How to Do Your First Open Mic: Signing Up, Your Five Minutes and What Not to Do

Here's the short answer. Pick one open mic, find out how that particular room signs people up, get there early, and bring a set you've timed out loud at about three to five minutes. When the host shows you the light, finish the joke you're on and get off. Then stay for the rest of the show. That's the whole job. Everything below is the detail, and the detail is where first-timers fall down, usually right in front of eleven people and a bartender.

Start by picking the mic. Heckle lists 431 open mics across 13 cities at https://hecklemag.com/open-mics, with the night, the time, the sign-up method and the cost for each one where it's been published. For a first time, pick a weekly mic at a real comedy club or a bar that runs a regular comedy night. A regular mic has a host who knows what to do with a nervous stranger. A brand-new mic in the back of a laundromat has a host who's also nervous, and nobody needs two.

Next, learn the sign-up. Every room does it differently, and the most common first-night disaster is turning up at 8 p.m. for a list that closed at 7. Wikipedia's entry on open mics puts it plainly: each club or bar has its own system. Here's how a few real ones work, straight from their own pages.

Cap City Comedy Club in Austin runs its open mic on Tuesday nights at 7:30 p.m. It says comics should come with at least three minutes of material, and it posts the lineup online before the show. If you didn't make the online list, you can come out and put your name in the bucket for a chance at a spot. At the Comedy Mothership's Monday open mic, Heckle's Austin listing has names going on a list at the front door and 16 of them drawn at random. The Riot Riverwalk in San Antonio takes submissions online until Tuesday at midnight each week.

Then there's the waiting-list kind. Comedy Works in Denver says more than 200 comics sign up for its New Talent Night each week. Picks go to whoever has signed up the most times and waited the longest, and the club says a first spot generally takes eight to ten weeks. So you sign up every week, and one day an email arrives. It's the closest thing comedy has to waiting on a kidney, except the kidney is two minutes long.

In Heckle's own listings, a list you sign in person at the venue is by far the most common method. Lotteries and bucket draws come next, then online forms. So unless the listing says otherwise, assume you'll be writing your name on a clipboard. And assume somebody got there before you, because somebody always does, and they're usually holding a notebook with more pages filled than yours.

What does it cost? Usually nothing, or close to it. Of the mics in our listings that publish a price, the biggest group is free, the next biggest charges about $5, and a few dozen ask you to buy a drink or an item instead. Clubs often add their usual minimum for the showroom. Cap City's site lists a two-item minimum in the showroom and says it's an 18-plus venue. Ask before you go and keep a few dollars on you. No one ever got a laugh out of arguing with a waitress about a minimum, though plenty have tried.

Now, your set. Most mics give you somewhere between three and seven minutes, and first-timers often get less. At Comedy Works every newcomer starts with a two-minute set. The Riot gives five minutes. The safe plan is to write and rehearse about four minutes of material, cut it down to three, and keep one more joke in your pocket. This part is advice, not a club rule: say the set out loud with a stopwatch at least a few times, because jokes run longer on stage than they do in your head, the way a drive always takes longer than the map says.

Open with a joke, not an introduction. 'Hi, how's everybody doing, so I'm new at this' has used up fifteen seconds and told the room you're scared, which they could already see. Put your best line near the top and your second-best at the end. If you lose your place, a set list on a scrap of paper or the back of your hand is an old crutch for a reason, and nobody in the history of the open mic has been booed for glancing at their palm.

Learn the light before you go up. The light is the host's signal that your time is nearly done. At Comedy Works the sound booth flashes a white flashlight at you 30 seconds before your time. The mic gets cut when the time is up, with no grace period, and the club tells comics to acknowledge the light. The Riot doesn't give a light at all. It says there's a clock in the back, and if you go over, they'll play music and cut the mic. So find out the house rule before your name gets called, and when the light comes, finish the joke you're on. Don't start a new one. Running the light is the one mistake hosts remember, long after they've forgotten whether you were funny.

Some things not to do, gathered from the clubs' own rules plus common sense. Don't go over your time. Don't leave the moment your set's done: the comics who stayed to watch you deserve the same, and it's where you'll learn the most. The Riot bans slurs and hate speech outright and asks comics to be respectful of the audience, other comics and staff, so take that as the floor everywhere. Don't heckle other comics, don't talk at the bar during sets, and don't bring six friends who all leave after you're done. That's not a crowd, that's a hostage situation with a cover charge.

Should you record it? Yes, if the room allows it, because your memory of a first set is a liar in both directions. Check first. Some clubs ban filming outright. The Comedy Mothership puts phones in Yondr pouches, for instance. Where it's allowed, a phone propped on a table with the sound on is plenty. Listen back the next day, note where people laughed and where they didn't, and keep the parts that worked.

Then do it again, soon. A first mic goes one of three ways: it goes well, it goes badly, or it goes so quietly you hear the ice machine. All three mean the same thing, which is that you should go back the following week. Comedy Works says its coordinators look at things like how quickly a comic gets to the first laugh and how they handle the stage, and the only way to get better at those is reps.

To find your mic, start at https://hecklemag.com/open-mics and pick your city, such as https://hecklemag.com/open-mics/austin or https://hecklemag.com/open-mics/denver. Once you're ready to hit two or three in one evening, https://hecklemag.com/open-mics/plan will build the night for you. And if you've got your eye on the most famous one-minute audition in comedy, our guide to the Kill Tony bucket is at https://hecklemag.com/opinion/heckle-guides.

So pick the mic, learn the list, time the set and respect the light. Nobody remembers your first open mic except you, which is the best news a beginner ever gets and the worst news a grown adult with a notebook ever hears.