Self-Inflicted Wounds: Heartwarming Tales of Epic Humiliation (24 page)

I realized I would have to do something before I slowly dissolved into a puddle of
sweat like the Wicked Witch of the West. I wasn’t about to abandon standup, but standup
seemed to be pretty set on abandoning me. I would have to make some kind of fundamental
change or watch everything I loved go flying out the window, or into the hamper, so
to speak.

Finally, after one particularly punishing night of sweating it out on stage, both
physically and psychologically, rivulets of liquid slithering uncomfortably down the
sides of my rib cage and into the sodden waistband of my jeans, taking all hope with
them, I realized this shit wasn’t working, and it wasn’t likely to magically start
working again any time in the near future. I needed to do something massive. Something
radical.

I had to destroy everything.
⁸

I would have to throw out my whole set—every joke I had ever written, honed, and performed
for the past six years, essentially my entire career—and start from scratch.

This initiated an entirely new and wholly more startling series of flop sweats that
graduated from merely tragic to grandly operatic in nature. I was
terrified
.

In almost every job, you build on past successes. You learn, you grow, you fail and
succeed, and you take what you have learned and apply it to your work going forward.
But in comedy, you are only as good as your last set, and if your material isn’t working
anymore, you are right back at square one. You can’t polish off the old turds and
give them new coats of gold. You’ve got to come up with a whole pile of brand-new
turds. It’s the only way.

I set about building an entirely new set. For a while I tried to have someone else
do some writing for me, because I was so confused and unsure of myself that I figured
having someone else write jokes for me couldn’t hurt me any more than I was already
hurting myself. But what I quickly realized was that delivering someone else’s jokes
and pretending they were my own felt like just that: pretending. I already felt unsure
on stage and trying to find myself within someone else’s words felt foreign and odd.
Plus, I wasn’t any funnier with someone else’s jokes than I had been with my own.
If I was going to suck, I might as well suck on my own terms.

I threw that set out and started again.

This was painful. I cannot overstate how painful this was. It wasn’t like I had lived
through a natural disaster or lost a loved one, but it really sucked. The thing I
loved, that I had been good at, all of a sudden I wasn’t good at anymore. I felt like
Michael Jordan during his MLB days—everything I had known or believed about myself
was suddenly gone and I had to start over with the fundamentals, something I had never
bothered to learn in the first place, because I had just started doing standup half-cocked,
chock-full of enthusiasm but short on technique.

So I started over from scratch. I wrote, and wrote, and wrote some more, performed
what I had written, threw most of it out, and started again. And again. I did beginner’s
nights and open mikes, late-night lineups and coffeehouse shows on Sunday afternoons
where people were too hungover or full of gas-inducing soy milk to laugh, late night
bar shows when people were too busy drowning in lite beer and crushing despair to
laugh. I trained like Rocky for a prizefight, minus the raw eggs and slightly pervy
sweatsuit. And I tried, as best I could, to be optimistic and open-minded, to trust
my instincts, listen to my heart, and relearn what I thought I already knew.

It didn’t go well at the beginning. I was paralyzed by fear and insecurity, not a
healthy mental state to be in while yelling at a bunch of drunken bikers in a dive
bar about interracial marriage and how Abercrombie and Fitch stores smell like sex
with a college freshman. When things worked, I was relieved, but I didn’t always know
why
they worked. And when things went poorly, it reinforced every negative suspicion
I ever had about the world and myself, which was that I should have been a lawyer
like my parents wanted, that there was no such thing as Santa Claus, and that a cute
golden retriever would just as soon shit on you as lick your face. My very faith was
tested.

But I was determined to do the thing I loved, no matter how much, at that particular
moment, I hated doing it.

And then, slowly, things started to get better. I started to have good sets again,
and then awesome ones, and finally, I started to kill. Even the loud obnoxious open
mikes in the back of karaoke pool halls started to go well. Even better, I stopped
dreading getting onstage, and started to feel eager to do it again. Excited about
a new concept, or a new bit, new punchlines, new ways of saying something I felt confident
would turn a joke from just okay to good, or from good to great. And with all of this
returned my confidence. I again embraced the idea that I might not be the best comedian
in the world, but I was damn good at this, and, even more importantly, it was something
I enjoyed, and so if nothing else I would get up there and grin my ass off, be happy
when people laughed, and when they didn’t laugh, write them off as a bunch of dim-witted
idiots with poor taste.

That was almost a decade ago. Since then I have done a lot of comedy performances,
in clubs, and concert halls, and late-night shows, and cable programs. I have written
two books, and a bunch of articles—some good, some just okay. I have produced a comedy
special, which quite a few people claim to like, and some others think isn’t funny
at all. And I have reached a place where I love what I do, and I put my heart into
it, and I am pretty confident that I do it well, and that no one else does it quite
like me.

It took twenty long years and a lot of blood, sweat, and tears to get here,
⁹
but I can finally say that I don’t just act as if I am a comedian. I am one.

Along the way I realized that to be really good at something, to truly excel, you
have to love it even when it doesn’t love you. You have to be prepared to suck at
it, and get good, and then suck again, and that may go on for a very long time, until
you want to punch the thing you love in the face and get a job at Home Depot.

But if you really want something, you don’t punch it in the face. You stick with it
until you stop wanting to hit it and start wanting to hug it, and then kiss it, and
finally make sweet, sweet love to it that will leave you both in a shivering puddle
of tears.
¹⁰

Until then, it’s absolutely fine to fake it ’till you make it. Jump in with both feet.
“Act as if.” Just remember you’ve got to actually put in the hours, and do the real,
hard work of “
becoming
as if.”

Because eventually you will have to put your money, or your jokes, where your mouth
is.

( 28 )

The Times I Spit on Someone from the Stage While Doing Standup

“Forgetting about our mistakes and our wounds isn’t enough to make them disappear.”
—
A
I
Y
AZAWA

“Let’s both pretend this never happened.”
—
A
ISHA
T
YLER

I have
done this so many times it does not even warrant counting; literally more times than
there are stars in the infinite galactic heavens. I have done this Sagans of times.

I have shared DNA with so many drunken strangers that if the government wanted to
spread some kind of engineered virus aimed at thinning the world’s population so that
they would be easier to subdue and control, I would be a perfect candidate for patient
zero. I run around onstage like a rabid ferret, gesticulate as if I am trying to catch
candy as it cascades from an imaginary piñata, and talk faster than a third grader
off their Adderall. I could, without trying, without even looking in your direction,
spit directly into your mouth as you are laughing at a joke.
¹
This is not a skill I am proud of. But it is a skill, nonetheless.

People do one of two things when they are talking and realize they have spit on another
person midsentence. They ignore it completely, even though they know they spit and
the other person knows they spit and they know the other person knows they spit; or,
they make a grand gesture of saying, “Oh my god! I spit on you! I am disgusting! I
am also perfectly healthy and impeccably meticulous, so you cannot be catching anything
at all from me but my delicate fastidiousness and dedication to personal hygiene!”
This, of course, convinces no one, but at least the spitter is off the hook and hasn’t
completely ignored an occurrence that both parties are totally aware just happened,
and are a little grossed out by.

When you are on stage, you are in a position of power. You are above everyone, illuminated
by spotlight, wielding your microphone like a broadsword and striding the stage like
Eddard Stark about to take a man’s head for fleeing the Wall. Showing weakness is
the furthest thing from your mind, and in truth, would be a fatal mistake. You cannot
show weakness, and you cannot bring the show to a halt so that you can apologize to
a guy in the front row for hitting him in the face with bodily fluids. This would
be exposing a chink in your armor that anyone, be they affectionate heckler or drunken
asshole, could fully and fatally exploit. We cannot have that. People paid money to
see you. The show must go on. There are many, many dick jokes left to tell.

When you play the game of microphones, you win or you die.

So you must always go for option number one, which is that not only will I
not
acknowledge that I spit on you, but I will act so oblivious to the possibility that
I might have spit on you as to convince you, through my bright and smiling certitude,
that it never actually happened. You will immediately cast about for the source of
this new-landed moisture, checking first your table mates, then the ceiling sprinklers
and your beer glass, and finally your own mouth, with a variety of Zapruder-like theories
of how you might have been caught in the face with a droplet of watery substance.
And then you will refocus on the show, and why you came, which is to laugh, and you
will move on.

In comedy, as in life, fun must be had, my friend. Don’t let a little spit derail
you.

( 29 )

The Time I Broke My Arm at Sundance, and the Ensuing Meltdown

“[N]obody likes having salt rubbed into their wounds, even if it is the salt of the
earth.”
—
R
EBECCA
W
EST

“
If I can’t have fun, damn it, no one can!”
—
A
ISHA
T
YLER

I will
not do what you tell me to.

In fact, if you tell me not to do something, I will do exactly what you tell me not
to do, even though I may have agreed, audibly and in your presence, not to do it.

For example, you may tell me not to eat the birthday cake. When it is gone, I will
tell you I did not eat it. Technically, that would be true. Instead, I will have nibbled
at it delicately and for an extended period, until it was no more.

You may tell me, after oral surgery, not to eat any solid food for twenty-four hours.
I will then immediately order a double cheeseburger with bacon and spend the next
four days scrubbing blood out of my pillowcases after chewing up the inside of my
mouth.
¹

You may warn me not to put my finger into that highly charged light socket. Of course,
that is exactly where you will find me, minutes later, right before I pass out and
require resuscitation.

Sometimes I do not even do this consciously. I may not even
want
to do the thing you told me not to do. I may actually want to follow your heartfelt
and well-intentioned instructions. I may just not be able to. I am powerfully and
inexorably—often subconsciously—drawn to do the thing that I should absolutely avoid.
I have always been this way.

It is a disease. Seriously. It is some kind of sickness.

It’s not that I’m not a team player, or can’t follow instructions, or that I don’t
want things to go smoothly, or safely, or stay out of the hospital. It’s just that
somehow, whatever I am supposed to stay away from, my brain will keep drawing me toward,
again and again, like a mental event horizon, the pull of which I cannot escape. I
do not do these things by choice. They just happen. I swear.

I am loyal. I am kind. I want nothing but the best for you and your family. But please
do not leave a donut in front of me and say you’ll be right back. That donut and me
will be long gone. While I am highly trustworthy, I am not a freaking statue.

When I was a kid, this manifested itself in many ways. If you told me I wasn’t athletic,
I was on three teams by the next afternoon.
²
If you told me I wasn’t good at science, I would have signed up for physics classes
at the local college by Friday, even though I was only halfway through sophomore algebra
in high school. And if you told me I didn’t know Kung Fu, I would have spent the weekend
trying to break a board with my hand, and showed up at school on Monday with a very,
very bruised hand and a very splintery, but unbroken, piece of wood.

The most dramatic occurrence of my young life came when I got into Dartmouth and decided
to attend, and my high school counselor told me not to go there because it was too
far from home and too different from what I knew, and that I would be martyring my
college career.

I sent in my intent to enroll form that same day.

I really don’t like being told what to do. And even less being told what I am
able
to do.