Creating a Comic

I got bumped at tonight’s open mic, which meant I didn’t get to close, as I had really hoped to do, with this topical holiday joke:

What would Dr. King say if he were alive today? This:
“You mean that all along, I’ve really been a Sagittarius? PFFFFT… naw nigga, you trippin’!”

The horoscope thing might get a chuckle,¹ but it’s mostly an excuse to shift the great, eloquent man of history into the modern black male vernacular — an idea that’s sort of funny. And having that vocal inflection suddenly coming out of my non-black face would have been surprising enough to get a solid laugh, I think.

It’s also likely that my dropping the (sorta) n-bomb would have upset somebody, or several somebodys. I’m on record as believing that white people should avoid saying that word under pretty much every circumstance — so why is it OK for me, as a mostly-white person, to use that word in the context of a joke?

To be honest, it’s probably not OK. Because while I know that my silly joke reflects absolutely no hatred or belittling intent, and my friends know it, anyone who doesn’t know me has no way of seeing into my heart.

It’s the first rule of communication: what one person says isn’t necessarily what another person hears.

So why was I going to say it? Firstly, and mostly, because I think it’s funny. But secondly, I’m also just not sure whether it crosses the line; I was actually kind of hoping the joke would provoke someone to take me to task over it. One of the wonderful things about comedy is that we can use it to probe around in these hazy and uncomfortable areas, and the ensuing argument/discussion might have helped clear away some of the murk.

In other words, sometimes crossing the line is the only way to find out where, exactly, the line is drawn.

Comedy can only make us think after it’s made us laugh, though. Nevermind all this ethical and linguistic wankery, then; is the joke actually funny? Who knows?? Hopefully I’ll have another chance to tell it to an audience, someday!

1. Although it’s certainly a relevant example, because in my experience the only class of males who rival gay dudes, in their knowledge of the zodiac, are younger black guys. Seriously. [↩]

Share this post by...

• 

I am less than fond of talking on the phone, in the same way Hitler was less than fond of upper lip waxing. I would 100% support a national program to round up all of our nation’s cell phones and fry them in a racist series of ovens.

I’ll still spend plenty of time on the phone with girls, of course, because vagina is the Killer App and in that sense I don’t often have a choice.¹ But I’m generally allergic to guy-on-guy phone conversations that last longer than about 90 seconds, making occasional exceptions for (1) good friends who (2) I haven’t seen for a while and (3) whose life I’m actually interested in. But it’s pretty rare.

It was during one of those catch-up chats with Andrew, last night, that he challenged my regular readership of his blog. How could I be reading it, after all, if I had seen his post about Fuck Me Pumps and not immediately jumped into the comments to defend my own earlier post about women’s fashion?

I thought about it for a while, after hanging up, and eventually decided to try squaring the circle: I’d demonstrate my love while calling him retarded, an emotional delivery payload so common to male friendship that I’m surprised it isn’t encapsulated in a fancy foreign word we can steal.

While my comment on his blog was written after 4am and reeks of Overwrought First Draft sweatstains, I ended up spending a blog-post-amount of time on it. So here is:

Consider the Elephant: A Parable

(The title is a fond homage to David Foster Wallace‘s amazing Consider the Lobster, an essay about a fair in Maine that somehow left me questioning all of my food-related ethical beliefs. There are exactly zero other qualitative similarities.)

1. Compare and contrast the Facebook participation of single vs. married males, age 26-45. Vagina is even more addictive than FarmVille. [↩]

Share this post by...

• 

I enjoyed reading the following in a book review of the new Autobiography of Mark Twain (emphasis below is mine):

It is clear from this Autobiography, however, that Twain experienced the ups and downs of his life as a orator much more viscerally than he did the joys and pains of authorship. By all accounts, including his own, he was an electrifying and hilarious public presence, a stand-up comedian before that title existed. He worked as hard on his lectures as he did on his published writing, if not harder, and he memorized every one, no matter how long. Having his jokes produce the desired effect on an audience brought him to a pitch of pure elation, while bombing on stage seemed nearly to kill him.

It’s nice to know that some things never change.

Share this post by...

• 

I should have also mentioned, in my post about bombing the other night, that “I just wasn’t funny” definitely could have been a factor.

But I don’t think that was it, at least not primarily. Which isn’t to say that I’m so damn funny or awesome at stand-up or anything; I’ve certainly told my fair share of awful and just plain unfunny jokes.

In fact, I’ve done so often enough that I know, fairly intimately, what that audience reaction looks and feels like. That’s one of the benefits of stage experience: you come to understand, and can distinguish between, the different types of audience reactions.

And it’s also why I feel like I can diagnose what happened the other night with some confidence. There’s a very tangible difference, from an audience, between the hesitant, almost saddened discomfort of “we don’t think this is funny” and the distrustful peppery twang of “we’re terrified that you’re going to say something hateful.”

I’m plenty capable of being unfunny, but the reason my set went poorly the other night is that I opened with edgy material before I had the audience’s trust.

Share this post by...

• 

All good things come to an end, and last night my longest streak (to date) of solid performances was punctuated with a crater. I bombed it by forgetting a fundamental rule of building a set: you have to win the crowd over before doing potentially divisive material.

One of my newer bits comes from the heart, has been doing really well over the last few weeks, and is stridently anti-racist. I keep finding new stuff to add to it, and trying to work that into open mic sets, and it’s had an amazingly high hit rate.

But racial material is very difficult¹ in white politically-correct Seattle, which is incredibly uptight about even the mention of such topics. The reason I’ve done well with it, previously, is that I’ve been performing it toward the end, right before the closer; I’ve already opened strong and established that I’m funny, so they’re willing to give me the benefit of the doubt when I start to set up the racial material. Being funny builds trust.

But you don’t have that benefit of the doubt when you first step on stage. And last night I forgot this; I went up to a room that already gone cold, and started in with the really edgy stuff. TACTICAL ERROR.

It did so badly that I even managed to torpedo the proven material that I closed with, stuff that (at this point) pretty much never fails. I didn’t deliver it with nearly as much confidence as usual. But if I had simply flipped the order of the material, the whole set probably would’ve gone much better. The streak would still be alive.

It’s a lesson I’ve learned before, but apparently needed to re-learn. George Carlin can come charging out of the bullpen and start heaving fastballs at the audience’s head:

George walks straight off of the street onto the stage. A crowd of 3200 people is going apeshit. A LOT of comedians would take that in, stand there looking proud and get every last clap and holler on tape before saying “Thank you. Thanks. Alright. How we doin? This is great!” But George is SO eager to get his first thought out, he’s trying to make them shut up so that he can do the bravest, boldest opening joke ever…

Any comedian with a joke like that would bury it inside of an act full of goodwill so that they wouldn’t lose the audience. George is DYING to tell it to a primo special taping audience. He OPENS with it.

Maybe someday I’ll be able to do that, too. But I am no George Carlin, and today is not that day.

Oh well. Time to start a new streak!

UPDATE: Why I don’t think “I just wasn’t funny” was the main factor (this time).

1. Very difficult for white people, that is, or people like me who are (and look) mostly white. Visually obvious ethnic comics, on the other hand — Asian, black, Indian, etc. — can very much do racial material, especially about their own ethnicity. [↩]

Share this post by...

•