How To Not Be a Stand-Up Comic
I originally wrote this for Richmond Magazine’s April 2006 issue, but the editor didn’t see it in her inbox, so it never ran.
After watching me send a 5-iron straight down the driving range fairway, a golf instructor once took the Nicklaus out of my swagger by saying there are three kinds of good in golf: driving range good, golf course good and tournament good.
Turns out I’m none of those three kinds of good at golf, but that’s not my field of expertise. I don’t bring the Big Dog; I bring the big laughs. But the rule still applies. When it comes to comedy, there are three kinds of funny: hanging with your friends funny; open-mic funny; and professional funny.
Since high school, I have been "hanging with your friends funny." Back then the bar was low. High comedy was achieved through fart jokes soaked in accelerants of late-night fast food or Miller Ponys.
In college the bar got a little higher. I was "Grand Jester" in my fraternity, responsible for bringing actual jokes to the weekly meeting, although my dating life, particularly once I’d made the ill-fated decision to become “Super Hokie,” provided plenty of fodder for laughter/ridicule as well.
Why Top of the Stairs would give four yahoos and Jordan Brady a stage during prime-time Friday night drinking I”ll never know.
I also started trying stand-up comedy at the student union or Greek talent shows. Another student-comic (like a student-athlete except not at all) Jordan Brady* organized a Friday Night Live show with him, me, Kevin Moss** and a couple other SCs at Top of the Stairs. I recall it going well enough, but all this was still glorified "hanging with your friends funny", which provided the illusion of open-mic funny, but…
When I tried to move up to the next level after college, I found out that being funny on stage is a whole different kettle of horses.
After graduation, I took a part-time job in a bar to tide me for the couple months I figured it would take to get established as a professional stand-up comic. Side trip: this was no ordinary bar job. I worked in the French Quarter East, a room where patrons could play blackjack. And I was a professionally trained blackjack dealer.
Of course, Richmond being Richmond (even more so back then), gambling was verboten (I’ll save my state lottery rant for another day, when my smoked-glass house isn’t quite so fragile). So a small set of regulars came in every night to drink and smoke (it was 1985, after all) and “gamble” using pretend money, which was sort of like Monopoly money except in far less demand. This pretend money was redeemable for nothing. Zero. You couldn’t exchange it for drinks or cash or prizes or a cup of coffee… nothing. Chuck E. Cheese tickets are more valuable. So people went home every night with hundreds of “dollars” of “winnings.” Over the past few years, dozens of middle-aged people in RVA have looked up from going through their dead parents’ shit and said, “What the hell is all this French Quarter East money?”
We blackjack dealers made minimum wage, so our real income came from the patrons who were playing blackjack. Because… they would tip us real money… to help them cheat… to win fake money. The business model was iron-clad.
Anyway, while I slung cards for my meals, I began working talent shows in local joints like the late, pretty-good Red River Rib Company and performing at Tuesday open-mics down at Matt's (the city's pioneer comedy club) in Shockoe Slip. Both venues offered unique challenges.
For example, while Matt’s open-mic night audiences were there to hear jokes, the Red River Rib talent show audiences came out for entirely different reasons.
Some were there for the two-for-one happy hour, which started at 5 p.m. By the 8 p.m. show time, the audience wasn't as much hostile as just plain hammered. The rest of the crowd had come in to support their buddy in the contest, usually the guy who played guitar and sang "Everybody Must Get Stoned" and "Why Don't We Get Drunk and Screw." As you can imagine, the audience-reaction scores for these acts were tough to beat.
Meanwhile down at Matt's, the audience of regulars showed up almost every week. About the third time I performed the same set for essentially the same audience, I noticed the laughs dropping off alarmingly.
Turns out, not only did I have to write new jokes constantly but, unlike my friends, the audiences at this next level were not all that worried about my self-esteem.
I worked on new material, but it didn't come easy. Like a novelist's first book, my first set of jokes and stories were the ones I'd been honing my whole life. Problem is, after the audience has heard your lifetime's worth of jokes, you have to produce another lifetime's worth before next week’s show.
While I was slugging it out down in Matt’s basement, I got the big break that instead broke my comedy camel’s back. I somehow persuaded the owners of the French Quarter East to name me the "house comedian." I would do two shows a night on weekends for $60 a night.
I was now a “professional comedian” (albeit entry-level), and the standard was higher than ever. Too high.
The first night, I struggled through my best stuff, getting little more than a few pained chuckles from the audience, who sat with their arms crossed or, in the case of my friends who came out in support, stared at their shoes, too embarrassed to make eye contact. After weakly joking through a flop sweat about my lack of comedic ability, I paused for a couple of beats, swaying and obviously groping for what to do next.
"Bill Cosby," came a voice from the audience.
"What?" I asked.
"Bill Cosby," the guy in the audience repeated. "Do some Bill Cosby."
This is not equivalent to someone yelling "Freebird" at a house band. It's more akin to your date saying, "You aren't very good. Can you do that the way they do in the movies?"
Not only that, doing another comic’s material is no more being a comedian than playing air-guitar is being a musician.
But what could I do? With 20 minutes left in the 30-minute show, I mangled some Bill Cosby (still a respected name at the time), sick to my stomach but killing enough time to stumble off-stage, leaving my dignity and stand-up aspirations behind, next to the stool and the mic.
I was done with stand up comedy, and it was done with me.
Over the next couple decades, I found new and rewarding directions in life (and went back to simply being "hanging out with your friends funny").
Still, I always toyed with the idea of taking another shot. So when Q-94 and the Richmond Funny Bone sponsored a "Last Comedian Standing" competition a few years ago, I jumped back in.
I qualified for the contest by telling a funny story about my kids on the air (you know the one: the time I let four-year-old Daniel use a port-a-potty by himself and he mistook the urinal and the cake inside for the sink and the soap). That got me into the field of 40 other comics – a few budding professionals and promising amateurs and a whole bunch of "hanging with your friends funny" types.
Using nearly two decades worth of new material, I made the finals with nine others. And with friends in the audience, some who’d been there during my first and last professional show 19 years earlier, I did ten enjoyable minutes, never once resorting to Bill Cosby, and finished fifth. It was a very satisfying new end cap (at least to this point?) to my stand-up comedy story, and I eventually parleyed my 19 years of new material into a failed motivational speaking career (more on that some other time).
While I never made The Show, I also never regretted my run at comedy fame, for reasons that Mark Twain may have said best: "Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things that you didn't do than by the ones you did do. So throw off the bowlines. Sail away from the safe harbor. Catch the trade winds in your sails. Explore. Dream. Discover."
*Jordan went on to be a successful stand up and then an actor, television and film writer and director, and produced the iconic documentary about stand up, I Am Comic.
**Kevin, a gentle mensch of a man, even then, recently passed away. Rest in peace, buddy.