That is, I did not win the crowd over or get a lot of laughs. But I did not suck, which is the death penalty for comedians whose terrible material gets them chased off the stage before their time is up. Bengt clearly killed on these two shows. If I keep killing, club owners and bookers will see me, and hopefully I will get work at progressively better clubs. Also, if the comedians you are working with like you, word spreads.
Good comedians like to work with other good comedians because it improves their humor.
It's hard to pinpoint where humor comes from. We are so surrounded by humor in daily e-mails, office jokes, advertisements and the like, we tend to forget that somebody actually came up with the original idea. Comedians are meticulous about coming up with their own ideas and are suspicious of other comedians ripping them off. The last 15 hours in the car, mostly across a Nevada moonscape, inspire a lot of angst mining as we recall bad relationships, wacky parents, dumb advertisements, childhood embarrassments. After a while, everything becomes a potential punch line.