The best standup set I’ve had in my short time doing it took place about a month ago, in the back of an Irish pub at 11pm on a Tuesday.
Killing in front of seven tired barflies on a weeknight in Oakland (if that can even be called killing) is a lot like getting one or two decent comments on a barely read piece of online writing—it keeps you going.
Over the course of the next week, after peaking in front of my optimal crowd size of seven, I proceeded to bomb four sets in a row. Two of those took place in the same psilocybin dispensary, the other two in front of an audience that included people I knew personally, which is its own autopoetic mortification engine.
And the head games. And the head games.
Truth of the matter is, I have no business doing standup. I started too old, having squandered my good apprenticeship years trying to be Donald Bartheleme (alcoholism included) and believing that standup comedy was for extroverted voice and posture athletes—Bo Jacksons of social confidence. That wasn’t me.
But standup, I suspect, is a bit like rap in that a large percentage of its lifelong fanbase is not content to merely sideline but has secret hankerings to become what it is listening to.
I mean a really large percentage. Like forty.
And if there is no proximal gateway, some concrete person, place or event that collides with unreality, the hankerer ends up obsessively drinking in professionals’ output in the even more secretly held hope that consumption alone will somehow complete the transformation, like piling neuron upon neuron until consciousness ignites.
And, of course, it doesn’t work that way.
In any case, missed window notwithstanding, the discovery has been that I am exactly the sort of weirdo that makes a good standup comic, am too domesticated at this point to do what’s necessary to become one, and that it is unfathomably hard, unless you’ve done it, to grasp how near impossible it is to appear relaxed up there, let alone be relaxed. Not once, I mean, but every time, every set.
That last part’s what’s keeping me interested.
People learn guitar for the joy of playing, Madison Square Garden need not factor in, or play pickup basketball at the park, no NBA—even with improv, no one at the community theater has delusions of auditioning for SNL (or almost no one).
But with standup, the assumption of a worldly success engine and doing a shitty open mic in a bar (or laundromat or dimly lit mushroom distribution center) are one motion. “Making it” is the point of the activity.
As someone fully aware that he won’t make it, I find this curious.
Maybe it’s because, as with any infinite game, the period within which you can’t help but suck in the beginning is long in standup (for everybody) but unlike any other sport, art, or craft I’m aware of, in terms of first-person experience, sucking at standup is uniquely devastating. It involves panic attacks and near-panic attacks and a kind of self-doubt that makes you want to donate yourself to Goodwill. That’s what bombing’s like. It’s like taking every awkward or embarrassing social fail, big and small, that you’ve had in the last five years, and every argument with a loved one that was your fault from that same period, and all the associated loneliness, and jamming it into the same five minutes in a single building, then walking out of that building to your car by yourself.
So I guess the scene consensus is No one casual-hobbys this. It’s too high consequence.
And I think that’s right.
And yet…
Life in reverse
A backstrap of San Francisco resists the pounding of transplant sandals. If you do what I say you will see. Robbed of photons during the day, every night it sheds its skin of a piece, headless marine iguana the Pacific revised it into. Get there before photons get robbed. The name of the city won’t be there the way your face comes apart in the middle of…
Daybreaks
At lunch I smuggle white books into the African-American Past and Present Library, its doors solid mahogany. I plant my feet to row them but they blow open as church doors, as saloon doors, as knocked over boxes do—some mystery of Jesuit hingemanship.
Tracy Morgan Freeman
How much more good could you do in the world if you stopped feeling inadequate?
I go to A’s games and still imagine taking the ball in extra innings, defective spine and all. I day dream about joining plays, appearing in movies, even working the grill at Five Guys.
I’ve never once entertained taking the mic for stand up comedy. Inducing laughter live is a tall order, not to mention looking (and feeling) in control doing it. I admire you for trying it.
And writing this. It’s a great piece.
I love your attitude to “making it” I never properly accepted that there was absolutely no chance that I would ever become fêted for some artistic endeavour until well into my fifties, in fact probably well into my sixties. The relief of having done so is liberating. It has given me a new enjoyment in everything, even if there is still a tiny residual voice inside me saying that the newfound freedom of expression and relaxed attitude might just be the key to me actually finally “making it”