Quantcast
Channel: FlipCollective » standup comedy
Viewing all articles
Browse latest Browse all 2

Stand Up or Shut Up, by Paul Merrill

0
0
In 2004, I stood at the top of the stairs leading to the old Comedy Underground in Seattle, one of the city’s last remaining relics from the stand-up comedy heyday of the 1980s. The entrance was a narrow, dark stairway that descended at a 90-degree angle for at least four miles beneath the earth’s surface. Those goddamned stairs seemed to stretch before my eyes, like a scene out of Vertigo. I had written and performed comedy off and on since high school. Writing jokes had always come easy for me, probably because I had been using them as a defense mechanism all my life. Getting rejected by girls? Deflect the pain with an elaborate Weird Al impersonation! About to get pummeled by a bully? Defuse the situation by faking a hilarious seizure! But this was different. This wasn’t the school lunchroom or a family Thanksgiving dinner. Now I was going to be alone, on a stage, being judged. Even worse: I was 32 years old, the exact wrong age to be starting out in comedy. Stand-up is engineered for lonely, single twenty-somethings and middle-aged professional couch surfers, not boring married people with kids and mortgages like me. Spending weeknights in bars and driving home wasted on free beer at two in the morning is not a lifestyle for those with lives. It’s designed for people with such low self-worth that they would gladly spend their free time in urine-soaked dives and work for free just on the off chance that someone, anyone might validate them. In that regard, at least, I fit right in. After pacing for several minutes between the entrance and the rat-infested alley around the corner from the club, I took a deep breath and plunged into the abyss, reassuring myself that I had been preparing for years for just this moment. I’d stockpiled jokes in a little black notebook and, when no one was around, practiced them in front of an audience of my children’s stuffed animals, videotaping each set and dissecting every flaw over and over again, like a losing football coach on Monday morning. When I stepped up to the microphone at the Underground, though, in front of those blinding lights and dark, squirming figures, my mind went blank and I started to sweat like an over-the-hill boxer. I got out my little notebook and frantically looked for hints, but the red light suddenly came on to usher me away. When I got off stage, I noticed that almost everyone else in the audience was a performer. “Is there anyone here who isn’t a comedian?” I joked to the guy next to me. “Yeah,” he replied. “You.” ** The first couple years of doing stand-up were great—I instantly felt a kinship with the ragtag community of funny sad sacks, and felt like I’d proved the guy in the Comedy Underground wrong—but eventually I started to feel a little burned out by the scene in Seattle. There are only so many gay bars and Chinese restaurants hosting comedy in this town. I was eager to try my hand at a bigger venue. Or, at least a place with doors on the restroom stalls. A friend of mine told me that he’d started a show in Los Angeles at the Knitting Factory, so I managed to weasel my way into the line-up the same weekend we were taking the kids to Disneyland. That’s usually how my “vacations” were back then—I’d try to fit in a couple late night shows after the kids went to bed, get back to the hotel just in time for them to wake up, then spend the morning puking on the Dumbo ride. Rinse, disinfect, and repeat. I really wanted to enjoy Disneyland with my family, but I just couldn’t turn down this show. The headliner was Patton Oswalt, one of the biggest names in comedy. I was going to be the opening act in a sold-out show in the heart of Hollywood. This could finally be it. Except, of course, it wasn’t. I should have known it was going to be a long night when I almost got arrested trying to find the place. The car rental company game me some weird, archaic GPS that led me straight to the Korea Town exit. When I realized the kind robot lady voice didn’t know what the Hell she was talking about, I did what any rational driver would do: I put the car in reverse and attempted to back down the onramp back onto the freeway. Apparently this is illegal in California because I was immediately pulled over by a CHiPs officer (they really have those!). Once I explained that I was a comedian from Seattle, and he saw that I was white, he gave a hearty chuckle and let me go. When I finally got to the Knitting Factory, it turned out it wasn’t the legendary rock club I’d read about but actually a small annex in the back of a mall. But hey, at least it was a HOLLYWOOD mall annex, right? They’d removed all the chairs to pack in as many people as possible so the tiny, windowless back room was soon stuffed to the rafters with wall-to-wall SoCal scenesters. It was at least 400 degrees inside and surely in violation of several fire codes and probably a few United Nations charters. But still, I was opening for Patton Oswalt, right? Except I wasn’t. When Patton got there he told the club’s booker his dog was sick and he wanted to leave early, so they let him go on first. Right before me. Imagine if you bought tickets to see the Rolling Stones. Not the mummified, denture-wearing, 2014 model—I mean the actual Rolling Stones in their prime, with Brian Jones and everything, and they’re playing in this tiny, possibly lethal, sweat box. Are you going to stick around to watch Harlow Wilcox and the Oakies afterwards? As soon as Patton finished his set, there was a mass exodus of sweaty, perfectly […]

Viewing all articles
Browse latest Browse all 2

Latest Images

Trending Articles





Latest Images