How To Be Less Angry, More Sad, and a Marginal Comic
I became something like a comic in the summer of 2010. The day after my sophomore year concluded I moved into the top floor of a seven-story apartment complex with a Tudor façade and a roach colony in its walls. There were bedbugs living in the carpet, though I didnât know that yet, and the screen on a large window next to my futon was so chewed up that each night was a choice between baking due to the lack of ventilation and transforming my studio into a bugtopia. The shower ran only cold water for the first four months. Iâm positive the apelike man two doors down was domestically abusing his girlfriend. I was the sort of unhappy people donât want to be around and was thankful to have a space of my own.
 Itâs perhaps strange for me to foreground heat during a period of time I was a low-rent Baumbachian cad, but heat as vigorous and persistent as the kind that afflicts Chicago in summer has a way of foregrounding itself. Itâs a contaminant that lives in your armpits and ass, and youâre never completely unaware of it. I spent a lot of hungover mornings fantasizing about death. I conceived of eternal nothingness as like air conditioning, I guess.
 Most things I did that summer were in service of psychically escaping the furnace I was living in. I put a lot of effort into wasting time. Itâs easy to accomplish very little and subsist on a diet of English muffins and vodka when heat exhaustion occupies the place where guilt should be. I encased myself each day in a cocoon of distracting activity[1]. Days were rendered endurable with the aid of masturbation, afternoon-devouring videogames, mountains of Datpiff detritus, Netflix schlock, Twitter, a robust RSS feed, and trips to clean, cool supermarkets. The days gave way to slightly-less-hot nights that I spent listening to Marc Maronâs WTF podcast. At night I felt better.
 Maronâs exceedingly narcissistic interviews with comediansâdemi-heroes like Bob Odenkirk and vaguely familiar somebodies like Brendon Burnsâcalmed me like nothing else did. My favorite episodes were the ones that unfolded like stories, in part because their rhythms were predictable and I became habituated to them, but also because the stories sounded like ones I could live. Listening to comedians talk about their personal and professional struggles felt like running my fingers over my own bones. A lot of people Maron interviewed were struggling with a social or mental disorder. I thought at the time that I was bi-polar, but it turned out I was just being an asshole. Regardless I was anxious, angry, and had a sense of humor. I thought I could be good at standup comedy. I began to write jokes in a notebook and recited them while pacing around my apartment.
 It was useful to have a dream. I was scrubbing piss out of my futon twice a week. It probably goes without saying that I was drinking a lot in the days that listening to a podcast with a misfit host and damaged guests was the only activity I actively enjoyed. The nights were too humid, I had rationalized, for me to fall asleep before four AM without a few screwdrivers. I was weathering the summer. This logic would have proved a lot less facile had I not been drinking heavily through the past fall, winter, and spring.
 Drinking to forget is a quaint concept found only in westerns and Drake records until you realize youâve been doing it prodigiously.
 I was drinking to meliorate my grief over the death of a girl with whom I had shared some intimate moments. At least thatâs what I was doing for a time, maybe three months. Then the drinking itself became a problem, and I was like an axel-less wheel tumbling down a long slope, not fully remembering or caring what had set me in motion in the first place.
 In the early morning, when the heat woke me and nausea sat in my gut like a radioactive football, I felt dumb. I cussed out friends that summer, told some embarrassing things to strangers, and projectile vomited over back porches. I lost control and was ashamed of myself. The best way to squelch my shame was to drink in solitude, where my shame was private. Upon reflection, I can conclude that alcohol was an excellent forgetting mechanism. Anguish came from so many directions that I hardly knew what the fuck was wrong with me anymore.
 What pushed the proverbial wheel off the hilltop was that the girl I was sleeping and commiserating with died of a cocaine overdose. One night, she was insufferably sad, and my patience with her was waning. I stepped into the kitchen to make a grilled cheese. When I returned to the living room, she was facedown on the coffee table. I placed a few fingers beneath her chin and lifted her head. Two dime-sized, amorphous speckles of blood interrupted the white-gray line on the table. I picked her up and laid her on the floor before remembering I didnât know CPR. I screamed at her corpse in the ambulance.
 We spent the majority of our time together getting faded and assailing one another with our narcissism like two riptides having a conversation, which, perhaps through sheer friction, would occasionally breed soul-rending moments of insight and empathy. I cared for her, though Iâm not sure she knew.
 After a week of disconsolatenessâalone, drunk, not answering my phoneâ following her death, I tried to will myself toward resolution. I was exhausted and wanted friends to stop worrying about me. I tried to return to some familiar stasis and repeatedly failed. By that summer, I felt an urgent need to talk about the whole ordeal, but not in a language that made sense to people I knew.[2] As I aggravated friends and acquaintances, I sank further into a state of alienation.
 If youâre feeling misunderstood or irredeemable, comics are a crowd that make sense to you. Many of them have persevered through a time when they felt on an emotional ice floe and, consciously or otherwise, paddled the motherfucker into a space where all they could see was water.
 One night, drunk and nonsensically angry, I punched my wall and a pack of four roaches fell from where the wall met the ceiling like a big wet drop from an icicle onto pavement. All I could see was water.
 My first night at an open mic, I was listening to Wiz Khalifaâs inextinguishably positive Kush & OJ on a southbound el train, hoping Khalifaâs hazy confidence would lend me some composure as I prepared to perform a joke about how much I hate children. I carried in my messenger bag nearly a notebook full of jokes and fragmented ideas I thought could be funny. This was early fall. I had decided in June that I wanted to do standup, that I could be good at it. The notion of doing standup and indeed being good at it was enough to console me; I felt no need to pursue it and find my assumptions inaccurate. Besides, I had filled a notebook with jokes. I was essentially a comedian already. By that early fall evening, I felt like enough of a fraud to actually do the thing I thought about nearly every day, in a bar that smelled like the inside of a rancid hot dog split open.
 The performance went about as well as it could have. It was not a religious experience, but I felt something hard inside me begin to erode. The joke worked fine, if clumsily. I had been so concerned with forgetting my lines that I had recited them too many times while pacing around my apartment. It sounded lifeless and overwritten. I switched the next morning from writing out my jokes in their entirety to bullet-pointing main ideas, then talking to myself to get the jokeâs language sorted out, so the ideas were attached more organically through something that sounded like speech, not writing. I now talk to myself pretty incessantly when Iâm alone, an idiosyncrasy that garners bemused looks from my cat.
 That evening also introduced me to the hilariously awful world of open mic comedy. Attending an open mic is like watching a tee ball game if all the tykes were drunks. Once in a while an established comic will breeze through to work on new material, but for the most part it is woeful incompetence interspersed with rare flickers of not-incompetence. By the fourth five-minute set, youâre convinced the overenthusiastic emcee is mocking the performers. That was terrific! It was the opposite of that, and if one more person uses âcancerâ or âHitlerâ, Iâm going to start carving Finnegans Wake into my arm. And then the next guy makes a joke about his dog getting AIDS, and you just have to sit there and take it.[3]
 Open mics are incredibly useful, even if they are, in practice, factories of unfunnyness and desperation. That theyâre unpleasant is sort of the point. Open mics evoke the kind of dread one experiences while standing at the foot of an unwieldy ladder, and they consist of people trying to be funny on stage while trying simultaneously to be themselves. Both of those things are difficult in their own right, so things get uncomfortable rather quickly. A lot of funny jokes depend on a degree of artifice, and thereâs a slickness to them thatâs not completely humanâitâs called an âactâ for a reasonâbut when a joke fails, itâs a sight to behold. Thereâs nothing more human than embarrassment and panic and sweating yourself translucent. Itâs also incredibly tedious to watch for two hours.
 On a good night, one will see a handful of possibly talented new standups filtering their words through a persona thatâs not their own. They treat themselves like a Patton Oswalt or Natasha Leggero puppet. Learning how to stand on a stage and get laughs takes inspiration and an understanding of language, which are to some degree innate, but itâs also about mouthfeel and rhythm, which is something most people learn through watching other standups. You have to learn how to talk all over again. As such, the best aspirant comics tend to have potentially incisive material, but sound like someone else. I still struggle with this. At times, Iâll talk through a joke in my apartment or an open mic and hear echoes of Kyle Kinane or Dan Telfer. I constantly have to rephrase and rework the rhythms of my material as I figure out what my voice sounds like.
 That some open mics are called âworkout roomsâ is apt. Have you ever jumped on a machine at the gym and realized you have little clue how to use it? The puzzling metallic apparatus thatâs making you look like a jackass is more or less analogous to every new joke a comedian brings to the stage. Half-formed material invites embarrassment. I remember debuting a joke that required me to do some illustrative hand gestures, and mid-sentence, realizing I lack the ability to mime. I was essentially performing free jazz with my arms. My mind broke like a poached egg in water, and the joke ended with an apology.
 You might have heard comics describe standup as therapeutic. I feel this way too, but if standup is dredging up and refining mind sewageâthe mundane, the angry, the absurdâin service of creating a performance that an audience can enjoy, then itâs a strange kind of therapy. Thereâs a reason most people prefer to conduct their therapy behind closed doors with a professional. Introspection is uncomfortable work, and to then have to share your introspective findings with a group of strangers adds an extra layer of anxiety.
 Yet standup comedy is my favorite thing to do. I like working on it, even when itâs hard, which is the most one can hope for in a vocation. I think I have affection for it because the creative process of trying to find a way to spin my thoughts into something funny allows me to interface with my inner monologue in a different way. It gives me a new question to ask of things. And âWhatâs funny about this?â is a pretty harmless question. It renders harrowing experiences and feelings of self-loathing and disappointment less scary.
 My comedy âcareerâ has been markedly unsuccessful, by the way, hampered by periods of inactivity brought on by scheduling conflicts, laziness, and stage fright. I went on a very brief tour of the Midwest last summer, performing at bookstores and dives, and felt the acute pangs of homesickness one feels when theyâre stranded in a small town that looks like it was scraped out of a can. Off the train home, I literally ran to my apartmentâthis one is nicer, with hardwood floors and no insects except for the odd silverfishâwhich I greeted like a toddler greets his motherâs calf. I then didnât touch a mic for three months.
 Iâm in the midst of another period of inactivity. I never stop working on jokes by myself, but getting to the stage is sometimes difficult. Job searches, a nascent writing career, and an endlessly understanding girlfriend consume most of my time. At least thatâs how Iâm rationalizing it. Itâs more that Iâm struggling againâthe kind of post-collegiate freakout most people have, probablyâexcept this time Iâm more aware of my unhappiness and its roots than I was a couple summers ago. The material generated from this new bout of discontent is exceedingly personal. I have been afraid of taking to the stage with such emotionally naked stuff. I donât worry too much when dick jokes fall flat, but shining a floodlight on the cobwebbed corners of my id is a nervier endeavor.
 Last month, I slipped into an open mic to perform some new material. I have, much like the first time I performed, accumulated what might be an hour and a half of jokes that have never seen the stage, most of which wonât work, some of which will be worked and reworked like bread dough until they congeal into things that have a voice and are funny. I have told myself Iâm recommitting, not solely because I need to treat standup comedy like a vocation if itâs ever going to be one, but because when I stop, I feel sick and cloistered. Iâm like a person who doesnât understand that after the flu symptoms relent, I still have four daysâ worth of antibiotics to swallow.
 But standup comedy is one of the few artforms you can just waltz into a bar and do. It really is as easy as swallowing a pill. I still get a nervous kick out of the fact that there are places you can go where someone will hand you a microphone and an audience and let you do whatever you want for five minutes. Itâs something I appreciate, but should appreciate more.
 I like my new jokes more than my old jokes, even if some of the old jokes worked and these new ones, like a crib-sprung infant, need to be constantly rerouted so they donât fall down a set of stairs and die. If my old material was about confusion, this newer stuff is about how unsettling clarity can be as it slowly makes visible what Iâve been fearing in abstract for years.
 In a lot of ways, Iâm less functional than I was a couple of years ago. Like the worst superhero ever, Iâve gained the ability to embrace sadness and stay at home with the lights off once in a while. Itâs an acknowledgment of what I canât handle, which is sometimes just being outside among strangers. A couple of summers ago, I thought I could contain the pain I was experiencing between my apartmentâs walls. Iâm down for the odd whiskey-breathed three AM commiseration session, but no one wants to be a perpetual downer. I tried to be charming and funny at parties, but the pain often leaked out in the form of anger and manic despondency, which was exhilarating at the timeâyouâre never so alive as when youâre caterwaulingâbut collapsed when I woke up in the morning with the taste of vomit in my mouth, scrolling through my phone and trying to take inventory of hours I didnât remember. I still have friends and acquaintances with whom I have an uneasy relationship. Did I steal from you? Was it your cousin that I screamed at? Itâs a strange and horrible thing to not know what your body did last night but to be responsible for it.
 Hereâs the part where I deadpan that you can see this is all very hilarious. When it was happening to me (and I was happening to the people around me), I was laughing a lotâthe sort of hysterical laughter that comes from your gut like a belch when everything is fucked. Oblivion sounds like being stabbed and tickled at the same time. But thereâs no laughter more pure than when itâs all you have left, and Iâm trying now, with some hindsight and distance, to recreate it. Iâm trying to make comedy out of what I know best, which are the worst parts of me.
[1] None of these activities included âhaving a jobâ except for a week in June I effectively babysat a group of teenagers at a Hilton while their parents attended some sort of African-American business leaders conference. That paid really well, and I decided, if I spent my earnings carefully, I could live off them for the remainder of the summer.
[2] I remember recounting a brief version of the episode to a girl I had known for about a week and capping it with ââŚand then she just fucking died!â before cackling into my drink. I was very fun to hang out with.
[3] Shout-out to the dude who once tagged a lazy shock humor joke with âIS LORNE MICHAELS HERE???â though. That was hilarious.
