One question that gets tossed around by newer comics is “How much time can you do?” There are two questions back to that. 1) How much are they paying me? and 2) Do I have to be funny? When I first started a guy told me he could over an hour. I watched his set. I had no doubt he was right, but I was willing to bet 57 minutes of it wouldn’t be worth watching.
Time is a very overrated aspect of comedy in that if you can’t kill for 10 minutes, why worry about a 45 minute set? I had a new guy come to my open mic and tell me he was working on a 15 minute set. Why? I have no idea. He then did about three and a half minutes without the mic and walked off the stage.
It works the other way too – I’ve been ambushed by venues before into doing more time than agreed to, and stupidly, trying to be a hero, I agreed. I can do a 45 minute set getting up out of bed, but anything longer than that and I need to prepare so I’m not just smashing material into a bag. I went to show at a bar once and the headliner went to the wrong city. Not wrong bar, wrong city. I was told to carry the room. I asked if I could have some time to prepare, since the show was starting in two minutes. They were very generous, they started the show at 8:03 instead of 8. The headliner showed up at 9:27. I know, because I ran out of jokes at 9:06 and had to do very subpar crowd work for 21 minutes. Thanks for showing up, dick.
The other time I got this thrown at me was at a really shitty hotel show. I was told by the owner they expected a 2 and half hour show. I told them that wasn’t in the itinerary and no drunks can pay attention that long, but he threw a fit. Fine, whatever. I did an hour as a feature act when the headliner asked me to share the burden so he didn’t get stuck with all the time they expected. He then went up, did 43 minutes, got paid way more than me and off he skipped down the road. Lesson learned again.