Some comedians love crafting a joke. For them, it’s a technique, it’s about precision, and it’s beyond just creating the perfect set-up/punch. But jokes aren’t what I love about stand-up.
I didn’t grow up watching stand-up or even listening to it. In fact, the first time I go to a show is when I’m already in LA. It’s my second week there, and my friend Tim invites me to the Comedy Store. I’m 23 then, still a Christian, still a virgin, still uncertain of the world beyond evangelical Christianity.
That was nearly ten years ago now, but that night still sits vivid and heavy in my memory. Ian Edwards went up. Ari Shaffir. Benji Aflalo. Bobby Lee. And then there was Chelsea Peretti. My friend Tim sat in the front row, and Chelsea asked if he and his brother were together. “We’re brothers,” Matt said. It came out that Matt was visiting from Jersey. Chelsea said, “Figures. You look like you’re from Jersey. Actually you don’t. You look like you’re a Malibu honey with your Sperrys and your beard.” She looked back at Tim. “And look at you. How can you be comfortable in those pants? They’re so tight. I literally just saw your dick. That isn’t supposed to happen. I shouldn’t be able to see the whole outline of your dick. Are they jeans or cotton?” I sat behind Tim, so I couldn’t see his face. I wondered if he was blushing, if he regretted sitting in the front. Chelsea moved on to other jokes but repeatedly went back to Tim’s pants and the undeniable protrusion of his penis. When she left the stage, she said, “I hope you guys had a good time,” and then looked at Tim, “except for you. I know you’re a lost cause. Sorry.” In the shadows, I spent Chelsea’s whole set biting my fingernails. I was not used to people talking about other people’s dicks, and I couldn’t decide if I was mortified or just enamored by Chelsea. She seemed so strong and brave and almost otherworldly.
A couple comedians later, Tim and his brother got up to leave. It was after midnight, and Tim had work in the morning. I expected them to pay for their drinks and then come back to say good-bye, but eventually I realized they were just gone.
At 12:30, more people started filing out, and finally it was just me and a woman in her 30s named Carol Ann. After the probing of various comics who were all, at that point, using their bare audience to provide the material, I felt as if I knew Carol Ann relatively well. Originally from upstate New York, she lived in LA for a while, then went to San Diego, but had just returned to LA. She sold Acuras. Before coming to the Store, she spent 450 bucks at an adult pleasures store. I did not know one could spend 450 dollars on sex toys. The dildos must be made of gold. Carol Ann was a much easier laugh than I was. Her body language was open. Her minimum two drinks contained more potency than my diet Cokes.
The last comic was a man named Don. He was in his mid-50s, adorned in t-shirt and sweatpants, and he immediately started throwing questions at Carol Ann and me. What is this? I asked myself. Is this still stand-up if it’s just this guy asking us where we’re from? Is this stand-up if it’s just me and Carol Ann in a sea of chairs? There were a few guys who sat in the back, silent and almost wholly masked by shadows, but Don said either they were asleep or they were comics.
When Don asked me questions, I did not respond with Carol Ann’s chuckling openness, her delight in being a player in the game of crowd work. I was guarded, and Don seemed to love it.
“You got a boyfriend, sweetheart?” he asked. “No.” Carol Ann called over, “Good for you.” Don continued, “I like you, Rachel. There’s something about you. If you let me, I would take you behind that curtain right there and lick up your pussy real good. I would go after it until you came.” This inspired a new set of questions in me. Did people actually talk like that, or was Don just trying to be funny? What was the proper response? I said, “That’s a lovely offer, Don.”
Don closed out the night, and it was after 2am when I walked down Sunset Boulevard, feeling wildly alive. What happened in that dark room, the experience I shared with people I would never see again, so much of it felt foreign, and yet it also felt as if I’d arrived.
Last month, at a show in Chicago, the first comic bombs so hard that the hosts apologize to the crowd. I’ve never seen this before, so openly acknowledging that someone has bombed, and from the stage. The tone is set now, and it’s rough. Later the hosts offer to buy people drinks - a tequila soda for the guy in the front, a dirty Shirley for the woman in the second row. They’re trying to turn things around, but the comedian who bombed had been so angry, and his words linger. It’s a small crowd, and they’re not bouncing back. But then another comic, Kristi, gets up. At first, it’s unclear if what she’s doing is a character or not. She says she’s trying to get a clip for her agent to send to SNL. She says that she knows it’s been a rough show so far, but if we could just act like we’re all having a blast and that she’s super funny, that’s all she needs for a good video. She has the crowd practice laughing. She instructs a woman to call out, “I love you, Kristi!” and for another woman to say, “No, I love her!” Kristi changes her mind and says the second woman must slap the first. She brings up one of the women to instruct her in doing a stage slap. She has a man in the crowd, Sebastian, he tells us, film her with his phone, and she keeps changing her mind over landscape or portrait. It is weird and delightful, this set, and in the back, I’m smiling to myself. What Kristi’s doing reminds me of my love for comedy, how it can take these various forms, how there is room for weird stuff I hadn’t even considered. When it’s my turn to go on, I tell the crowd that they will never forget this night.
I find Kristi on instagram and ask if she’d be willing to chat. I ask her if she does that character all the time, if it’s a permanent part of her act. She tells me she does straight stand-up half the time, lately, and that she hadn’t intended on doing the bit she did. “But the room needed something different,” she tells me. And she’s right. She turned the room around. She made everyone feel like they were part of something new and bizarre.
Something in Kristi reminded me of my friend Simon back in LA. He has an uncanny ability to make it seem like he’s coming up with the jokes right that second. He feigns a breakdown, but is he actually faking it? And this is what’s so exciting about Simon - the audience feels like they’re witnessing something truly special. They’re not seeing a comic tell the same jokes they’ve told a hundred times before; they’re seeing someone lose their mind, but the insanity is channeled into this lovely tornado of energy. Simon sings about his job at a delicatessen, where he spent his time “slicing away, slicing away.” People turn to their friends, asking themselves, Did he just come up with that? And even after watching Simon dozens of times, hearing him talk about the extra-extra-thin slices of prosciutto, he manages to make it fresh every time. People leave and remember Simon.
In LA, sets are short. I don’t know if I ever did more than 20 minutes when I lived there. And with an eight minute set, a ten minute set, I felt pressured to have all my jokes tight, to stick to my script, to avoid risking anything that could go off-course. But in the Midwest, there is time to play. And in this playtime, I think, magic is more likely to happen.
A few months ago, I do forty minutes at a packed winery. I talk about being bisexual, which I don’t often talk about, because, first, I feel like everyone’s bisexual these days, and secondly, I’m married to a man, so does it even really matter? But. I have a couple jokes about it, and this winery crowd is unruly, and so I go for it. I start talking to a woman named Jean. She’s gotta be in her 70s. Later I find out that she did not know there would be a comedy show at the winery; she and her husband came for wine and decided to stay and were somehow put in the front row. I chat with Jean during my set. I chat with another woman across the room, Linda, who’s maybe 50 and looks pissed at everything I say. I propose a threesome between myself, Jean, and Linda. I ask who would pay to see that, and who would pay to not see it. I try to return to material, but no one wants anything except more of me talking about Jean and Linda and our beautiful future together as a throuple.
Am I delusional to believe that this memory is a gift? That people will look back and remember that rowdy night at that winery where the comedian at the end talked about hooking up with that grandma?
I’ve heard people say that comedians are like preachers, uniquely gifted tellers of truth, exposing the reality of the world to itself. I would not agree. I don’t think comedians are, by default, bad people, but I certainly don’t think we are good people, either. Of all the professions one could pursue, many create more tangible good in the world than people telling jokes into a mic. And maybe some comedians, certain famous comedians with a wide audience, have a platform to share their ideas, to inspire people to think differently about sexuality or race or feminism or what have you. That’s why people liked Nanette, right? But firstly, I do not have a million followers on Twitter, and secondly, the thought of having a message behind my jokes sounds like an impossible feat. I can barely write clean jokes, let alone jokes that rattle people’s preconceptions about immigration. And so I do not go to bed every night thinking, wow, it’s a good thing I’m doing this.
But when I think about that very first show I went to, back at the Store, what drew me in was not jokes. It was crowd work. It was the fact that what happened that night could never ever be replicated. Never again would Tim sit in the front row of that club, wearing those pants, with Chelsea Peretti calling him out for it. Never again would Don offer to eat me out (though I’m sure the offer has been extended to many other women in subsequent sets). So although I don’t believe that, as a comedian, I am a beacon of truth, and though I do not possess an incredibly large following who take to heart whatever I say on podcasts, I do believe I am in possession of a small amount of power. For ten minutes, twenty minutes, fifty - for whatever time I am given, I can try to give you a memorable time. A magical time. In that bar, basement, club, it’s all of us together, and it’s never going to happen again.
"is she really hitting on that grandma?"
Love your writing. Keep it coming!!!
Thanks. Insightful and a lot of fun to read.