My Stand-Up Debut

This will be my 100th blog post, and to mark that special occasion for all my dedicated followers (read: no one), I thought it would be appropriate to reflect on an actual accomplishment I’ve had instead of pure silliness. However, it’s an accomplishment born for silliness: last week, I finally worked up the nerve to realize a boyhood dream, and did stand-up for the very first time.

While I am beside myself with pride and excitement, it behooves me to be a bit realistic. I was only performing at an open mic in front of a very small crowd of people, who were almost all performing themselves; I wasn’t invited to the event, and had to pay five bucks for the privilege of spouting my nonsense at this abnormally kind and supportive audience; the median age of my fellow performers would make them a good decade my junior; and while I wasn’t the least funny person there, neither was the brain-damaged coke addict, who, save for some unavoidable issues with delivery, was actually pretty good.

While all this might lead someone to say that my performance wasn’t really any kind of achievement, I would respond to such skeptics by saying, “fuck that, I did stand-up!”

For much of my young life, my only goal was to be a comedian, and I’ve wanted to make people laugh for as long as I can remember. Comedians frequently have stories about a moment in their early years when they made someone laugh in one way or another, and they realized for the first time that the gift of humor could bring them attention and approval. For example, George Carlin had that moment of realization when his impressions of famous actors he’d never even seen would please his mother so much that she’d have him do them in front of all the neighbors.

I, on the other hand, had a very different experience. As a kid, I certainly realized the power that humor gave you over those around you. And I can remember thinking how the kids who could tell jokes were the ones who everyone looked up to as early as kindergarten. But whenever I tried to be one of those kids, I always fell flat. I wasn’t naturally funny, and whenever I tried to be, I felt the absence of laughter like a slap in the face. I wanted so desperately to be the funny kid in class, but alas, I just never had the knack for it. I was still drawn to the power of comedy to do everything from entertaining to healing, and I tried to cultivate the skill in my head. But I came to shy away from letting it out for fear of humiliation.

Another defining moment in my quest for hilarity came when I was ten years old, when my dad sat my brother and I down in front of the TV and made us watch George Carlin’s then new HBO special, “Jammin’ in New York.” I decided pretty quickly that it was the single funniest thing I’d ever seen, albeit due more to the excessive use of profanity than anything poignant in the material. (What do you want? I was ten.) But it was so much more than that to me, because it was also the first time I realized that comedy was actually a career path. It was possible to be so funny that total strangers would pay good money to gather around and hear what was on your mind, and no sooner did I realize this than I decided that it was for me.

Through high-school, being a comedian was still the goal, even if I never actually performed and tried to attract as little attention to myself as possible. That probably didn’t work very well, as I was still the weirdo who walked around with a tape recorder (lest a moment of genius go forgotten), but didn’t actually talk to anyone. But with the passage of time and countless empty laugh-breaks in day-to-day conversation, I came to both doubt and hate myself too much to ever try to perform. And while my obsession with comedy didn’t die, I would inevitably shift my focus to forms of writing where I could hide myself from the audience. I tried my hand at fiction, essays, you name it. And ultimately I fell into film because people finally started telling me how funny I was when I tried out the screenplay form (which, to be fair, also coincided with my first showing anyone something I’d written). Being both a terrible coward and a shameless praise-whore, I stuck with what seemed to be working.

But of course, it wasn’t really working. I still have no idea how to sell a screenplay or raise money for my own film, and my job in the isolated world of post-production limits my ability to network almost as badly as my lack of social skills does. Still, even as I grew disillusioned with the idea that I could ever make a living with my comedy, I secretly still wished that I could do stand-up. But I was so certain that I’d fail that I could never bring myself to try.

That is, until a few weeks ago. A friend suggested that we go to an open mic the following week, and I enthusiastically agreed under the assumption that he meant “go SEE an open mic.” It wasn’t until about three days before the show that I realized he’d meant “go DO an open mic.”

By that point, I didn’t want to admit my mistake or let my friend down, so I basically said, “fuck it, if I have to prepare something with no time and embarrass myself, that’s fine, I’ll never see these people again.” I renewed my commitment to this plan, even though I had absolutely nothing to support it. Fortunately, we ended up pushing the date a couple times, giving me a chance to write anything and at least make an effort at remembering some portion of it. But that moment where I decided that the transient nature of the audience in my life meant that it didn’t matter what they thought helped me to not only stop being afraid of the idea of performing, but to actually get pretty jazzed up about it.

The show itself was nothing special. It was an extremely amateur level event, with even the best comics faltering and using notes. And since the audience was almost completely made up of performers, they were all too afraid of being booed themselves to be harsh. But even so, it was just about the most thrilling and rewarding thing I’ve ever done. Over the last few years, in the absence of any hope of a screenwriting career, I’ve been looking for a way that I can write something more substantial than a Facebook status and actually have it make someone laugh. And to be able to stand up in front of an audience (as it were) and be able to make a stranger laugh with my words, hokey and generic as they may have been, was more gratifying than anything I’ve yet done with my post-collegiate years.

I’m a long way from being able to call myself a real “comedian.” And even if I work hard, I may never honestly make it to that level. (I’m already planning the business cards, though.) But I’ve whet my appetite for a crowd, and I look forward to giving it my best shot. And even if I do fail or quit, it’ll at least make for a better story than, “Hey, remember that time I lived in New York? Yeah, I didn’t really do anything interesting there. But I had some really good food while I wasn’t doing it.”

I’ll keep you all posted on how things develop. Even if no one reads this, I’d still like to thank everyone for being so supportive.

-TC