Bombing

If you go on stage and your opener sucks, everyone HATES you, the whole time. You can’t recover. The first impression frames the way they see everything else. So if you’re an unknown, you need to convince them you’re worth listening to in like 10 seconds or you’re going to be up there for 5 minutes yelling at a wall. 

And you just get more and more frustrated that the jokes you’re telling which have brought joy to so many other crowds for some reason are completely unappreciated by these blank drones staring forward or down at their phones. This is called a Bomb. Because if you fuck up at the beginning, they will tune you out. They will not listen to anything else you say. This is the same with writing. Probably no one has read this far. Because you read the first line and decided it wasn’t worth your time. So you kept scrolling. When you bomb, the audience has mentally chosen to keep scrolling.