Creating a Comic

There’s this weird psychological phenomenon that happens to me, when I haven’t blogged for a while, wherein writing the next blog post seems to become more and more difficult as time goes on. I feel increasingly compelled to offer up a really good reason for my absence from blogging, and it also feels like I have to write some sort of stunningly helpful or insightful post to make up for lost time.

But I’d rather just get back to regular blogging, so if it’s OK with y’all, how about if we just skip past all that? Excellent!

I’ve recently been helping write sketches for a live comedy show, which has been a lot of fun. It never occurred to me that I’d have the opportunity to do this kind of thing, back when I got involved in stand-up comedy, but it’s been a really fun and rewarding experience. I’ll be talking a little bit more about it in the coming days.

Following the story of the worst stage fright I’ve ever personally seen, I’ve been thinking a bit about my own pre-stage jitters before a show.

I still get a bit tense before a show, but it’s gone from nearly debilitating to fairly mild. If a 10 is passing out on stage, a zero is total comfort, and the guy from my earlier story was maybe a 9.5, then I’d say the worst my stage fright got was about 8.6. Someday I’ll talk about what goes into that estimate, including the time I almost peed myself…

Nowadays I probably don’t spike higher than about a 5. Whereas I used to be nervous and unable to concentrate on anything else for the 2-3 hours before the show, these days I can happily relax and read a book on the bus trip on the way to the club.

Part of this is just that I’m a lot more familiar with my material, now, but the greatest help is simple experience. And I do still get butterflies about fifteen minutes before going on stage. I worry that my mind will go totally blank, etc. Then my name is called and I feel a surge of adrenaline; I’ll spend the first thirty seconds on stage a little stiff, but after the first laugh or two I’ve usually calmed down.

(I’m filing this under Overheard Backstage but it’s really more of a Witnessed Backstage…)

The worst case of stage fright I’ve ever seen was by an open mic rookie at Giggles. He was a scrawny, bespectacled college kid who might charitably be described as socially awkward — at a later open mic he would make a punchline hinge on a reference to Vogon poetry, if that tells you anything (note to non-nerds: be glad that it doesn’t).

Anyway, he got a spot on the list and then, clearly a bundle of nerves, proceeded to stomp a pacing trail into the carpet along the back hallway, muttering to himself and avoiding eye contact with everyone. So far, this wasn’t too out of the ordinary; I remember doing something similar when I popped my open mic cherry. Then, suddenly, he B-lined for the bathroom, and those of us nearby heard violent, explosive vomiting noises. A subsequent trip to the bathroom revealed that he hadn’t successfully made it to the toilet before ralphing. The stall was a putrid, barfy mess.

So this poor unkempt kid, whose grooming habits weren’t exactly those of a GQ cover model in the first place, was now covered in sweat, shaking violently, and reeking of puke. That’s pretty bad, but it was what happened next that catapulted him past the pretenders and into the Stage Fright Hall of Fame.

After his name was called, he haltingly made his way up to the stage. He went to take the microphone out of the mic stand, but at this point he was shaking so violently that he accidentally smashed it into his nose — which then started to bleed uncontrollably. He said a few incoherent words into the mic before realizing that blood was gushing down the front of his face, at which point he simply dropped the microphone and scampered off the stage, whimpering and bleeding through the hands clutching his nose and mouth.

While the next comic made his way up in front of the stunned crowd, the kid raced back to the bathroom and into his previously-befouled toilet stall. His efforts to staunch the bleeding in an orderly fashion were profoundly unsuccessful, and to the other bodily fluids deposited earlier, he added bright red globs of blood. After his second visit, that toilet stall looked like someone had gone in there and dynamited a bucket of afterbirth.

To his credit, he did come back and try again a few weeks later, though I haven’t seen him since then. But I still think about him sometimes, because he certainly helped to put my own pre-stage butterflies into perspective.

Rich emotions are like humor fertilizer: they provide a fertile (if sometimes disgusting) breeding ground for beautiful flowers of laughter to blossom. Whenever writing a joke or funny story, remember that emotional conflict is good for comedy.

In fact, every joke is basically a short story — even one-liners — and our strongest, most visceral reactions come when we relate to the emotions behind the story. That’s why puns and other straight-up wordplay merely makes us chuckle, while someone making an absurd fool of themselves can unleash our bladder. Try to heighten the emotional conflict wherever possible.

I was recently in a brainstorming meeting with a group of talented local comedy writers and actors, preparing for an upcoming comedy show that will include live sketches. Eventually the time came for the writers to divvy up rough draft assignments from the sketch ideas on the whiteboard.

The premise for one of the sketches was Parents fighting at a toddler’s birthday party and using silly euphemisms instead of curse words. The writer who volunteered to write it made a comment that assumed the parents would be divorced. “Oh, I didn’t think they’re necessarily divorced…” said the person who originally pitched the idea, and we proceeded to have an interesting back-and-forth about whether or not the parents were, for the purposes of this sketch, divorced.

To me the answer was blindingly obvious: of course the parents are divorced! Think of all the emotional shorthand you get to cram into the setup with just that simple detail — the seething resentment, the bitter history with the extended family, the conflicting prerogatives for the future¹. There are so many jokes and insults available for a divorced couple who hate each other that simply wouldn’t work for a married couple who has to go home together at night. It might not be pretty, but it sure can be funny.

1. Yes, there are plenty of perfectly amicable divorces that don’t involve any of this — believe me, I know — but we’re painting with a broad brush, here. [↩]

MTV has stopped pretending they still show music, removing the words “Music Television” from their logo. Of course, MTV these days has about as much to do with music videos as AT&T has to do with telegraphs (that’s what the second ‘T’ stands for). But as with AT&T, the initials will stay the same for branding purpose, their true meaning hidden in plain sight.

Can I just say, though, that this quote belongs in the PR Flack Hall of Fame:

“The people who watch it today, they don’t refer to MTV as music television,” the net’s head of marketing Tina Exarhos said in a statement. “They don’t have the same emotional connection that, say, the people who are writing about [the logo change] do.

Translation: “Go ahead and make your snarky comments, journalists — if you don’t mind looking like a bunch of out-of-touch old fogeys!”

It’s the kind of brilliant pre-emptive strike that would give Dick Cheney a boner.