It happened in Innsbruck. A technology conference, about a hundred and twenty people, the kind of corporate audience that is polite but not begging for comedy. I was thirty minutes into my keynote and I had a line that I was sure would get a laugh. I had tested it twice before, both times to decent reactions.
I delivered the line.
Nothing.
Not uncomfortable silence. Not a groan. Just… nothing. The room continued to look at me with the same polite expressions they had been wearing before. As if I had simply stated a fact about quarterly revenue projections. Except I was not moving on. I was standing there, in the posture of someone waiting for a reaction, and the reaction was the absence of reaction.
Two seconds of silence after a joke is an eternity. Three seconds is a geologic age. I stood there for four seconds before my brain kicked in and told my mouth to start talking again.
Those four seconds taught me more about performance than the previous six months of preparation combined.
The Anatomy of the Comedy Hole
Here is what happens in your body when a joke tanks. Your brain, expecting a dopamine reward from laughter, does not get it. Instead it gets a signal that something has gone wrong. Your sympathetic nervous system fires. Heart rate up. Palms sweating. And then the worst part: your analytical brain engages mid-performance, running a frantic diagnostic instead of focusing on the next line.
This diagnostic process is what creates the comedy hole. The joke itself did not dig the hole — the recovery failure does. While your brain runs its panicked analysis, the show is still happening. Seconds are passing. The audience starts to feel uncomfortable — not because the joke failed, but because you are uncomfortable and they can see it. Your discomfort becomes their discomfort.
The comedy hole has gravitational properties. Once you are in it, everything pulls you deeper. The silence makes you nervous. The nervousness makes you rush the next line. The rushed line does not land either. Now you have two failed moments in a row. The hole gets deeper with each passing second.
My Worst Moment (So Far)
Back to Innsbruck. The line that died was not even a real joke — it was a self-deprecating observation about my own data analysis habits, designed to be a light moment before a heavier section about decision-making under uncertainty. In rehearsal, it had felt natural. In the room, it felt like I had read it off a card in a language the audience did not speak.
Here is what I did wrong. Instead of moving on, I tried to explain the joke. “You know, because consultants always…” In that moment, every person giving me the benefit of the doubt now understood that I had attempted comedy and failed. My explanation turned a private failure into a public one.
I was rattled for the next ten minutes. I rushed through a mentalism piece, and the rush meant the buildup was insufficient and the payoff diminished. One dead joke cascaded into a weakened ten-minute stretch — not because the material was bad but because my internal state was compromised.
After the event, sitting in a cafe near the Hofburg, I took notes. Not about the content. About the failure. Because the failure itself was not the problem — every performer bombs eventually. The problem was my response to it.
Ralphie May’s Lesson: Bombing Is Education
Ralphie May, in his Standup Masterclass, says something that I had to hear several times before it sunk in: “You can learn more from bombing than you can from killing.” He says it with the casual authority of someone who has stood in every comedy hole there is and climbed out of all of them. “You will never kill until you bomb,” he adds, “because you gotta learn mistakes.”
May is not being philosophical. He is being precise. Bombing teaches you things that killing cannot, because the emotional intensity of failure burns the lesson into your memory with a depth that success never achieves. I remember that Innsbruck moment in vivid detail — the exact words, the exact posture, the expression on the face of the woman in the third row. I do not remember a single successful joke from that period with anything approaching that clarity. Failure encodes. Success reassures.
May also has a metaphor about birds: every bird flies, and every now and then a bird hits a glass and falls. If they live through it, they get up, ruffle their feathers, and take off again. The key is in the getting up — not the analysis, not the self-recrimination. Just fly again.
Recovery Technique One: Acknowledge It and Move On
The single most effective recovery technique I have found is also the simplest: acknowledge that the joke died, and move on immediately. Do not explain it. Do not retry it. Do not pretend it did not happen. Say something like, “Well, that one is going in the bin,” or “I will be workshopping that one later,” and then immediately continue with your next piece.
Why does this work? Because it does three things simultaneously. First, it breaks the tension. The audience was holding their breath, wondering if you noticed that the joke died. When you acknowledge it, you give them permission to relax. Second, it demonstrates confidence. Acknowledging a failure and not being destroyed by it is one of the strongest displays of confidence a performer can offer. It says, “I am in control of this room, and one dead joke is not going to change that.” Third, it often gets a laugh itself, which resets the room’s energy and gives you a clean launchpad for whatever comes next.
The key is speed. The acknowledgment has to come fast — within two seconds of the silence. If you wait longer than that, the comedy hole opens and starts pulling you in. A fast acknowledgment is a bridge over the hole. A slow acknowledgment is just standing in the hole and commenting on it.
Recovery Technique Two: The Saver Line
A saver line is a pre-written recovery line that you keep in your back pocket for exactly this situation. It is not a response to the specific joke that died — it is a general-purpose line that works after any failed joke.
Judy Carter, in her comedy coaching work, recommends writing saver lines in advance and practicing them until they feel spontaneous. This makes sense. When a joke dies, your brain is in panic mode. Asking your panicked brain to generate a witty recovery line in real time is like asking someone to compose a sonnet while their house is on fire. Much better to have the line already written, already memorized, and ready to deploy automatically.
I have three saver lines that I rotate. I will not share them here because a saver line loses its effectiveness if the audience has heard it before, and some of the people reading this might eventually be in my audience. But I will describe their structure. Each one is self-deprecating, short (under ten words), and slightly absurd. The self-deprecation signals humility. The brevity prevents the recovery from becoming its own performance. The absurdity shifts the room’s emotional register from awkward to playful.
The important thing about a saver line is that it must not be funnier than the material around it. If your best laugh of the night is your recovery line, you have a structural problem. The saver should get a mild laugh — enough to break the tension and reset the room — but not so big a laugh that it overshadows the rest of your set. You do not want the audience hoping for more failures so they can hear more saver lines.
Recovery Technique Three: Physical Reset
After a joke dies, change your physical position on stage. Take three steps. Move to a different table. Pick up a different prop. The physical movement signals to the audience, at a subconscious level, that a new segment is beginning. I discovered this accidentally during a show in Vienna — a joke died and I just walked to my table to pick up the next prop. The movement created a natural break, and by the time I turned back to the audience, the energy had reset.
Now I deliberately position my transitions near the places in my set where humor is riskiest. If the joke lands, great. If it does not, I am already moving, and the movement itself serves as the recovery.
The Three Things That Make Bombing Worse
Through my own bombing and through watching other performers bomb, I have identified three behaviors that reliably make the situation worse.
The first is explaining the joke. I already described my Innsbruck mistake. Explaining a dead joke is like performing an autopsy in front of the patient’s family. Nobody wants to see it, and it provides no comfort.
The second is blaming the audience. “Tough crowd” or “you had to be there” or any variant of “it is not me, it is you.” Even when delivered as a self-aware joke, this creates an adversarial dynamic. The audience was on your side. They wanted to laugh. They did not laugh because the joke did not work, not because they failed as an audience. Blaming them for your failure is the fastest way to lose their goodwill.
The third, and most subtle, is performing the next bit from a place of apology. After a joke dies, there is a temptation to deliver your next line in a lower energy, more tentative register. This apologetic energy is poison. It tells the audience you have been diminished by the failure, which makes them worried about you — the opposite of what an audience should feel. The solution is to deliver the next line with the same energy, or slightly more, than you would have if the joke had killed. Your body wants to shrink. The performance requires the opposite.
The Long Game: Building a Relationship with Failure
Here is the thing about bombing that nobody tells you until you have done it enough times: it stops being terrifying. Not because you stop caring, but because you build confidence in your ability to recover. The first time a joke died, I was devastated for days. The tenth time, annoyed for minutes. The thirtieth time, I barely registered it before moving on.
This is not desensitization. It is competence. The skill of recovery is arguably more important than the skill of never failing, because no performer never fails. The question is not whether a joke will die. The question is what you do in the two seconds after it dies.
I still bomb. Less often now — a formal audience in Klagenfurt, a heavy keynote where humor felt tonally wrong, a moment where timing was off by half a beat. Each time, I acknowledge it, move on, and take notes later. The lesson is always the same: get up, ruffle your feathers, fly again.
The comedy hole is not a pit. It is a ditch. You can always climb out. The audience will follow you. They want you to succeed even more than you want to succeed, because your success is their entertainment. Give them the confidence of a performer who acknowledges failure without being defined by it, and they will follow you out every time.