The thing about stand-ups is you can't really get good unless you're failing in front of a large number of people. That makes stand-up comedy unique: you need a tremendous amount of reserve within you to take the rejection from the audience, and without it, you can't do anything.
I got a small Mead notebook and I wrote “The Golden Bits” on the front. I was thinking of something Steve Martin had said in a show recorded for one his albums, Comedy Is Not Pretty, I think it was, an album I had played endlessly as a kid. One of his jokes didn't go over, and Steve threw a pretend onstage tantrum, and said, petulantly: "These were the golden bits we wanted bad." I always loved that part of the record. Anyway, over the next few days, I filled twelve or fifteen pages with the jokes and routines that had been running through my head.
At the time I was a graduate student in English at the University of Texas. I was reading Coleridge and Henry Louis Gates, studying linguistics, taking part in writing workshops, and grading papers as a teaching assistant for big undergraduate lecture classes. Away from campus, I walked through the Austin heat with a portable tape recorder in hand, saying my golden bits out loud, trying to burn every word into my brain.
This hadn't come out of nowhere. Not quite. In my mind I had been a comic for a long time. In fifth grade, our homeroom teacher informed us he didn't have time to help us put on a class play that year, so I wrote one with two classmates. It was our own version of a "Welcome Back, Kotter" episode, and it got huge laughs when we put it on for the school, especially the part where the principal shot the Sweat Hogs with a fire extinguisher. Through high school I did comic announcements during the school's "morning meeting" period. These were pretty much the highlight of my time there. And in college one night I stopped pretending to be a tortured loner, which was my pose for a while, and took a bicycle tire to an open mike night. I didn't tell anybody what I was doing. I didn't rehearse. I just signed up, went onstage, and I banged on the spokes with a spoon while singing my version of Beethoven's Fifth, with words that told the story of Beethoven's life. I followed that by singing stupid lyrics to The Andy Griffith Show theme song. It went over nicely. As college went on, I played comic parts in two plays and wrote a one-act comedy that got laughs.
So there I was in the Austin heat, trying to pick up where I had left off, writing material in the cracks of my grad student life. Late one night, I got in my car, a Chevrolet Berretta, and drove to the Laff Stop, a strip-mall comedy club, and signed in. I was tenth, twelfth, maybe fifteenth on line. It was well past midnight by the time I went on. The guy in front of me did a crude "Star Trek" bit, complete with William Shatner imitation. I went to the microphone and said my words. I got scattered laughs from the 40 or so people in the seats. And then I drove home, feeling not so great about it. This was not like school, where you had a built-in audience of people who were rooting for you.
I made it through one more time at the Laff Stop before declaring myself ready to enter the annual “Funniest Person in Austin” contest. You had to keep winning your night to stay in it. Round one took place at the Velveeta Room, a club on boozy Sixth Street, which is peopled with drunk frat guys, drunk sorority girls, and redneck-bohemian Austin types. The emcee was a big Texas girl with a big voice. She was a pro who knew how to dominate a room. The performer in front of me was a guy with long hair. I still remember one of his bits, which was pretty good. He said he couldn't understand why marijuana was against the law while tequila was perfectly legal. He imitated someone high on pot (inspecting potato chips at a convenience store) and then someone drunk on tequila (robbing same convenience store). He did well and got real applause at the end. Then it was my turn. The emcee called me to the stage. It was weird, to hear my name come out of a speaker. From the tiny riser I looked at the people seated at the tables. There was nothing for me to do but get started.
“My girlfriend broke up with me for the stupidest reason." Pause. "She said it was because my hands always smelled like roast beef." Pause. "Which was sad, because I had worked so hard to get the pork smell out.”
A couple laughs. Then I started doing a routine I hadn’t tried at the Laff Stop, something I called “the sports dance.” I won’t go into detail but the basic idea was this: I put on a cheesy Robert Palmer song, loud, and then I shouted the name of a sport into the microphone (“Golf!”), and then I did my modern-dance interpretation of it. The Velveeta Room was full that night. More than a hundred people tight together. And now everyone was staring at me with no discernible expressions on their faces. My interpretive sports dances had rendered them unable to react. It is not a good feeling, when you are in the middle of a "baseball" dance, and you can feel it failing, hard, but the music is still playing, and there is no plan B.
My head went hot. I felt an ocean of sweat sliding down my back. I hit the stop button on the portable stereo... it had been so hilarious in my mental rehearsals... and I went into my next thing, a spoken routine about a couple who decides to adopt a highway, rather than a child. (The Adopt-a-Highway thing was just getting started at the time.) It was more of a written piece than something you could really perform. A few words into it, I forgot the next line... and the one after that. Which was weird, because I had never had a problem with stage confidence in my youth. But a lot had happened since then. Things weren't breaking so easily as I had thought they might when I, at age 11, was like some junior version of Rushmore's Max Fischer ("I wrote a hit play!"). On the Austin stage, my throat closed. My body shrank. I mumbled a few more words and I stepped down. Did the walk of shame through the tables back to my seat. The emcee bounded up there and took hold of the mike. She sniffed her fingers, snorting loud, and then, making reference to my first bit, she said: “My hands smell like tuna!”
Huge laughs all around. Tuna. It had to be tuna.
When I was leaving the club, she caught my arm.
“Hey. You’ll get it. You just need to put in the time.”
At her mention of “time,” it hit me just how much time it would take for me to become any good: a year or two, at the least, of putting in two hundred nights a year. Driving home at 2 a.m., from places like the Laff Stop, feeling like crap. It seemed like a nightmare. My happy notion of show business was coming up against what it really was.
Still, I tried again after I had moved back home, to New York. (Well, Weehawken, N.J. Close enough.) There was an open-mike night at the Village Gate, in Greenwich Village, where I had seen a Lounge Lizards - They Might Be Giants double bill. By the time I went on, it was past 2 a.m. I was working as a high school English teacher at the time, and I had to be in the building at 8 a.m. Most of the people in the audience were talking as I stood at the microphone. They weren't being rude. Just normal table conversation. I felt the spotlight on my face. I couldn't make out the faces in front of me. Dark shapes. I did my "smelly hands" bit. A couple laughs from the back, maybe. I did my "imaginary friends" routine, about how I liked them, but they were starting to get on my nerves. I managed to get through the four minutes with no brain-freeze (and I did not attempt the famous sports dance). It wasn't a disaster but afterward I had a feeling of shame. What the hell had I been doing? Two in the morning. Standing there. Talking. Who did I think I was?
I had no answer. Which meant I wasn’t good enough or driven enough or desperate enough to pull it off. And I could feel it, especially the morning after -- I could feel that you have to ride out the shame. Your desire to get the things in your head out into the world, in real time, from a stage, has to be greater than any embarrassment you may feel when you can’t quite pull it off.
I quit attempting to be a comedian and then I quit being a teacher. Eventually, I became a reporter and then an editor and then a reporter again and then an editor and now I piece together a living doing both. These days I limit the comedy to publishing pieces of "humor" now and then. But my fascination with performing and performers has led me to interview a great number of people I admire, and I ended up getting into the subject of comedy shame when I spoke with Patton Oswalt (for Rolling Stone) and David Steinberg (for The New York Observer).
“The ones who remain comedians are the ones who power through it,” Oswalt told me. “The ones who don’t make it are the ones who go, ‘Wow. I guess the audience was right.’”
"But in the beginning," I said, "when you’re probably terrible, what keeps you going back to the stage?"
“I don’t know," he said. "It just happens. No one can describe it.”
"The ones who keep going, maybe they just don’t feel that embarrassment?"
“I don’t know,” he said. “I don’t know.”
"How about for you?"
“I don’t understand where it came from or why it happened," he said. "It just happens. I just got through it.”
"So how did you -- "
“It just happens.”
"But -- "
“The thing just happens.”
"And then you toughen up?"
“It just happens somehow," he said.
I left it at that. Either it was an uncomfortable subject that he didn't want to go into, or else it was just like he said. An inexplicable thing that you just have to power through almost without thought. You decide to do it and you do it. You cannot dwell on the deciding part. Dwelling allows the doubt and the stage fright to find a crack and creep into your brain. Maybe Oswalt did not want to dwell, although he was deep into a terrific career.
Even when you make it, though, it's still hard. David Steinberg was one of the great standups, but he ended up leaving the stage to focus on directing for television.
“I remember sitting somewhere in Cleveland," he told me, "and there were fifteen hundred people to see me, and I was on the front page of the entertainment section -- but I didn’t know anyone there. I used to watch all the cars. I’m in the hotel, six o’clock, everyone’s going home to their meals. It’s an empty feeling. The feeling onstage is always a kick, and it’s great, but it’s not enough to substitute your life for.”
