The Year of Living Humorously: A Stand-Up Philosopher's Pilgrimage - Part VII

My wife’s Grandmother is 100 years old. She has a very weak heart, any sudden shock could be it, so every year we wrap her Christmas presents in Saran Wrap.

I wrote and edited, worked in front of the mirror, went over and over bits as I drove to and from work. It had been a long odyssey of self-doubt and reaffirmation, but I thought I was in a place to pull it off.

I should have sensed something wrong when the afternoon of the show, I finally got around to timing out my routine. I had relied on my page length calculations and did not actually figure out how long I was running. When my first set clocked in at twenty-three minutes, I realized something needed to be done. I had to cut about a third from each set. But I had segues leading from section to section and references back to earlier jokes that only made sense if the earlier jokes were still in.

I figured out where there was fat and tried not to chop out too much content, but got it down to size. Sloppy and unprofessional, I chastised myself. How could I not have done something as basic as timing out my sets? But I had rescued it and sat confidently eating and chatting with the band before the show.

Leaving the green room for a visit to the men’s room, I noticed some of the staff moving benches in from the lobby. They had run out of chairs. It was going to be an overflow crowd. I gave them a hand hauling in more benches and looked up in horror at the arrangement. It was a dance, how could I not have realized that there would be a dance floor? The distance between the stage and the first set of chairs was huge. If a single empty row of chairs was a chasm for comedy, the vast wasteland of a dance floor was a region of astronomical proportion, a black hole that would suck in my entire set. There was only one solution, I had to bring the stage to them. I needed a wireless mic to use the dance floor as the stage. I was told they didn’t have one, but the terror in my eyes led them to search.

By the time they found it, the set up was the least of my worries. I looked by the door and there they were…mom, dad, and their daughters, one about six and the other probably eight. This was a full set, forty-five minutes of jokes written for an audience I thought would be drunk college students. I ran and got a member of the planning committee with whom I had become very friendly, northeastern Jew who loved having another member of tribe around. I ran through my routines for her. Oh, she laughed, joke after joke, “That’s great, you can’t tell it.” I looked down at my book. After spending months to get a tight forty-five minutes of strong jokes, my entire routine was twelve minutes at best with only a few minutes before Showtime. I had signed the contract. I had already been paid for the show. What could I do?

The crowd was a mixture of families with young children and a lot of senior citizens. I was in the South. I am a secular Jew. These were very much not my people. I was on their turf and was expected to entertain them. I started to feel the old fear resurface. If ever there was an appropriate time for a meltdown, this was it and I braced myself for it.

I had developed a couple of jokes about Cajun food while I was in town, that would work. I could do a bit I had cut about the similarities between Baltimore and Lake Charles. It wasn’t as funny as the rest of the stuff, but it was clean. Along with what remained of my original material, it gave me enough to get me through my first set. So, the bandleader introduced me and I launched into it.

Interestingly, it was the best thing I could have done because it showed that I was not just a performer playing yet another show wherever he happened to be, but displayed deference to their much maligned hometown. Now I was not some Yankee, but a cousin from out of state. The audience had embraced me and they were laughing at lines I thought were just ok, but not my best work. They were with me and having fun. They wanted to laugh and I realized that I was nowhere in my head, I was surfing.

But I had two more sets I needed to spontaneously generate. For the second set, I remembered advice from my buddy – tell stories. So, I took an old dinner party favorite about the time I tried out for “Who Wants To Be a Millionaire,” embellished it and with a couple of TV jokes as an intro took it out to fifteen minutes. I was always a punch line guy, I’d never tried the Bill Cosby narrative approach. Here I was, on the fly, realizing that my job as a comedian was not to keep them continuously laughing, but to keep them engaged, entertained. By the time, I got to the final pop in the story and hit a quick segue back to the band, I could sense that I had made a roomful of friends.
As the Cajun music started up, an older gentleman in a plaid flannel shirt came up and spoke to me in Cajun French. Reaching back to high school, I got a little bit, enough to know he asked at the end “Do you understand?” When I replied “Une peu,” a little, in a terribly rusty accent, he grinned and slapped me on the shoulder, and went off two-stepping off with his wife.

I had one set left and knew what to do. I had created a pretend religion, Comedism, in which that which is holy is that which is funny and had developed a set of schticks I tell in my classes when asked about it. I’d pull that out and end by inviting people up for a joke telling contest offering automatic entry into comedy heaven to the winner. So there I was talking about our Holy Scripture, The Comedist Manifesto, and explaining the central tenet of the religion that life is a joke. You see a joke has two parts, a set up that leads you to think of a situation in a particular way and a punch line that forces you to realize that you need an entirely different understanding than you first thought. Laughter comes when your brain is stuck trying to reconcile these irreconcilable interpretations. Jokes require you to see the world in more than way at the same time.

As I was getting laughs, I realized that these folks who were not my people, were, in fact, my people. I had found my voice and it was, in fact, my voice. What started as an attempt to avoid a midlife crisis had become a full-blown search for identity. In the end, the Comic religion was actually right. The stage is the ultimate confessional where your flaws and sins are not absolved, but in being brought out into the light become invisible because you have no more need to hide them. The connection that you make in bringing a laugh to a stranger bridges any divide as long as there is not space to separate you from each other. My life now made sense as a joke. The set up took an entire year, and here in the joy of the room with the mic back in the stand I finally got the punch line.

The Year of Living Humorously: A Stand-Up Philosopher's Pilgrimage - Part VI

David Vitter, the very socially conservative Senator from Louisiana, was caught in the DC Madame scandal. What makes it even more ironic is that the prostitute spoke with the press and told them that the Senator insisted on wearing diapers to their sessions. Apparently, it’s still family values as long as you call the hooker “mommy.”

But then it was as if my guardian angel was protecting me. Writing at the public library, I rifled through the comedy albums, finding a Mort Sahl disk. A routine from the 90s with a few good lines, the CD held minor interest until the end. He closed by saying that he was told that you had to play down to the audience to succeed in comedy, but that he had always treated his audience as if they had Ph.D.’s. The wording stung me. He paved the way for Leno and Letterman with that approach, I could do worse.

It gave me back a sense of power over my act. I would write forty-five minutes of material that even drunk college students would have to laugh at. I got a note from the organizer that the gig would be a combination of comedy and dance music called “Chicken and Beer, Music and Comedy.” I’d be doing three fifteen-minute sets during the band’s breaks. Fifteen minutes was the combined length of my first and second modules. I already had a third of it written.

Typed out, seven minutes of comedy was about two pages. So, fifteen minutes, I estimated would be five, allowing for the fact that things tend to come out quicker on stage because of nervousness. I would need fifteen pages of jokes that would entertain beer drinking, chicken-eating, college students. I could do that.

But I would also need to develop stage presence, at least enough to get by. Karen, a friend in the theater department, offers a class in improv comedy and she was graciously willing to let me sit in to learn the basics of stagecraft. I could begin to solve the problem in my own geeky milieu.

But I would need to confront the mic and stool and the drunks that came with them. The classroom was one thing, but if I was going to be a comedian for a night, I needed to be a comic for several hard months.

Looking for rooms to play, a friend tipped me off to a new place in Northeast. I showed up to literally play to an empty house. The bartender, house manager, and sound woman took the front table as I got up and told every joke I had ever written. The sound woman had minored in philosophy and wanted more smart jokes. Was she a prophet?
The only thing worse than playing an empty room is playing a room of comics... which happens often. Bars rely on comics to bring people, but since the number of friends who would come out to see your act is limited, you only invite them to big gigs. As a result many open mics are badly attended. Of course, without the open mics, the rooms close and then there is no opportunity for the better shows. The circle is vicious.

Almost as vicious as the comics themselves. As a matter of policy, comics do not laugh at each other’s material unless it is to express derision. While newbies will get compassionate handshakes and nurturing backslaps, once you are seen as a regular, the best you can hope for is the comic’s attaboy, a flatly delivered “nice set.” You know you nailed it when someone comments that they had never heard the Mr. McFeely one before. A direct reference to a joke means it stuck in the mind and needs to stay.

Another room only gives you three minutes for your first set at the venue. The need to pack set ups and punch lines into such a tight time and the fact that a cable company was filming it for its amateur comedy specials combined to throw me back into my head and I blew it, but I learned a valuable lesson. The host made the comics sit in the front row until the room filled and audience members looked for those seats. No one wants to sit up front out of fear of getting picked on by the comedian, but if there is distance between the stage and the audience, jokes fall into the void never to be laughed at. You need to hit a home run, he said, to get it over the wall of empty seats.

Then I found a home at a club in Arlington, All-Stars Comedy club. I could get guaranteed stage time every week and a college educated audience. The regular comics were a good bunch and I settled in. Each week, I’d watch them hone their act making minor modifications while I’d take the chance to work through new modules. Some hit, some missed, but I was gaining back my confidence and adding to my time.

I figured that a college audience would have at least a few geeks, so I wrote some nerd jokes (I was part of a study testing the placebo effect, but I ended up in the control group. What do you get if you cross Sophocles and James Bond? Oedipussy Rex.) I knew that I had no business telling these jokes in a bar, but I had a roll of twelve and needed to practice the rapid-fire delivery in front of a crowd. They were going to fail. I was going to die on stage. I knew it and I accepted it. I was going to become a comedic martyr for my cause and I was at peace with that.

It was the day before April Fools’ Day and on that holy day the comic gods saw the new purity of my heart and my reverence for the jokes and they did deliver a miracle. A new guy, a recent graduate from James Mason, brought an entire table of twenty bright college kids and sat them right in front of the stage. They got each and every reference. Other comics were strangely complementary about the bit. The weather was getting warmer, time was getting shorter, the comic gods were smiling and I was feeling ready.

The Year of Living Humorously: A Stand-Up Philosopher's Pilgrimage - Part V

I have this friend who is completely blind. Loves to go to Hooters. They keep the restaurant cold for him so that he can read the waitresses’ t-shirts in Braille.

Not only had I died on stage, I was sent to hell. My stomach tightened thinking about comedy and like your tongue searching the empty spot of a lost tooth, it couldn’t stop going there.

I was giving academic talks and cracking jokes with no problem in front of at least as many strangers as were in the bar that night. I was teaching and for all intents and purposes doing stand-up breezily. In my classroom, I could do the Lewis Black style rant, the Steven Wright word plays, the Steve Martin goofy bit all in the context of philosophy lectures and pull it off without breaking a sweat. But the thought of the stool and mic made me ill. It was the dark night of my humorous soul. I wandered in the comic desert. I felt like Moses led to, but barred from seeing the Promised Land.

As a philosopher, I could not avoid analyzing it. The only difference was the context, the place. What was it about the stage? I was comfortable in the company of other geeks. But to do stand-up I had leave the comfort of my little Nerdvana. Comedy is done in bars. Bars are filled with people who go to bars. These were not my people, this was the in-crowd, the guys who bullied me as a child and the girls I wasn’t cool enough to even have crushes on. It was their territory and I always knew that I was out of place among them. Now it was my job to be their court jester. If I was to succeed, it was because they would judge me funny enough by their standards.

Middle school had never ended. The revelation was sickening. I was writing the sort of jokes people with doctorates in philosophy would enjoy, but I was telling them to drunk people who laugh at one thing and one thing only. If I wanted to avoid the comic equivalent of this atomic wedgie, I would need to once again be subservient to the jocks and princesses I thought I had left. In the classroom, I had the red pen, but here once again they held the social capital. So, I was faced with a choice – give up the dream and surrender to the fear, that would mean the bullies had once again won, or else figure out how to play by their rules and entertain them, meaning that they once again held the power over me and won.

I tried to work more blue, but even my dirty jokes seemed too sophisticated. The fear ebbed and flowed. A good night was not one that got laughs, but just one where I wasn’t inside my head and they weren’t happening very often. I seemed more and more sure that I could never fake it. I wasn’t a comedian and I’d never be able to fool a packed room full of people for forty-five minutes who paid to see me that I was.

When both of the open mic comedy nights I was playing closed in a matter of weeks of each other, it seemed like an omen. The comedy gods were sending me a message, I had fallen from grace.

The Year of Living Humorously: A Stand-Up Philosopher's Pilgrimage - Part IV

What’s solitary, nasty, brutish, and enlarged? Hobbes’ prostate of nature. Why did the Freudian chicken cross the road? She was envious of the cock.

A few days later, I got word of a new room in town asking for people to play its opening night. I got my name on the list figuring I’d hone this second module. Arriving early but still learning the protocols of this new world, I checked in with the host late and ended up at the end of the night’s menu.

The bar, a small oblong room in Fells Point, the obnoxiously alcoholic district of Baltimore, was odd. Under previous ownership, I had sat in with college buddies whose garage band played there about ten years earlier. In the meantime, the bar had new owners who decided to make it a strip joint, building before they realized that they would not be granted the permit for nudity. Now it was a flailing sports bar with a mirrored stage five feet off the ground.

It was a metaphor not lost on me as I took the stage and stood there nakedly dying in front of that audience. I climbed the steps and quipped that I had not been this high in Fells Point since college, a line I thought clever at the time. But my ears didn’t match my mind.

Stand-up comedy is hard for many reasons, but chief among them is that it requires a combination of two very different skills. First, you must be a good writer, finding clever, insightful, and sharp new angles on things and being gifted in taking a funny idea and shaping it into a well-worded joke. Musicians can develop their chops playing covers, but comics start from scratch working up their own material.

But you not only have to have the funny, you need to bring the funny. Delivery and presence is paramount. The amateurs I was among were influenced by Chris Rock; they were loud, big, and in your face. Several of them were quite good at it, limited only by their material. They were talented with the mic, but didn’t have anything strong to say through it. They didn’t seem to understand the craft of joke writing. This, I thought in my arrogance, would be the strength that would carry me through. My stuff was so witty that it could walk on its own. Or so I tried telling myself repeatedly as I sat at the bar.

The sound system was built behind the stage to boom out rhythms to facilitate the undulations of strippers, but now I heard only the sound of my voice. Everyone who is not James Earl Jones knows that moment, hearing your voice as others hear it. It was higher and squeakier than in my head. It sounded so small and they sounded so big. The thumping, the cold sweat, the stomach, the shaking hands with their death grip on the mic. The jokes I told just days earlier were gone. Tripping over words, voice quivering, timing gone, I blew punch lines. The sympathetic faces that looked at the guy before me my first go ‘round were now looking pityingly at me. I had stage fright and was dying up there. The comic gods had struck me down.

The Year of Living Humorously: A Stand-Up Philosopher's Pilgrimage - Part III

It’s a good thing that Jesus’ last miracle wasn’t to turn himself into a chicken before ascending up to heaven because then you could not serve the wafer with red wine. Jesus, the other white meat.

The second ten-minute module came together. Start with meditations on “truck nuts,” the fake rubber testicles hanging off the trailer hitches of pickup trucks and what gender equality might mean for them, move into the PMS navigator bit, a few license plate jokes that segue into new age kids in the backseat on a car trip, and end with accidentally staying at a hotel for the elderly (instead of a Continental breakfast, they had an incontinental breakfast where the apple juice was served in little specimen cups). I wanted to road test it and went to the rib joint.

The MC for the night did some strong material and brought up a couple of performers who clearly had worked the mic before. A much better class of comics, they fell in four categories. First are the pros who get up and coast. They pull some stuff out of mothballs to tighten up the delivery and do some better material by request of fellow comics in the house who want to hear favorite bits. Second are those trying to ascend into the ranks of working comics. I was surprised to see these guys walk on stage and work directly from their books – the notebook every comic keeps of carefully worked out bits and ideas for new jokes in development. The third group is comprised of folks like me in the early stages of learning the fundamental mechanics: using the space and the mic, working the crowd, finding balance without training wheels. The fourth class are the rookies, but you didn’t see that many here.

That night there was only one and he was first, a tough spot for anyone, but as a fiery wreck of unfunny, he did nothing to help himself out. Our cultural idea of a comedian is shaped by those we see and we generally only see the best of the best. By the time they make it to The Tonight Show, HBO, or Comedy Central, they’ve been honing that same routine in clubs, delivering variants of the same jokes every night for months, if not years. Comedy is flux, a full time job in which you write, edit, throw out, resurrect in a new form. We see comedy as a product, but like all art forms it is actually a glacial process, a craft. The rookie learned the hard way.

The third spot – a coveted position because the crowd is warmed up but not yet restless – was Jay, a rising insult comic who opened by pointing to the new kid and telling him that he sucked so badly that his friends couldn’t even lie to his face and pretend that he did well. He then congratulated him, welcoming him to the club. “You are now a comic, my brother,” he said. “Anyone who claims to be a comic and says he’s never died on stage as disgustingly as you just burned is a damned liar.”
I smirked with a hubris that surely mocked the comic gods for I thought that the failure could be avoided with wisdom. I loved comedy enough to have a sense of what makes a tightly worded joke, timing to guarantee successful delivery, and how to take a single line and place it in the rhythm of a larger bit. But I had gone further, reading technical literature about the nature of joking and teaching a semester-long independent study course on the linguistic structure of humorous utterances. I succeeded in my initial flight, the YouTube video getting good reviews on my blog, even from a working amateur comic, commenting that it took him a year to be as polished as I was my first time.

But behind this arrogance, I had also begun to feel strangely insecure about my material. Somehow, I seemed different from everyone else. I couldn’t put my finger on it, but I started feeling nervous about my routine, which just an hour ago I had been quite proud of. This caught me off-guard. I’m a college professor. I speak in front of people every single day. My teaching style in the classroom and even my delivery of professional conference papers is based upon my stand-up heroes and had gotten me praise for years. I was almost cavalier about getting up and ad-libbing, challenging my students at the beginning of every class to ask me any question from auto mechanics to quantum mechanics. But now I was getting the jitters. But my time came and the second bit was well received, so rationally that should have been the end of it.

The Year of Living Humorously: A Stand-Up Philosopher's Pilgrimage - Part II

It turns out that Eskimos really do kiss by rubbing noses. I dated an Eskimo woman once. Well, she was half Eskimo and half French, so when we would make out she’d stick her tongue up my nose.

Driving to work a few weeks later it hit me. “I just bought a new car. What I really wanted was one of those GPS navigation systems, but I couldn’t afford it. Had to go with the next cheaper version, the PMS navigation system. It has three settings: random explosion, constant criticism, and passive aggressive where you’ll drive for twenty miles and it’ll refuse to say anything.” It was good, too good not to use.

It was a fleeting thought, quickly dismissed as I focused on an upcoming presentation. It was a presentation relating religious modes of thought to the physics of Newton and Einstein. I was scheduled in the Banners’ series of lectures, concerts, and cultural events at McNeese State University in Lake Charles, Louisiana where a good friend of mine teaches. Asked if I’d also speak to local schools, I agreed because I relish the chance to excite young people about science and it was nice to have more time to visit.

All went well and I found myself chummy with the folks running the series who invited me back the next year. When hearing of my comic adventure, they requested some stand-up when I came back. I knew a local bar had an open mic comedy night and I got a charge out of being able to pretend to be a real comedian playing on the road.

There was, however, a miscommunication. I had inadvertently agreed to a Banners event, a full show with an audience who would expect a professional comedian. Confronted with this by e-mail, I could have simply backed out. It was still floating in the ether of potentiality. It would mean writing forty-five minutes of quality comedy. That is a lot of jokes…a LOT of jokes. It would mean working them out in front audiences. That’s a lot of open mic nights. It is hard to be funny for ten minutes, three quarters of an hour is something else entirely.

But there is something magical about forty-five minutes. It is a complete set. In the old days, forty-five minutes of polished, rock solid material meant you could record an LP. That is where you transform from a comic to a comedian. This could be my only chance to emulate my childhood heroes. And I had an entire year. If I could do a fairly successful seven minutes with four week’s worth of preparation and no experience, developing five to six more short bits in twelve months shouldn’t be beyond me. So, I signed on for a year of living humorously.

The Year of Living Humorously: A Stand-Up Philosopher's Pilgrimage - Part I

Maybe the whole midlife crisis thing is a myth, maybe it isn’t; but just in case, I was going to try to preempt it. Entrenched in my life as a tenured philosophy professor, the iconic routes were closed off to me. Being happily married (not to mention, teaching ethics), an affair with a younger woman was a non-starter. Two kids and a philosopher’s salary meant the sports car wasn’t an option, either – not that a Corvette would be anything other than ironic as I’m such a slow driver that I’ve been flipped off by the Amish. I’d already gone hang gliding, run class V rapids, and solo backpacked, so the adventure bit was in the “been there, done that” folder.

Then it hit me. I was doing a drive-time radio show on a rock station in Baltimore, an “ask the ethicist” segment, when the show’s host, a long time professional comedian, asked me during a break whether I had done stand-up. It was one of those moments you file away. I’ve been a comedy geek my entire life. Finding my dad’s Stan Freberg, Bill Cosby, and George Carlin albums when I was a boy, memorizing Steve Martin and Robin William’s routines as a teenager, I had always idolized comedians. Here was a member of the brotherhood asking me if I was in the club.

Recalling that moment sealed it, I would try my hand at stand-up comedy. Little did I know that what started out as a lark, a half-facetious attempt to avoid a crisis of identity would, in fact, cause one and lead me to a Comedic religious awakening.

I saw Elliot Spitzer’s rabbi interviewed on CNN. He was livid. A member of his congregation paying $4,300 to a prostitute. The Governor of the state, a pillar of the community, a seemingly upstanding Jew, and he’s caught paying retail. At least she could have given him a discount for being circumcised, knock off the cover charge.

There are nights that you will never forget. Close to where I grew up, a comedy club had a monthly new talent showcase just a week before my 40th birthday. The word “talent,” it turns out, does not always mean what it seems. It was a “bringer show.” You get the mic only if you bring at least five paying audience members. More than that increases your stage time – a minute per person – up to ten minutes. I brought more than triple, it was my birthday party after all, with family, friends, colleagues, former students, a sampling from my entire life ready to laugh whether I deserved it or not.

For bringer shows, the club doesn’t care whether the comics are funny, as long as they fill tables. This is not AIG-style greed, times are tough for comedy clubs. In the late 80s, when Jerry Seinfeld was a cultural phenomenon, comedy clubs were packed and the number of rooms exploded like microwave popcorn. All those stages meant acts were needed, and the rapid growth outpaced the development of talent. Many shows were no longer worth the cover charge and two drink minimum and eventually the whole game eventually collapsed. The number of places for comics to play now is miniscule and even those clubs are struggling. These nights help keep live comedy alive.

This is how I came to be fourth from the end of a twenty-seven rookie comic extravaganza that would stretch on continuously for three excruciating hours. Real shows have a structure – three comedians, first is the night’s MC who gets a short set and then introduces the opening act. The MC then introduces the headliner who does a longer set. MC is a yeoman’s job, it is the lowest rung on the comedy ladder, the way you pay your dues, getting to say that you performed with “fill in the name of the headliner.”

But it’s the opposite with an open mic. The MC is the most seasoned comic on the bill, gets the longest set at the beginning (to guarantee that at least something funny will be seen), and then serves as an anchor during the marathon doing quick bits between the newbies to keep those who have already seen their friend in the seats ordering drinks.
Sonny, the night’s MC, had his work cut out for him. A couple comics were regulars trying to add “winner of the ‘New Talent Showcase’” to their credits, but most were first timers who didn’t realize that you actually needed to have written material to fill five minutes, much less ten. Unfunny radiated from the stage in the form of staggeringly drunk frat boys, disgruntled, inarticulate factory workers, and a racist in a polo shirt. It was a preview of comic hell. The Cosmic Comic was warning us that sinful lives would lead to reliving that show for all of eternity.

There was Amos, whose opening line was that in elementary school the children called him “Anus.” It would have been mildly amusing if there had been more to his act. But for twelve interminable minutes, as Sonny in an increasingly urgent fashion flashed him the signal to get off stage, he continually repeated the ways in which he would be called for lunch, recess, and everything else by students and teachers as Anus. Have you ever repeated a word over and over again until it just sounds wrong in your head? I’ve not been able to look at a rectal sphincter in quite the same way since.

Refuting claims of telekinesis, the entire psychic energy of the hundred or so people in that club was simultaneously focused on levitating that Anus off the stage, yet he remained the immovable object, until he realized that he had a second joke. With his last stolen minute, he turned around, and pulled from a brown paper lunch bag, a foot and a half long marital aid and strapped it to his chin as he made uncomfortably lewd facial movements ten feet in front of my grandmother. Years of therapy gone in thirty seconds.

There is a reason for opening acts. Comedy at its best is like surfing, once there is a wave of laughter, it becomes self-reinforcing and you can ride it instead of having to swim against the tide. The opening act brings in the tide, getting the waves rolling. So, I had great hopes for the guy before me. Earnestly studying his sheet of hand-written jokes through furrowed brows, he was a nice guy and I hoped for both our sakes that the lines on his paper killed.

Alfred Adler argued that to be human is to be insecure and stage fright is perhaps the most explicit instance of insecurity. Watching someone wither, seeing self-image melt, is stunningly affective. He took the stage and froze. Starting one joke, he aborted. Trying another, he forgot its obvious punch line. When a compassionate stranger in the front row supplied it for him, it didn’t register. He left the stage prematurely, defeated, a somber pall trailing behind him. My opening act was Bambi’s mother getting shot.

Three hours, five glasses of water, and fifteen trips to the men’s room later, it was finally my time. You can tell when it’s a white guy’s first time on stage. They’re the only ones dressed like Jerry Seinfeld in sneakers, jeans, a plain t-shirt and sports jacket. There I was climbing up onto a real stage with nothing but the emblematic stool and mic stand in my sneakers, jeans, plain t-shirt and sports jacket. After months of writing, editing, re-writing, and working in front of the mirror, it was go time.

Placing my glass of water on the stool, I turned around to see nothing. The lights that made me visible to the audience made them invisible to me. You couldn’t play off of reactions because you could not see the faces. Your only cues being the sounds you could hear over the echoes of your heart beating in your head.

I started with some political jokes, segued into a schtick about circumcision, communion, and jihad, then ended with an extended bit on Eskimo kissing. A slight stumble over one line and accidentally leaving out one good joke, it was a successful seven and a half minutes of humor. I left the stage feeling good.

Walking back to the bar, a guy asked me how long I had been performing. When I told him it was my first time, he seemed surprised and told me in a hushed tone that if I wanted to continue, there was an open mic across town at a rib joint for working comics, a smaller but more workshop-like arena to test out new material. I took the compliment, but I had gotten what I had come for. I had done stand-up. I had a unique 40th birthday party, a story that I could milk for years, and a mid-life crisis averted. Or so I thought...