Please bear in mind that this critique came from my friend/co-worker’s long-time girlfriend. Call me crazy, but it seems like a good thing that I don’t get all pervo when in close contact with the significant others of… others.

So how should I go about demonstrating greater hugging sincerity, then? I feel like dialing up the crotch-rubbing would be a step in the wrong direction. Ditto the creepy lower-back hand rub. Help me out here, ladies.

I was recently at a gathering for my best friend’s family, which can be a disorienting experience: his entire extended family is filled with incredibly good looking, physically fit, blonde-haired, blue-eyed relatives. Hitler would have been proud of this genetic stock.

The occasion was his Dad’s 60th birthday, and they had rented out a local school gymnasium for the party. While milling about, I heard my phone ring; seeing that it was a call I needed to take, I ducked out of the gym, through the kitchen and out the back door. As I answered the phone, I saw that one of his cousins was also outside, off by herself having a smoke.

This particular cousin isn’t a traditional blonde bombshell like all the other females in his family, but she’s smarter and funnier than the rest of them, and that’s always been something that rings my bell. She’s also quite good-looking in her own right.

I had been hoping to see her that evening, and this seemed like a great opportunity to go over and say hi. Unfortunately, just as I was getting off the phone, she was taking a new call.

Now, I don’t smoke, so I had a dilemma:

1. Should I stand around like a doofus, waiting for her to get off the phone?
2. Should I go back inside, even though there probably wouldn’t be another opportunity like this to talk with her?
3. Or maybe I could call and bother someone else for a few minutes while I waited for her?

Favoring this last option, I scrolled through my phonebook, slowly realizing that I didn’t really want to talk to anybody else — especially since I’d be interrupting to hang up almost immediately.

For the first time in my life, I actually cursed the fact that I don’t smoke.

You might think that at this point, I needed to choose one of those other reasonably sane options. That is because you don’t think like a dipshit ape-brained man. I chose insane option four: fake a phone call to stall for time.

Inside the Actor’s Studio

Bear in mind that I was a few beers in at this point; I wasn’t drunk, but I was buzzed enough that I decided to have fun with my little parlor game. I really threw my back into the fake call: laughing, getting indignant, waxing philosophical about some imagined nonsense. It was an acting tour de force. In fact, I was having so much goofy fun playing pretend that I lost track of the cousin… and suddenly she was standing right in front of me, asking me a question.

“Uh, what?” I said stupidly. Then, remembering that I was supposed to be on a call, I added a belated “hold on a sec” into the phone. To nobody.

She repeated her question and I put my finger up to signal that I’d get off my “call” to chat with her. I just had to maintain the charade for a few more seconds.

I started to say some more fake crap into the phone, with the intention of getting off, when suddenly… my phone rang.

While I was holding it to my ear and talking into it.

This is impossible, of course, if you are really on a call, because call waiting doesn’t ring. I stared straight ahead for a second, struck stupid, praying the ring was a mistake and would go away. It rang a second time. My brain flooded with panic; I gave a confused look to the phone and attempted to recover by stuttering out, “what the fuck, did uh… did the first call drop?”

She was staring at me but, miraculously, didn’t seem to have caught on yet. It was probably taking her a minute to piece together the full and unlikely extent of my insanity.

I answered the other call — the real call — and it was my buddy, inside the gym, wondering where I was. I told him to go screw and hung up; very uncharitable of me, yes, but I was in the middle of panicking. I turned to the pretty girl and waited for my searing ritual humiliation to begin.

And she just continued talking normally!

What was going on?? Was she just being polite and pretending not to notice my shenanigans? No, that didn’t seem to be it… and while I was puzzling it through, that’s when I remembered that when she first appeared in front of me, she seemed a little nervous. And the way she was talking to me now, kind of rambling a bit… waitaminute, is it possible that she might be interested in me, too? Is that why she didn’t notice that my phone supposedly just violated all the known rules of telephony?

“You’re like a big bear
with claws and fangs!”

And then it hit me: this was just like hiking in the forest and accidentally stumbling into a clearing with a startled bear or mountain lion.¹ We’ve heard it a million times in safety lectures: “it’s just as afraid of you, as you are of it.”

The same thing was happening here: she was just as nervous to be chatting me up as I was nervous to be talking to her. That’s why this otherwise incredibly bright girl hadn’t seen through my hysterically inept bullshit.

It was a close call — and an empathic epiphany. Every conversation consists of (at least) two people, and it’s worth remembering that everyone else is wrapped up in their own emotions just as much as we are in our own crazy brain-universes. Thank God my friend’s pretty cousin didn’t notice my craziness… because she ended up giving me her number, and she’ll hopefully be coming with me to an open mic in the near future.

I just hope she never finds out that I have a blog.

Related entries:

• The Story So Far
• Creating a Comic FAQ

1. I realize that “cougar” would be perfect here, but this girl is in her 20s, so it doesn’t really fit.

Still photo from my first
open mic performance.

I bombed. Hard.

After an initial laugh or two, I told a couple jokes that fell flat, at which point my confidence shattered and everything spiraled out of control. In my mind’s eye, the room was just crickets and tumbleweeds, then an audience with torches and pitchforks. I fled the club wanting nothing more than to go home and take a three hour rape shower.

It felt like an abject disaster, at the time, and I wasn’t sure I’d recover from the smoking CJ-sized crater I had left up on stage. Part of it was simple nerves; the other part was that I was a newbie, and made some very obvious (in retrospect) newb mistakes with my act structure. And—I now realize—some of my stuff just plain wasn’t funny.

Second Time Up

I licked my wounds for several weeks, eventually forcing myself to listen to the recording I had made of the carnage. As the initial horror subsided, I slowly realized that it hadn’t been as bad as I originally thought. None of the worst case scenarios had come true: I hadn’t forgotten any material, I hadn’t messed my pants on stage, and I had even received a few fledgling laughs.

A few more weeks of cowering went by until I finally went back for my second Open Mic, armed with new jokes and the confidence that I wouldn’t make the same mistakes. This time, I was certain, would be different.

I bombed again.

…but not quite as badly as the first time. I only took a two hour rape shower afterward. This, I felt, was progress.

Fancy Fast-Forward Montage

For the next six months I returned to Open Mic intermittently, sometimes getting back on stage but usually getting bumped.¹ Then life intervened and I left town for a couple months, during which my distance from the stage helped recharge my commitment.

Stop half-assing it

I came back to Seattle with renewed purpose. No more half-assing it; it was time to give stand-up comedy my full ass. I would write every day, I would rehearse religiously, and I would be at every single Giggles Open Mic—and eventually other open mics at more distant clubs, too.

Which brings us to the present, May 2009. I have some reliable material that gets regular laughs, and can do a solid 7-8 minutes at an open mic without too many crickets, tumbleweeds, or homicidal mobs. I still bomb sometimes, especially with new material, but it’s more of a learning experience now. Best of all, these days I only take rape showers when I actually get raped.

Related entries:

• The Cousin and the Phone Call
• Creating a Comic FAQ
• Open Mic: First Timer Primer

1. The rules for getting stage time at Open Mic vary by establishment, but a newb is usually only guaranteed a spot if they bring paying audience members. I’ll discuss the entire Open Mic pecking order in a future entry.