Go And Do The Weird Thing

or, A Letter To A Guy Who Just Did His First Open Mic

photo by WildCardPhoto

“I was not confident enough to tell him what I myself barely knew, which is that being true to yourself, even if it makes everyone hate you, even if it makes people want to kill you, is the most radical form of liberty, and when you make contact with something as electric and terrifying as the unadorned truth of yourself, it burns away so many other smaller forms of bondage you weren’t even aware of, so you find yourself irradiated and unencumbered.”
― Rufi Thorpe, The Knockout Queen

Hi Jay, it’s Jay. How are things? If memory serves, they’re a little turbulent. You’ve got a lot of crazy shit happening in your personal life: adapting to college life, learning what it’s like to get drunk (enjoy it while it lasts!), the beginnings of a truly nightmarish phase in your on-again-off-again long distance relationship. But you also just did your first open mic at a bar currently called Lighthouse Tavern, which in a couple of years will be called College Street Taphouse, which will eventually close completely. And while there is no audio or visual record of the set, you got laughs! Enough laughs that you have been bitten by the stand-up comedy bug! Welcome to the party, pal!

I have good news and bad news. Bad news first: you won’t do another open mic for a while. Something like 9 months. You will do two of them relatively close to each other, in a pizza parlor right by your old high school. At one of them you will get big laughs, and at the next one, you will bomb for the very first time. Both of these performances, unfortunately, are on tape, and neither of them are anything to write home about. Yes, even the one where you don’t bomb.

But here’s the good news: you will go on to make a living at this. It will take you a while to work up the courage to take pursuing this craft seriously. Specifically, about two years. Yes, you do tell people you’ve been doing this for fifteen years even though your first ever open mic was seventeen years ago. Yes, it is a little confusing, but that’s nothing worth fretting over.

Over the course of those fifteen years, you will learn a lot of things, not all of which will be applicable. It is, in fact, better that they are not all applicable. You will become a better comic by not following every piece of advice you get. There’s a reason that the 12-step programs you will later work heavily emphasize taking what you like and leaving the rest: it’s just good practice.

But the most important piece of advice, the one I wish you (and every comic) had heard earlier, is to go and do the weird thing.

In the mid-2010’s, you’re going to find yourself hanging out with this comic Tim Dillon. You’ll meet doing a show together in New York, where he’ll tell a joke about performing for a group of gay homeless teens that makes you perk your ears up. You will be newly sober, and re-learning your relationship to who you are on stage vs. who you are off stage. You two will spend a few hours wandering Central Park and talking shop, where he will tell you about all the weird gigs he took on during in his earliest years in comedy, like giving bus tours of the city where he deviated from the script to unveil the soft, seedy underbelly hidden behind the old-money Manhattan façade surrounding the park. He will tell you about how, at one point, he was hired to perform for a couple on their anniversary, basically to just be sitting at the table with them while they were eating at a restaurant, doing his act. “And you did that?” you’ll ask? And he’ll reply: “without hesitation.”

And maybe you are wowed by this because you have found yourself becoming surprisingly skittish on stage. You will be newly sober, freshly ashamed, and feeling fear more tangibly than you have in years. And in this moment, you will need someone to tell you to, essentially, get over yourself. To divest yourself of the romanticized notion of what it means to be a stand-up, the purity of form and performance you think it requires.

Slowly you will come to realize that the feeling you get when you find yourself reacting to a situation as “weird” is actually just fear with the edges sanded off. A softer, cuddlier, more palatable version of fear. A teddy bear with razor blades hidden in the stuffing.

I’m here to tell you that what lies on the other side of “weird,” on the other side of fear, is a joyous freedom. All you need to do is push past.

You feel this now, having just done your first open mic, realizing you might have what it takes to be good at stand-up after writing jokes in your first Moleskine notebook for months. You will feel this again during what you will eventually recognize as one of the defining performances of your early career: you, upon finishing up an internship at the Cannes Film Festival, fueled by probably a gallon of liquid courage, doing a set on the beach outside your home base, using a bottle of beer as a microphone, performing for 20 minutes and drawing a crowd, drawing big laughs and doing so well that seemingly everyone in your little Cannes program came up to you and was like “keep doing it, man!” You will feel this after your first time on Potluck, your first set on Kill tony, after winning your first roast battle. But you will not clock this feeling of freedom until, well, right now, when you’re writing this letter.

You will learn, in recovery, the difference between ignoring fear and accepting it. You’ll recognize that, more often than not, fear in an artistic context is backlash to potential inconvenience; you don’t know what could happen, and you will run enough scenarios in your head that go wrong that you decide to avoid it altogether. You will realize that you have used fear to shelter yourself on stage.

You will find new ways to move beyond the fear, mostly through what I guess could be considered exposure therapy, and you will learn how much you love finding yourself in a strange situation. You will find genuine joy telling jokes at rehab facilities all across California, especially the ones where the people who are in them are just freshly detoxing, eating ice cream and not laughing but coming up to you afterwards and thanking you for being there, for being a distraction from the hospital bed and the shitty CRT TV. You will be thrilled and honored to roast people at their weddings and birthday parties, even if, every time, moments before you are set to take the stage, you wonder if these people will begin to think they’ve made a horrible mistake by hiring you. You will dive headfirst into the unknown by performing outside of your comfort zone a thousand times over, everywhere from biker bars to deep-south Elks Lodges to coffee shops and hostel basements on the other side of the world. You will briefly balk when a Japanese TV producer asks if you want to go be a judge on a game show, because you don’t want to wind up in some weird scam, but you will agree moments later after some light Googling. (By the way, it’s amazing what a little light Googling will do to solve a lot of life’s problems! Don’t forget that!)

All I’m trying to say is if it seems weird, it’s probably worth giving a go. You have to deal with weird situations the same way you do trying new foods: take one bite, enough to determine whether or not you actually like it.

Every time you lean into doing the weird thing, your horizons will be broadened, your understanding of humanity will grow, and your stories will get better. You will become less rigid with yourself and others. You will not just become willing to fail, but able to find the happiness in failure. You will step more confidently into the life you have chosen to live, a life that you will one day realize is the only one you should have ever tried to live.

I don’t know how you’re ever going to read this, but maybe some new comic will appreciate the conceit of what’s happening here. Hopefully one day someone will figure out how to fling this in a digital bottle through the ocean of time until it gets to you.

Until then, my friend…

Jay

WHAT’S HAPPENING HERE IN THE PRESENT?

Next week, you can find me:

• on social media (mostly Instagram, a little on YouTube)

• doing shows in Los Angeles and San Diego - full show calendar is here

• getting ready to host my comedy game show WRONG! all over the place, including in LA on 11/12, Nashville on 11/19, and Asheville on 11/22

Until next time, thanks for reading, I’m glad you’re here!