persona, to help me open the show, and we ended up having a great crowd turn out. Derek and I both joked that the crowd at Last Laugh was about twice the size of what we often get in RL at Dickens or at the Laugh Shop, one of Calgary’s other RL clubs.

Elron Priestman performs in Second Life

When I first started in the stand up comedy thing, the world was a different place. The time was 1991, and very few average people even had cell phones. The internet was a small-time network that was hard to navigate and contained little content, and was over shadowed by “Bulliten Board systems” like AOL and Compuserve in the “online world.” The idea of bringing multi-media attachments to aid your comedy show was a virtual impossibility, with laptops whose harddrives were a fraction of the size of the RAM in many laptops today. In general, in 1991, doing anything other than standing on stage talking to the audience was a very difficult technical challenge, while today, the incredible increase in computer and communication power means that there are things we can do on stage, relatively easily, that simply would have been inconceivable in 1991.