On Tuesday, November 4th, 2008, I did two things:
1. I watched my country elect the first black President of the United States.
2. I decided that in one week I would do my first stand-up comedy open mic, and started writing some jokes.
Seven days later, on Tuesday, November 11th, 2008, I performed my first stand-up comedy set at an open mic in Nashville, Tennessee at a bar called Spanky's. It was a weekly show where the comic who performed the "best" set of the night would win a lukewarm can of Fresca and the title of This Week's Funniest Person in Nashville. In case you're wondering: I completely ate shit and most certainly did not win a lukewarm Fresca on that first night (though I did go on to win four of them over the course of the three years I spent doing comedy in Nashville), but I did acquire a new passion. I started doing open mics every night that I could, which, at that time, was not often: there were only *three* consistent weekly open mics, with a handful of other random short-lived mics here and there. So the rate of development for a new comic was significantly lower than most other major cities in the US. (It wasn't because of a shortage of stages in Nashville; it was because virtually all of them were already being used in the name of that whole "Music City" racket.) Because of the shortage in stagetime, what a Portland comic can do in one week took me FIVE. And I'm grateful for that. I was two years in before I really figured out how to write a solid joke. I've bombed more times than I can count. I've known failure on a level that has since given me a type of confidence onstage that allows me to fear no audience. The type of confidence that in 2011 once allowed me to go up last at an open mic in Knoxville, Tennessee, at roughly 12:30AM on a Thursday, in front of four people, with six minutes of jokes about religion--and annihilate. The same type of confidence that in 2017 also once allowed me to receive a text from a producer telling me that the host was introducing me onstage even though I was still on my way to the show, resulting in me ordering my poor Lyft driver to pull over so I could jump out and literally run an entire city block at full speed towards the venue in order to make it to the stage at the exact moment that the host finished announcing my name--and went straight into my act with zero preparation whatsoever. (Oh, and that show was broadcast to an online audience of thousands on Twitch.) My point is that the extended period of time I spent under the weeping moons of failure and disappointment due to the circumstances around my humble beginnings gives me a level of appreciation for my own comedy career that I wouldn't have developed otherwise, and I'm glad for that. The struggle was real, the pain was real, the growth was real, and because of that, the work is real.
Ten years is a long time to do something. I would guess that besides basic things like driving a car or working a job, there are not very many things in life that a person voluntarily does for ten years. Especially when that thing is an artistic pursuit. And especially when that artistic pursuit is stand-up comedy, which I've come to conceptualize as an artform consisting of one-third creative writing (because you write the joke), one-third theatrical performance (because you perform the joke), and one-third jazz improvisation (because you *feel* the joke in the present moment, which can change the writing and the performing of the joke in the process). Now, I realize that that is an EXTREMELY generous description of your latest multi-layered twenty-two minute epic stool-humping bit, but sometimes you can't help but see the innocent beauty in a baby deer enthusiastically eating a pile of literal trash on the side of a major highway.
I don't often highlight the various milestones I've achieved over the last decade--trust me, I know how annoying it is to see someone bragging about how incredible they are--and I'm not going to devalue this post by listing all of those accomplishments. I will, however, mention a few of the ones that either may not be particularly well-known about me, or that are somewhat uncommon among most comedians I know:
1. I independently recorded and released two comedy albums representing 90 minutes of material by 2013.
2. I was interviewed TWICE by the same newspaper, in a state I've never lived in, about my second album (once before the recording and again before the release).
3. I've also had three separate interviews with outlets based in the UK (one by an Irish journalist, two from England).
4. I have had tweets from my Twitter account featured in articles from over a dozen media outlets as diverse as New York Magazine, Cosmopolitan, BuzzFeed, and on one still-inexplicable occasion, Perez Hilton's blog.
5. I was instrumental in the establishment of the young comedy scene in Knoxville, Tennessee, by starting up two additional weekly mics in a city that previously only had one. (Including one that was a clean-material-only mic, set up as a way for comics to increase their chances of getting paid emcee bookings at the local comedy club, because that particular club required all of their hosts in rotation to work clean.)
There have been plenty of times in the last ten years when I've thought that I haven't done enough. That I'm not as far along in my career as I should be, especially when comics who have been doing it half the time I have are already on TV or headlining clubs or [insert other milestone I haven't yet reached here]. That I haven't even actually done anything notable, and I'm just deluding myself in order to keep from giving up a dream I've had since I was 12. That I'm just not funny in the first place. That I'm not interesting. That I'm not liked. That I'm not respected. That I don't fit in with the "club" scene. That I don't fit in with the "alt" scene. That I don't fit in anywhere. That I'm not dedicated enough because I'm not grinding it out at every single mic I can possibly fit into my life, even though I find that mostly uninspiring (how do you write jokes about life when you aren't out living it?). That the only thing I will have to show for all of my efforts over the last ten years is a bunch of fucking likes on a Facebook post.
That after ten years I still don't know what the fuck I'm doing. (Well, let's be honest: this one will always feel true.)
Honestly, some of the content in this post isn't even for you. It's for me. It's to remind myself, as I often do and sometimes don't do enough, that comedy isn't a race to see who "makes it" before anyone else; it's a journey that takes you for a customized and personalized ride that never ends, unless you choose to do so. (And even if you do decide one day to quit and give it all up, you never truly can: Steve Martin hasn't done stand-up comedy in almost 40 years and his Wikipedia page STILL refers to him as a god damn comedian.)
When I started doing comedy ten years ago, I hated the idea of being what comedians have since evolved into: content generators. Between podcasts, sketches, videos, scripts, tweets, memes, silly online stunts, and the constant promotion of all of those things, I wondered where the time was to just be a funny human with a pen writing jokes in a notebook. I got into comedy because I wanted to use it as a vehicle to figure out three questions in life: who I am, what I believe, and why I believe those things. And I wanted to figure out those three questions because realizing the answers to those questions would help me realize what it means to be human. (Yes, I'm one of those obnoxious "comedians are truth-tellers" believers, and whether exploring an idea on the page or documenting a verbal workout of a premise, I also still prefer to write all my shit out by hand on paper. Some habits you just can't quit.)
The most romanticized, idealized version of a stand-up comic to me was and still is this: a person who stands alone on a stage before an audience, microphone in hand, and, thru a distinct point-of-view extensively developed and highly refined from years of practice and confidence earned from failure, earns laughs by examining various aspects of humanity and ridiculing its shortcomings. A social critic who kills a room by embracing a unique comedic perspective to attack the status quo and holding the often-mocked "mirror up to society" by satirizing its flaws. A thinker who fucking annihilates an audience by questioning conventions and just plain making fun of them.
If that's the kind of comic I can become before the end of my career, then I will consider myself successful artistically, even if I turn out to be a failure commercially. And again, I'm aware that that's an extremely generous description of the hours of Tinder jokes you hear from the mouths of sad men in hoodies every night at open mics across America.
Now that you know these things, some of you reading this might be wondering what kind of sagelike wisdom I might be able to share from my decade in the world of stand-up comedy. The honest answer is: not much. I mean, sure, I understand how to construct a joke, and how to arrange jokes in a particular sequence in order to build an act with an arc, but those are things I learned to do by year five. If there is anything I've actually learned after ten years of this shit, it's things like these:
1. You will never truly feel like you know what you're doing. Ever.
2. The moment you start to feel like you know what you're doing, everything will fall apart just to remind you that you don't.
3. Every comedy scene around the country is exactly the motherfucking same.
4. If you spend more time caring about what everyone else around you is doing, you'll never get anything done.
5. You start over every single time you move cities, but the good thing about this is that you'll always have the hindsight of your experiences in every previous city to help you navigate your new community.
6. Speaking of moving cities, I'll paraphrase a tip from an interview my friend Ted Alexandro gave on this topic: when you move cities, spend at least six months to a year learning your way around the place besides where all the mics are. You're in a major city; there's likely a ton of cool shit to do there. Take public transit if it's available. Explore the new world around you. Become a regular at a few bars that don't have stand-up, and form a connection with the staff--they've likely lived there a lot longer than you and can recommend some awesome things to do.
7. Comedy doesn't have to permeate every single moment of your existence. Don't forget to be a fucking human. Make room in your life to actually live it beyond the prospect of what jokes you can get out of it. Sure, if you go to an art museum and see a painting that moves you to write a killer bit about it, fucking do it. But don't be afraid to see a painting that simply moves you.
8. Keep a 15min, 30min, and 45min setlist available anytime you go to a show, especially if you're not on it. (Put them in the back of your notebook, or on a digital file on your phone.) You never know when a producer might need someone to fill in a last-minute drop-out, and you'll want to be prepared to do any length of time they might ask you to do.
9. Take an afternoon with a stopwatch and individually time every single one of your jokes. Write out a master list of all your jokes. Then go one-by-one and perform them like you would onstage (pause for three seconds after each punchline to factor in estimates on laughter length). Then notate the length of the joke on your master list. This will save SO MUCH time when putting setlists together for shows, because now you can build your setlists based on timestamps instead of intensely poring over which jokes to tell and risk going short or running over.
10. Whenever you have the opportunity to pick your slot at a mic, choose one of the last five spots. Force yourself to do this for several months. You will learn how to feel really comfortable onstage REALLY fast. More importantly, you'll learn how to feel really comfortable with silence onstage, because if you're one of the last five spots, you're probably gonna get a lot of it. It'll teach you how to handle it gracefully, and it will teach you how to work harder to avoid it altogether. And if you can manage to have a good set as one of the last five performers on a mic, when it's late and the handful of audience members remaining are completely laughed out after two and a half straight hours of open mic comedy, then chances are good that the material you're working with is solid.
11. Finally, don't take any advice any comic ever offers you. None of this shit is gospel, and no one is an authority. It's all just suggestions. Every comic has a different process and if something from my process ends up becoming a part of yours, that's wonderful and I'm glad I could contribute something beneficial to your creative development, but I'm just another comic who's constantly trying to make his own stuff better too.
Comedy can be a brutal, ruthless beast. It can do a number on your psyche if you're not careful. For every comic I started with ten years ago who is still around (and there aren't many of them), there are countless dozens who fell off for one reason or another. Some died. Some got married or had children. Some changed careers. Some were victimized by monsters. Some were the monsters who victimized. Some got sober. Some got addicted to a different demon. Some found Jesus. And some simply failed one too many times to want to keep going.
I'm immensely grateful for the fact that I've managed to survive this long, and I would like to thank every single comic I've ever met in the last decade for being a small part of my experience so far. I also look forward to every single comic I meet in the next decade because they will also become a small part of my experience, just as I will inevitably become a small part of theirs. I'd like to thank every single person who has ever been in an audience at a show I performed on, including the people who've hated me, the people who've ignored me, and even the people who've heckled me: y'all make the people who dug me that much more fun to perform for. And I'd also like to thank anyone else who has ever supported me in any way over the last decade. Sometimes comedy makes you feel like you're shooting in the dark, hoping to create enough light to see where to take the next step, and knowing there are others out there who have your back means more than can sometimes be articulated.
You will no doubt meet some of the most fascinating people, like the guy who I always saw rehearsing his act in the parking lot before every single show even though he did the exact same five minutes of material every time he stepped onstage; the most infuriating people, like the guy who performed under the pseudonym "King James" and claimed he had an hour of material after doing stand-up for eight months; and the fucking weirdest people, like the guy who dressed in a full-body bear costume and performed two open mic sets under the name Bear Cosby (and who had a full crew following him and filming the entire thing).
The longer you do something like stand-up comedy, the more and more of these odd little portraits you collect. Enjoy the gallery. If you can find a reason to keep going, keep fucking going. If you do, you just might end up with an interesting story that brings things full-circle, like this one that just happened to me as I was writing this piece over the weekend: the former owner of the now-defunct comedy club that gave me my first paid weekend spots in the fall of 2010 sent me a message on Facebook to ask ME for stagetime on MY show.
I can't think of a better way to celebrate ten years of stand-up comedy than that.
1. I watched my country elect the first black President of the United States.
2. I decided that in one week I would do my first stand-up comedy open mic, and started writing some jokes.
Seven days later, on Tuesday, November 11th, 2008, I performed my first stand-up comedy set at an open mic in Nashville, Tennessee at a bar called Spanky's. It was a weekly show where the comic who performed the "best" set of the night would win a lukewarm can of Fresca and the title of This Week's Funniest Person in Nashville. In case you're wondering: I completely ate shit and most certainly did not win a lukewarm Fresca on that first night (though I did go on to win four of them over the course of the three years I spent doing comedy in Nashville), but I did acquire a new passion. I started doing open mics every night that I could, which, at that time, was not often: there were only *three* consistent weekly open mics, with a handful of other random short-lived mics here and there. So the rate of development for a new comic was significantly lower than most other major cities in the US. (It wasn't because of a shortage of stages in Nashville; it was because virtually all of them were already being used in the name of that whole "Music City" racket.) Because of the shortage in stagetime, what a Portland comic can do in one week took me FIVE. And I'm grateful for that. I was two years in before I really figured out how to write a solid joke. I've bombed more times than I can count. I've known failure on a level that has since given me a type of confidence onstage that allows me to fear no audience. The type of confidence that in 2011 once allowed me to go up last at an open mic in Knoxville, Tennessee, at roughly 12:30AM on a Thursday, in front of four people, with six minutes of jokes about religion--and annihilate. The same type of confidence that in 2017 also once allowed me to receive a text from a producer telling me that the host was introducing me onstage even though I was still on my way to the show, resulting in me ordering my poor Lyft driver to pull over so I could jump out and literally run an entire city block at full speed towards the venue in order to make it to the stage at the exact moment that the host finished announcing my name--and went straight into my act with zero preparation whatsoever. (Oh, and that show was broadcast to an online audience of thousands on Twitch.) My point is that the extended period of time I spent under the weeping moons of failure and disappointment due to the circumstances around my humble beginnings gives me a level of appreciation for my own comedy career that I wouldn't have developed otherwise, and I'm glad for that. The struggle was real, the pain was real, the growth was real, and because of that, the work is real.
Ten years is a long time to do something. I would guess that besides basic things like driving a car or working a job, there are not very many things in life that a person voluntarily does for ten years. Especially when that thing is an artistic pursuit. And especially when that artistic pursuit is stand-up comedy, which I've come to conceptualize as an artform consisting of one-third creative writing (because you write the joke), one-third theatrical performance (because you perform the joke), and one-third jazz improvisation (because you *feel* the joke in the present moment, which can change the writing and the performing of the joke in the process). Now, I realize that that is an EXTREMELY generous description of your latest multi-layered twenty-two minute epic stool-humping bit, but sometimes you can't help but see the innocent beauty in a baby deer enthusiastically eating a pile of literal trash on the side of a major highway.
I don't often highlight the various milestones I've achieved over the last decade--trust me, I know how annoying it is to see someone bragging about how incredible they are--and I'm not going to devalue this post by listing all of those accomplishments. I will, however, mention a few of the ones that either may not be particularly well-known about me, or that are somewhat uncommon among most comedians I know:
1. I independently recorded and released two comedy albums representing 90 minutes of material by 2013.
2. I was interviewed TWICE by the same newspaper, in a state I've never lived in, about my second album (once before the recording and again before the release).
3. I've also had three separate interviews with outlets based in the UK (one by an Irish journalist, two from England).
4. I have had tweets from my Twitter account featured in articles from over a dozen media outlets as diverse as New York Magazine, Cosmopolitan, BuzzFeed, and on one still-inexplicable occasion, Perez Hilton's blog.
5. I was instrumental in the establishment of the young comedy scene in Knoxville, Tennessee, by starting up two additional weekly mics in a city that previously only had one. (Including one that was a clean-material-only mic, set up as a way for comics to increase their chances of getting paid emcee bookings at the local comedy club, because that particular club required all of their hosts in rotation to work clean.)
There have been plenty of times in the last ten years when I've thought that I haven't done enough. That I'm not as far along in my career as I should be, especially when comics who have been doing it half the time I have are already on TV or headlining clubs or [insert other milestone I haven't yet reached here]. That I haven't even actually done anything notable, and I'm just deluding myself in order to keep from giving up a dream I've had since I was 12. That I'm just not funny in the first place. That I'm not interesting. That I'm not liked. That I'm not respected. That I don't fit in with the "club" scene. That I don't fit in with the "alt" scene. That I don't fit in anywhere. That I'm not dedicated enough because I'm not grinding it out at every single mic I can possibly fit into my life, even though I find that mostly uninspiring (how do you write jokes about life when you aren't out living it?). That the only thing I will have to show for all of my efforts over the last ten years is a bunch of fucking likes on a Facebook post.
That after ten years I still don't know what the fuck I'm doing. (Well, let's be honest: this one will always feel true.)
Honestly, some of the content in this post isn't even for you. It's for me. It's to remind myself, as I often do and sometimes don't do enough, that comedy isn't a race to see who "makes it" before anyone else; it's a journey that takes you for a customized and personalized ride that never ends, unless you choose to do so. (And even if you do decide one day to quit and give it all up, you never truly can: Steve Martin hasn't done stand-up comedy in almost 40 years and his Wikipedia page STILL refers to him as a god damn comedian.)
When I started doing comedy ten years ago, I hated the idea of being what comedians have since evolved into: content generators. Between podcasts, sketches, videos, scripts, tweets, memes, silly online stunts, and the constant promotion of all of those things, I wondered where the time was to just be a funny human with a pen writing jokes in a notebook. I got into comedy because I wanted to use it as a vehicle to figure out three questions in life: who I am, what I believe, and why I believe those things. And I wanted to figure out those three questions because realizing the answers to those questions would help me realize what it means to be human. (Yes, I'm one of those obnoxious "comedians are truth-tellers" believers, and whether exploring an idea on the page or documenting a verbal workout of a premise, I also still prefer to write all my shit out by hand on paper. Some habits you just can't quit.)
The most romanticized, idealized version of a stand-up comic to me was and still is this: a person who stands alone on a stage before an audience, microphone in hand, and, thru a distinct point-of-view extensively developed and highly refined from years of practice and confidence earned from failure, earns laughs by examining various aspects of humanity and ridiculing its shortcomings. A social critic who kills a room by embracing a unique comedic perspective to attack the status quo and holding the often-mocked "mirror up to society" by satirizing its flaws. A thinker who fucking annihilates an audience by questioning conventions and just plain making fun of them.
If that's the kind of comic I can become before the end of my career, then I will consider myself successful artistically, even if I turn out to be a failure commercially. And again, I'm aware that that's an extremely generous description of the hours of Tinder jokes you hear from the mouths of sad men in hoodies every night at open mics across America.
Now that you know these things, some of you reading this might be wondering what kind of sagelike wisdom I might be able to share from my decade in the world of stand-up comedy. The honest answer is: not much. I mean, sure, I understand how to construct a joke, and how to arrange jokes in a particular sequence in order to build an act with an arc, but those are things I learned to do by year five. If there is anything I've actually learned after ten years of this shit, it's things like these:
1. You will never truly feel like you know what you're doing. Ever.
2. The moment you start to feel like you know what you're doing, everything will fall apart just to remind you that you don't.
3. Every comedy scene around the country is exactly the motherfucking same.
4. If you spend more time caring about what everyone else around you is doing, you'll never get anything done.
5. You start over every single time you move cities, but the good thing about this is that you'll always have the hindsight of your experiences in every previous city to help you navigate your new community.
6. Speaking of moving cities, I'll paraphrase a tip from an interview my friend Ted Alexandro gave on this topic: when you move cities, spend at least six months to a year learning your way around the place besides where all the mics are. You're in a major city; there's likely a ton of cool shit to do there. Take public transit if it's available. Explore the new world around you. Become a regular at a few bars that don't have stand-up, and form a connection with the staff--they've likely lived there a lot longer than you and can recommend some awesome things to do.
7. Comedy doesn't have to permeate every single moment of your existence. Don't forget to be a fucking human. Make room in your life to actually live it beyond the prospect of what jokes you can get out of it. Sure, if you go to an art museum and see a painting that moves you to write a killer bit about it, fucking do it. But don't be afraid to see a painting that simply moves you.
8. Keep a 15min, 30min, and 45min setlist available anytime you go to a show, especially if you're not on it. (Put them in the back of your notebook, or on a digital file on your phone.) You never know when a producer might need someone to fill in a last-minute drop-out, and you'll want to be prepared to do any length of time they might ask you to do.
9. Take an afternoon with a stopwatch and individually time every single one of your jokes. Write out a master list of all your jokes. Then go one-by-one and perform them like you would onstage (pause for three seconds after each punchline to factor in estimates on laughter length). Then notate the length of the joke on your master list. This will save SO MUCH time when putting setlists together for shows, because now you can build your setlists based on timestamps instead of intensely poring over which jokes to tell and risk going short or running over.
10. Whenever you have the opportunity to pick your slot at a mic, choose one of the last five spots. Force yourself to do this for several months. You will learn how to feel really comfortable onstage REALLY fast. More importantly, you'll learn how to feel really comfortable with silence onstage, because if you're one of the last five spots, you're probably gonna get a lot of it. It'll teach you how to handle it gracefully, and it will teach you how to work harder to avoid it altogether. And if you can manage to have a good set as one of the last five performers on a mic, when it's late and the handful of audience members remaining are completely laughed out after two and a half straight hours of open mic comedy, then chances are good that the material you're working with is solid.
11. Finally, don't take any advice any comic ever offers you. None of this shit is gospel, and no one is an authority. It's all just suggestions. Every comic has a different process and if something from my process ends up becoming a part of yours, that's wonderful and I'm glad I could contribute something beneficial to your creative development, but I'm just another comic who's constantly trying to make his own stuff better too.
Comedy can be a brutal, ruthless beast. It can do a number on your psyche if you're not careful. For every comic I started with ten years ago who is still around (and there aren't many of them), there are countless dozens who fell off for one reason or another. Some died. Some got married or had children. Some changed careers. Some were victimized by monsters. Some were the monsters who victimized. Some got sober. Some got addicted to a different demon. Some found Jesus. And some simply failed one too many times to want to keep going.
I'm immensely grateful for the fact that I've managed to survive this long, and I would like to thank every single comic I've ever met in the last decade for being a small part of my experience so far. I also look forward to every single comic I meet in the next decade because they will also become a small part of my experience, just as I will inevitably become a small part of theirs. I'd like to thank every single person who has ever been in an audience at a show I performed on, including the people who've hated me, the people who've ignored me, and even the people who've heckled me: y'all make the people who dug me that much more fun to perform for. And I'd also like to thank anyone else who has ever supported me in any way over the last decade. Sometimes comedy makes you feel like you're shooting in the dark, hoping to create enough light to see where to take the next step, and knowing there are others out there who have your back means more than can sometimes be articulated.
You will no doubt meet some of the most fascinating people, like the guy who I always saw rehearsing his act in the parking lot before every single show even though he did the exact same five minutes of material every time he stepped onstage; the most infuriating people, like the guy who performed under the pseudonym "King James" and claimed he had an hour of material after doing stand-up for eight months; and the fucking weirdest people, like the guy who dressed in a full-body bear costume and performed two open mic sets under the name Bear Cosby (and who had a full crew following him and filming the entire thing).
The longer you do something like stand-up comedy, the more and more of these odd little portraits you collect. Enjoy the gallery. If you can find a reason to keep going, keep fucking going. If you do, you just might end up with an interesting story that brings things full-circle, like this one that just happened to me as I was writing this piece over the weekend: the former owner of the now-defunct comedy club that gave me my first paid weekend spots in the fall of 2010 sent me a message on Facebook to ask ME for stagetime on MY show.
I can't think of a better way to celebrate ten years of stand-up comedy than that.
RSS Feed
