Do you rehearse interruptions, or only the clean version of the set?

I can run a set perfectly in the kitchen because, weirdly, the kettle never heckles me. What I’m less good at is finding my place again after something breaks the rhythm. Has anyone started deliberately interrupting rehearsal — stop after a punchline, answer an imaginary comment, wait ten seconds, then try to re-enter the bit? I’m wondering whether practising the recovery is more useful than doing another flawless run-through.

Do you rehearse what you'll do with the mic stand before the first line?

Tiny thing, but I’ve noticed I can waste the opening seconds of a set doing admin: move the stand, realise it’s in the way, move it again, then finally start. Do you make the mic/stand setup part of rehearsal so your first line can happen cleanly, or is that overthinking something you should just deal with in the room? I’m especially curious whether people who move around a lot put the stand somewhere specific every time.

When you move from five minutes to ten, do you build out or join two bits together?

I’m trying to make the jump without ending up with ten minutes that feels like two separate fives stapled together. Is it better to take the strongest five and deliberately deepen a couple of bits, or start joining material that already works and worry about the shape later? I can see how adding more detail gives you a more coherent set, but also how it could turn a tight five into a baggy ten.

What do you do when the first joke dies but the rest of the set still has to happen?

I’m getting better at accepting that one joke can die without the whole set being bad, but an opener getting nothing still scrambles my brain more than anything else. Do you have a deliberate reset — slow down, take a breath, go straight into the next bit — or is the goal basically to train yourself not to treat the first silence like an emergency?

How long do you give yourself before watching back a bomb?

I’m trying to get better at learning from bad sets without turning the whole thing into self-punishment. Straight after a rough five I’m usually too annoyed to hear anything objectively, but if I leave the recording for days I’ve already rewritten the night in my head. Do you review a bad set that night, the next morning, or only once you’ve stopped caring quite so much?