As part of my journey to make my home here, I did something almost every evening last week. Mondays are reserved for curling but there was also an e-commerce happy hour/meetup event on Wednesday, a series of short talks on Thursday, and a comedy open mic on Friday. I met a couple of people on Wednesday but I’m hardly a social butterfly. Thursday was a wash. This post, though, is about the open mic on Friday.

I also wrote about the last open mic I attended this summer. That one was in a dedicated comedy venue in what has become the hottest city in America for standup and some of those acts are now headlining comedy clubs around the country. That wasn’t the case this time. This was in the brightly lit barrel room of a brewery with an industrial fan running on low the whole time. The acts were a mix of decent-to-good, vulgar, and downright awful. There was even a ventriloquist for some reason. It was a much more typical open mic than what I witnessed in Austin.

I went to the event knowing that the performances would be hit-and-miss. That’s what you sign up for as an open mic attendee. Even the misses are part of the fun; there is a perverse satisfaction in watching someone else fail even if most people don’t like to admit it. I enjoy watching standup comedy and even though I’ve never had the urge to perform standup myself I have great respect for those who genuinely pursue the craft. Trying, learning, and building in public is hard. Most crafts don’t permit such public exposure. The closest I come is publishing this every week but my writing craft is hardly improved through the manner in which this column is written and edited most of the time.