Self-Inflicted Wounds: Heartwarming Tales of Epic Humiliation (20 page)

Not
literally
, anyway.

The silence of a darkened nightclub at 1:52 in the morning after three-plus hours
of comedy can be so oppressive as to feel like a weight. Like a giant has climbed
upon your shoulders and taken a seat for a few hours to think. It can squash you,
push the air out of your lungs, turn everything dark. I can’t tell you what jokes
I did that night, because honestly, they weren’t jokes. I can’t tell you what unformed
premises I presented, because I blacked out soon after ascending the stage, the rest
of those three minutes unfolding like an out of body experience of which I have no
memory, just the faint sensory recall of sweat pooling in the hollows of my collarbone,
the deafening bass drum of my racing heartbeat, and the crisp, dry taste of pennies
in my mouth. All I know is that I was not funny, and I was not getting laughs.
¹¹

Except for one.

Just one.

I got one laugh, around eighty percent of the way through my act. I don’t know what
got it, and I was never able to reproduce that exact laugh ever again. The next twenty,
or fifty, sets I did were exercises in how long someone could stand before a group
of utterly silent people.

The rest of my set was workmanlike, shot through with terror, and preeminently forgettable.
I shambled offstage to a smattering of applause, and by smattering, I mean the bartender,
who wanted to go home, and my boyfriend, who wanted to go home. I was exhausted, confused,
and like a soldier with PTSD, I just wanted to forget. I might have hated my job,
but at least the entire office didn’t get together to critique my work while I stood
at the blinding center of an overhead klieg. Spending the rest of my life in a nice
quiet cubicle with my instant noodles and my broken hopes and dreams suddenly seemed
like a perfectly fine way to die.

But that one laugh, like a single transcendent experience on a highly potent drug,
was enough to change my brain chemistry forever. Afterwards, my boyfriend and I went
and ate our weight in dumplings.
¹²
And after that, he got laid.
¹³

The next day, when people at work asked me how my big debut had gone, I told them
the truth: it was terrible. And somehow, I couldn’t wait to do it again.

I had decided to try something terrifying, I had tried it, and it had been, indeed,
terrifying. But I had done it. And that was my first step out of being mired in a
frustrating and unsatisfying dream job, and into being mired in an even more frustrating
but supremely rewarding dream career. And while that night was traumatic and on the
whole pretty scarring, it did drive home another old piece of pabulum: you’ve got
to venture if you want to gain. And if you actually get off your ass and try to follow
your dreams—make yourself a little uncomfortable in pursuit of what you want—holy
shit, you might just achieve them.

Or at the very least, get to destroy a plate of
char siu bao
, ride home on the bus, and have hot dumpling sex. Which is the best kind, because
you get to use up all the leftover duck sauce.

( 21 )

The Tenth Time I Did Standup

“Truth alone wounds.”
—
N
APOLEON
B
ONAPARTE

“Truthfully, I suck.”
—
A
ISHA
T
YLER

This
was as awful as the first time, only without the dumpling reward at the end. So,
actually, this was
way
worse than the first time. Suck minus dumplings equals super suck.

If I could go back in time and tell myself not to do this set, I would.

No, wait. I wouldn’t, because bombing so hard you get a bruise on your ass is the
only way you get any funnier. We learn from our mistakes.

And if the bigger the mistake, the more we learn, well then this elevated me into
genius territory.

So, yeah. This time
really
sucked.

( 22 )

The Hundredth Time I Did Standup

“Great is the power of habit. It teaches us to bear fatigue and to despise wounds
and pain.”
—
M
ARCUS
T
ULLIUS
C
ICERO

“I can’t feel my face.”
—
A
ISHA
T
YLER

Comedians
have a name for newcomers who have only been doing standup for a few years. We call
them babies.

Baby comics
, specifically.

We don’t call them baby comics because they are infants. Sometimes they
are
literally young—high school students, or worse, precocious middle-schoolers full
of moxie and innuendo whose parents have to drive them to the club and wince delicately
through five minutes of wobbly material on jump rope and homework. But just as often,
they are a middle-aged cubicle jockey who decided to recklessly chuck it all—job,
relationship, kids, self-respect—to become a comedian.
¹
These people are called baby comics because they have absolutely no idea what they
are doing, stumble about aimlessly, are prone to outbursts and tantrums, stare at
you uncomprehendingly when you offer help, and occasionally shit their pants.
²
Regardless of their age, baby comics are immature, undisciplined, hysterical, emotional,
self-centered, and totally without humility.

It is hard to believe I was
ever
one of those.

Baby comedians are all the same, and they are very easy to spot if you know what to
look for.
³
No matter their age or provenance, they all have the same complaint: nobody
gets
them.

It is an almost universal refrain: every comedian who has been doing comedy for three
years or less will tell you that they are brilliant, before their time, the next coming
of Richard Pryor, and others just don’t recognize their genius. People are trying
to stand in their way, keep them down, cockblock their stardom. Every baby comedian
is confident they’ve got what it takes, that stardom is just a shortcut away, and
if people would just give them the respect and adulation their startling brilliance
deserves, they would have their own sitcom by Christmas.

And every comedian who has been doing comedy for ten years or longer looks back at
their three-year-old comedian self and thinks, “Geez. What an intolerable douche.”

When I was a baby comic, I kept looking for the
secret
. The hidden key, the magic trick that would help me bypass all the waiting and sucking
up and bombing and suffering and zip straight to comedic stardom. I was convinced
it existed, and that older comedians I admired, who told me that the only “secret”
was hard work multiplied by time, just didn’t want to share what they knew. Like some
MLB home run phenom or blood-doping cyclist, they all kept claiming their success
came from focus, discipline, and drive, when I knew it really came from a shot of
something clear, potent, illegal, and undetectable. All I needed was a phone number
or shady address. I needed the BALCO of comedy. I was positive it existed; people
just weren’t coming clean.

What is most charming about youth, both literal and comedic—enthusiasm, optimism,
bright-eyed hubris—is also what sucks most about it. Young people are swaddled in
delusion. You think you are more awesome than you are, the world more interested in
you than it is, your countenance more dazzling, your ideas more captivating, and that
LeBron James was just a natural talent recruited from a neighborhood pickup game.
You don’t want to practice, you don’t see the value in sacrifice, and you are convinced
there is some vast comedy conspiracy to keep you from buying your first Bentley and
dating a model by the time you are twenty-five.

Wow. You
are
a douche.
⁴

Unfortunately, much like the actual process of growing up, there is no shortcut out
of metaphorical comedy childhood either. Every baby comic is looking for an easy way
out, a secret door or magic bullet, a red pill that will make everything go away—make
the shitty open mikes and stone-faced comedy bookers and sleazy club owners evaporate,
leaving in their place a late night spot on
Conan
and a week of sold-out shows at Madison Square Garden. These babies are convinced
that anyone with a moderate amount of comedy success has figured out this chute-and-latter
secret, and if they can just prize it from their elders, they’ll be well on their
way to hosting the Emmy Awards.

Sadly, like friendly aliens or gay Latino Republicans, this shortcut to fame just
does not exist.

Sure, there are people who have shot to infamy quickly and without serious effort.
I am thinking, of course, of the ilk that populate such heady dramatic fare as
Jersey Shore
,
Pregnant and Sixteen
, and any of a variety of surgically augmented and mentally demented
Real Housewives
.
⁵
They have, indeed, lucked out. Their main talents seem to be their proclivity for
psychotic outbursts, the ability to funnel their husbands’ money into fresh sets of
breasts, a love of getting drunk on boxed wine in the middle of the day, and a deft
proficiency at snatching the weave off a bitch.

But that is not fame, and it is not earned through any real talent, or by putting
anything meaningful, helpful, or good into the world. It is
infamy
, not fame. Ignominy, notoriety, celebrity—they are poor substitutes for actual ability.
Infamy is not real. It does not last.
⁶

Real success and accomplishment, at whatever it is you are passionate about, requires
real work. Real sacrifice. Real disappointment. Real failure. And it requires the
ability to scrape your sorry ass up off the floor, stumble to your feet, wipe the
rivulets of watery drool from your face, and do it again, like an obstinate toddler
running against the wall with his head in a bucket.

This is the thing that baby comics do not understand. It is the thing that I did not
understand, until I had done my hundredth set. It was not a memorable set, or even
a particularly good one. I don’t remember the jokes, or the crowd, or the club, the
town, what night of the week it was, or how much I got paid. What I do remember is
how I
felt
. Because somewhere around set one hundred, I realized something that had evaded me
up until that point: it was going to take hundreds more sets, just like that one,
to get where I wanted to go, and in all probability I would never actually get all
the way there. I was in this thing for the long haul, and that haul was going to be
much longer than I had hoped. But that night, I realized for the first time that I
loved what I did, that the comedy itself, the elation of creating art, expressing
ideas, making other people laugh, was its own reward, and that passion for my work
was more important than fame or the false adulation of a bunch of people I didn’t
know or care that much about anyway.

That, I realized,
was
the secret. And that night was the moment I finally saw it clearly. The work is the
reward.

That’s what I tell baby comics now. Don’t do this because you want to be famous, or
rich, or get laid.
⁷
Sure, everybody’s gotta make a living. But don’t get into comedy because you imagine
yourself riding in a Bentley with a bevy of porn starlets and a shitload of gummy
bears. Do this because you love it, because it imbues your life with meaning, because
you have something you want to say—no,
need
to say—and you cannot live without saying it. Because in all likelihood you won’t
become famous, or you will run out of stamina way before you run out of road, or the
rejection and thanklessness of the business will grind you to a bloody smear on the
pavement, and if you don’t have your passion to drive you forward, nothing will. It’s
great you’re talented. It’s fantastic that you’re unique and there’s never been anyone
in the history of comedy quite as amazing as you. But that guy over there—who is half
as talented as you—gets up twice as early and works twice as hard.
And
he can snatch a mean weave. You’ve got work to do.

Here’s the thing: you may truly be talented. You may be a creative genius or a mad
scientist or the next Larry Page, running around with the next decade’s life-changing
technology scribbled on a cocktail napkin. You may be the third coming of Richard
Pryor,
⁸
funnier than Eddie Murphy trying to get into the hot tub when the water’s too hot.
You may, indeed, be fucking
awesome
.

No one gives a shit.

No matter how incredible you are, how naturally talented and touched by greatness,
you still have to do the work. Chris Rock still goes to dive bars and open mikes and
struggles through thirty minutes of wobbly new material to get three great new minutes.
Michael Jordan, cut from his high school team, practiced for hours and days and weeks
and months to become the player he was, and then after that, he practiced some more.
At his height, Tiger Woods was on the range drilling for hours every single day.
⁹
Talent is not enough. It’s not even close. Hard work is far more valuable than talent.
The world is littered with brilliant, talented, lazy nobodies. Almost the entire workforce
of Starbucks is populated by a bunch of geniuses that “nobody gets, man.” If you have
talent and you don’t have the stones to get up every day and perfect that talent,
accept criticism, look at yourself honestly, suck on the hard lozenge of failure,
and try to constantly and consistently improve, well then, you don’t have shit.