I’m at the Northeast Regional Folk Alliance (NERFA) conference. I’m sure I’ll post more existential thoughts on this conference and where I am in my folk career, but for now, I’m going to do my standard reporting on workshops I’ve been to at the conference. In the first panel slot I was interested in four of the panels and ended up going to two (so, no, although a panel on humor and booking would perhaps be useful – and the best way to handle booking – they were actually two separate workshops. The humor one, led by Don White, was designed to teach us how (and why) to be funny between songs. He made a compelling case that for anyone who comes to see us play it’s a much bigger investment than a $10 ticket price might represent (including such things as babysitters and the fact that someone may be giving up her one free night in two weeks to this endeavor) and that we owe it to them to be entertaining. The other premise he was working from is that you can learn how to be funny. The most specific example he gave of what is funny is when people come to expect something and then don’t get what they want. He told some other comedian’s story of a drunk guy trying to cross a busy street at night saying “Oh God; please help me get across the street. If you help me get home tonight I promise . . . [with the necessary pause] . . . that tonight I’ll get home on my own.” And the idea that it was funny because we all expect him to say something like “I’ll give up drinking,” so it was playing with our expectations. He also talked about things like using our full range of physical movements (people remember what they see more than what they hear), which might require putting down the guitar. (He didn’t, though, discuss the practical aspect of how you do that in a way that doesn’t look strange.) You also need confidence – there’s nothing more painful than people trying to be funny but being too scared to pull it off. (That may well be true of almost any type of performance, though.) Probably the one thing he said that I hadn’t really thought about is that if you are saying something funny it should be at the end of what you’re saying (rather than in the middle), because then people are laughing through – and don’t really hear – whatever comes after that, and it interferes with their laughter. I do have a few comments I make that reliably get a laugh, and they tend to come in the middle of something else I say, so I need to think about whether I could reconfigure them. I left halfway through the workshop, though, because it seemed that I had gotten everything out of it that I was going to, and headed to the Booking Yourself workshop. It’s probably what I should have gone to from the start (and featured a fantastic lineup of impressive people (three of whom I am pals with) who have done a great job booking themselves and having a reasonable music career. The reason I didn’t choose it at first was that at this point, I know most of the stuff I should be doing; I just need to actually do it. And the things they emphasized – it’s about making personal and genuine connections with people; it’s a marathon rather than a sprint; you need to be organized and keep records and reminders of everything – are in fact things I know. But it was good to be reminded of them and great to hear how people I know and like have managed to make the music business work through booking themselves. Humor probably helps, too.