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The Comedy Lifestyle Or, The Post in Which I Wax Poetically and Verbosely About the Pros and Cons of Being a Comedian

I have to apologize for the lack of blogging. It's not for lack of subjects - actually, I have a kind of reverse writer's block. There are so many things I'd like to write about that I have trouble picking one subject - there are tons of ideas fighting to be written about and I find it difficult to make one the victor over any other. Starting tonight, however, I'm going to try to tackle at least one topic a day and wrestle through this thicket of things about which I would like to be writing.

Let's start with this "comedy lifestyle" I'm still adjusting to.

The decision to devote my life to performing comedy was about passion; the decision to immediately make the move towards performing comedy full time was about pragmatism. I realized that spending 100% of my time on comedy was the best way to make comedy my job: I could work on more material, do more shows, and spend more time on my career with comedy as my full focus. There's also benefit of the push that comes from realizing that your welfare and ability to eat and pay rent is dependent on the quantity and quality of comedy that you do. On top of all of that, I knew that I wanted to make comedy my life, so why delay the inevitable? Why not just jump with both feet and pursue the thing I'm most passionate about with all the passion I have?

I'm proud to say that I'm a professional comedian. I make my living doing what I love. I'm most happy when I'm on stage performing comedy in front of an audience and I get to do that several times a day - what more could I ask for? The lifestyle is not without difficulty, however. The fact that I can't predict what will happen on any given day, that there will always be a surprise or something unexpected, is both a blessing and a curse. It makes things fun and exciting, but it's also tough to plan things in advance (which the "real world" requires you to do) and hard to feel or have any kind of security. There's also the negative side to the comedy industry - the constant rejection, the mistreatment of performers, the competitiveness (whether intentional or not), the drama and politics of working in such a relatively small community of professionals - all can be harmful to one's positive outlook. Add to that the unusual hours (I'm essentially nocturnal and practically don't see the sun at all in the winter), which has left me vampire pale (no sun) and unable to hang out with my friends who have "normal" jobs (as an entertainer, I work when everyone else isn't). My love life (not to get too personal) is also in shambles because, as I've told a few of my comedian friends, when I'm spending time on anything but my art (like with a girl, for example), I honestly feel like I'm cheating on comedy.

But that analogy also illuminates why I'm still doing what I'm doing. Comedy is my love, my passion, my reason for being. As a result, I can't imagine doing anything else. (Okay, I can imagine what it would be like to do something else, but I definitely wouldn't want to be doing anything else.)

That's why I - no matter how hard it's been or how hard it will be - will keep on truckin'. I'm excited to see where the road will lead, but - more importantly - already happy and fulfilled by the journey itself.

Comedian as Jester-Philosopher-Poet

"The jester makes jokes, he’s funny, he makes fun, he ridicules. But if his ridicules are based on sound ideas and thinking, then he can proceed to the second panel, which is the thinker—he called it the philosopher. The jester becomes the philosopher, and if he does these things with dazzling language that we marvel at, then he becomes a poet too. Then the jester can be a thinking jester who thinks poetically."

-- George Carlin on Arthur Koestler

Haikus

Tonight, I performed on "Haiku...a comedy show" at Jelloato in the East Village (for more information on the show click here). Each comic had to include at least one haiku in their set, but I decided to challenge myself and write an entire 10 minute set in which every joke either ended with a haiku or was a haiku itself. (I even re-wrote the "baby trick" I close most sets with to include several haikus.)

Here are a few of the haikus I wrote for the show:

AWKWARD CONVERSATION WITH MOM

(Adapted from a joke I regularly do in my act)

"I hooked up with my

girlfriends." "But that means make-out."

"I thought it meant 'fuck.'"

MICHAEL JACKSON AND BILLY MAYS TEAM UP IN HEAVEN

Jacko, Billy Mays:

"Oxiclean: when it matters

if it's black or white."

BREVITY

"Brevity is the

soul of wit," Shakespeare wrote, but

He'd still hate Twitter.

META HAIKU

Suppose the last line

Had six syllables, not five.

Would you notice it?

Comedians and/vs. Strippers

Last night, I was having a conversation with an audience member after a comedy show I was featured in and found out that she was an exotic dancer.  In talking about our careers, I realized that exotic dancing/stripping may be closer to stand-up than any other entertainment career.

From a practical and business perspective, the two are very similar.  Each week, both comedians and strippers call the clubs they work at, give their availabilities for the week ("avails"), and hope to get scheduled.  Comedians and strippers also work the same hours - at night, busiest on weekends - essentially, when "normal" people are looking for entertainment - in similar environments, performing in dark rooms for patrons who are drunk or drinking.  The clubs (both comedy clubs and strip clubs) make the majority of their money through alcohol sales, so both comedians and strippers are essentially conduits for these places to sell drinks (not that there is anything wrong with that!).

From a more philosophical perspective, the two also overlap.  Both professions are about revealing yourself on stage.  In the case of comedy, you get emotionally naked; in the case of stripping, physically.  In both cases, you are exposed in a way "normal" people are not, pushing you out of the mainstream of what is acceptable in society.

You might also consider that both jobs involve doing something "normal" people do already (make others laugh, take your clothes off), which sometimes causes others to conclude that they can do what you do for a living without any of the training through which you have gone.  These people don't realize how hard it is to do what you do - not only to just do it, but to do it well.

On the face of it, I think what seems like a glaring difference might also be a commonality.  The comedian is fueled by honesty - he/she creates comedy by revealing the truth about the world and/or ourselves.  The stripper, on the other hand, often hides behind a persona: he/she uses a fake name, wears a costume, partitions his/her "stripper self" from her "real self."  I think, though, that a comedian is different onstage than offstage - the comedian is a larger version of himself on stage.  You're not "you" but "YOU" - a distilled, magnified, highly focused rendering of who you are.  I think a stripper does the same thing, highlighting the sexual and physical components of themselves in a focused reflection of their underlying selves.  In both cases, the comedian and the stripper bring to focus important components of humanity that we often hide.

What do you think?  Do you think this comparison holds?  Do you think there are any other jobs with such similarities to comedy (comedians as doctors bringing truth medicine to the masses?  comedians as firefighters saving society from the flames of self-destruction?  comedians as mimes who talk?)?

New Jokes: Swine Flu

I promised a while back to start posting new jokes as I write them, so here goes (keep in mind that this is a work in progress):

"Swine flu isn't all bad.  I haven't seen a mariachi band on the subway in two weeks."

I'm Featured on The Apiary!

The Apiary, a legendary comedy blog, just published a lengthy interview with me on their home page!  I read the blog every day, so it really means a lot to me to actually be featured by them.

Check out the whole interview here!

Art vs. Commerce Or, The Cheeseburger Theory of Comedy

I still haven't decided what the core purpose of this blog is.  Should I just update everybody on my experiences as a full-time comedian?  Or should I get a little more theoretical and try to analyze comedy a bit?  Is this blog about the comedian or the comedy?  (I'm still not sure, so please feel free to weigh in in the comment section!)

With that in mind, I have been working on something for a bit, a theoretical discourse on the art-commerce spectrum as it relates to stand-up comedy.  I think I may be in withdrawal from all of the paper writing of 12 years in public schools and 4 years at Harvard, so I apologize if the language gets a little too academic for an informal blog post, but here goes anyway:

As someone who makes his living as an artist, it's always fascinating to me to consider the relationship between art and commerce.  I think all comedians fall somewhere on a spectrum between art (comedy purely for the sake of comedy) and commerce (comedy purely for the sake of making money).

The first thing to consider in regards to this spectrum is that the audience plays an important role.  Since the commerce aspect of art is fueled by those paying for it, the commerce side of the spectrum could also be labeled "comedy dictated by the wants/needs of others" while the art side of the spectrum could be labeled "comedy dictated by the wants/needs of the artist."

I think the best analogy for conceptualizing the scale is as follows: at the far end of the commerce side of the spectrum is a fast food cheeseburger.  It's cheap, it's easy, it sells well, and is extremely popular on a large scale.  However, it's not good for you nor is it really satisfying on any level below the topmost surface.  As we move along the scale, the cheeseburger starts to get less and less manufactured and its composition is less and less dictated by what will appeal to a large, generalized population.  At the center of the scale, we have a standard cheeseburger, one you might find at a good diner.  As we start to move farther and farther down the art side, the cheeseburger starts to get more and more experimental.  Instead of cheese, you might find an avocado.  Instead of a bun, you might find lettuce.  Instead of beef, you might find tuna or turkey or vegetables.  At a certain point, however, these cheeseburgers go from pushing the limits of what a cheeseburger is to being so un-cheeseburger-like that anyone who orders it will send it back because, at this point, it's just not a cheeseburger anymore.

I think every comedian should decide where they want to be on this scale.  If comedy is a cheeseburger, what kind of cheeseburger do you want to be?  I think, ideally, you want one foot on the art side and one foot on the commerce side, in such a way that you can straddle the middle point, putting weight on one or the other foot depending on the venue, audience, etc.  If comedy is something you want to do but not something you want to do for a living, then I think you have the freedom to be farther out on the art side.  (If comedy is a cheeseburger, you don't have to worry about people sending a cheeseburger back if you're not concerned with selling a lot of them or making a profit.)  Thus, the danger in going too far out on the art side is that it diminishes your ability to make a living as an artist.  More importantly, being that far out means you're too far away from the comedy the audience wants to see or expects - of course, you have to make strong artistic choices, but since the audience is so important to stand-up comedy, you can't completely alienate all possible audiences.  If you end up performing in an empty room, you're no longer performing stand-up comedy.

Still, I think more comedians tend to go too far out on the commerce side, ignoring the art and the craft solely in order to create commerce (make money).  Stand-up comedy is an art form and should be treated as such - it's a vehicle for creativity and expression.  If you're too far on the commerce side of the scale, you're denying the very essence of comedy, which is that it is an art.  Somebody too "arty" is still an artist, but somebody too "commerce-y" has forgotten what it is or ceased to be an artist.

I describe this spectrum and my thoughts on it because I think it's useful in conceptualizing certain theories or ideas.  

For example, people struggle to define "alternative" or "alt" comedy.  Instead of trying to nail down what it is, I would argue that it might be reasonable to simply define it as comedy a significant distance away from the midpoint towards the "art" side of the art-commerce spectrum.

Using the spectrum also makes it easier to explain the difference between the comedy scenes in the U.S.  In New York, there are more comedy clubs (centers of commerce) than Boston; it's also more expensive to live in New York, so the commerce aspect has to be pushed even harder in order just to survive as an artist.  As a result, Boston comics tend to be more art/less commerce than New York comics.  (This is not to say that New York comics are not artists, only that in relative terms Boston comics on a whole are "artier"/more art-focused than New York comics.  Both might be on the art side of the scale, but Boston would probably be farther out from the center.)

Another example: stealing jokes and doing hack material is an art/commerce question.  These comics are performing in front of audiences and getting hired - this is the commerce aspect of this issue.  (Commerce is the only reason these comedians resort to this - if it didn't help them get up in front of an audience or do better when performing for them, they wouldn't steal jokes or use hack material, as it would defeat the whole purpose of them doing it in the first place.)  According to this scale, you can't get closer to the commerce side without getting farther from the art side - I think we can agree that this works well for the stealing/hack example since these comics essentially cease to be artists when they engage in this kind of behavior.  Art is about creating - one can't be an artist without generating or creating anything.

I think a strong conceptualization of this spectrum is helpful in thinking about stand-up comedy.  Such issues as joke selection, playing to an audience, developing abstract material are all really art-commerce issues, so I think a greater understanding of this scale will lead to better, more well-informed choices.

Anybody want a cheeseburger?

New Bit: Memento-ing Movies

I think it would be cool to blog new jokes that I'm working on.  Definitely check me out live and see how these jokes play in front of real audiences!

There's an easter egg on the DVD of the movie, Memento, that lets you watch the movie in reverse.  How much better would movies be if you could watch all of them backwards?

* The Godfather would be about mobsters who come back from the dead and attend a wedding.

* Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory would be about a child who owns a chocolate factory, gives it to an adult, and then becomes poor.

* The Curious Case of Benjamin Button would be about a man aging normally living in a world where everyone ages backwards.

* Superman is about a superhero who saves the world, gets the girl, and then gets on a rocket and leaves Earth for his home planet, Krypton.

* Friday the 13th is about a man in a hockey mask who, after using his magic machete to reverse people's gruesome deaths, becomes a boy again and goes to summer camp.

* Rocky would be about a fighter at the top of his game who gets worse and worse and ends up a normal guy.  In other words, The Wrestler. 

Cartoon

Here's a photo comic Craig Carmean snapped of a cartoon comic Kenny Ortega (who's also a tattoo artist, so is great at sketching) drew:

(That's me with a quote from my act.)

MAD About Comedy

I finally uploaded a .pdf of my first major article in MAD Magazine ("If Different Comedians Told the Same Joke," May 2008) to the Press page of my website.  (You can also download the article here.)

I can't tell you how much of an honor and a thrill it is to be a contributing writer for MAD.  As a kid, I used to crouch over a decaying cardboard box at my grandparent's house in Brooklyn, poring over my dad's yellowing collection of old MADs.  Fast forward to the summer of 2005 - when I participated in MAD's six-week internship program - and I was now actually helping write and put together the magazine that informed the childhoods of both my Dad and me (not to mention countless others).  That summer, the summer of my freshmen year at Harvard, I learned not only about the technical aspects of comedy writing (the editors of MAD are all brilliant comedic minds and just watching them come up with ideas is a master class in itself) but that comedy writing was what I wanted to do with my life.  Combine that desire with a desire to perform and express oneself on stage and - presto! - you have a stand-up comedian.

The bottom line: as a kid, MAD influenced and shaped my sense of humor.  As an intern, MAD influenced and shaped my life.

Fire and Flood

One of the reasons I love stand-up comedy is because anything can happen during a show - and you're expected to be able to deal with it.  That's what makes stand-up so amazing as an art form - each time a comedian creates on stage, he/she has the opportunity to create something entirely unique for that specific audience.

Last week, I was truly able to see what "anything can happen" meant.

On Friday, as I approached HA! Comedy Club, I saw lines of fire trucks and police cars lining 46th St.  Nervous, I called Cisko (the manager and all-around great guy) at HA! in order to find out if the fire was at HA! and, if it was, if everyone was okay.  It turned out there was a small electrical fire in one of the showrooms, but everyone was safe, the theater was still intact, and that shows would continue as usual on Saturday.  After offering my help, I went back home.

I went back to HA! on Saturday (46th St. seemed so much quieter without the FDNY and NYPD blaring their sirens and crowding the street!).  For the first show of the night (the 6:30 PM show), I was slated to be the opening comic, the first comic to follow the host.  Right before I gave the host the light (the "light" being a wave of a cell phone in the back that signals the host to begin ending his set and get ready to bring the first comic up), I heard a huge "WHOOSH!" sound, followed by what sounded like waterfalls.  Rushing into the room, I discovered that water was streaming from what appeared to be the ceiling, soaking the host and his audience.

We re-directed everyone to the third showroom, a large theater, the only room untouched by fire or flood.  Since the host was also the manager, he had to attend to cleaning up the water (the source of which, we discovered, was a pipe burst due to the rapidly decreasing temperature outside).

Turning to me, he said, "You're the host now.  Let them settle for a second, then start the show."

I was now hosting a show in which the audience had just been ambushed by water.  Soaked and shocked, the audience was not probably thinking about what would happen to the rest of the show.

I got on stage.  "Thanks for coming to HA! the ride.  It's like the Earthquake ride in Universal.  Hope you enjoyed the first part of our adventure - now for the real show..."

Although previous omens would not have portended this, the show went really well.  The audience seemed to actually relish the action - what an amazing story to tell the family back home, right?  The comics also all came through, delivering great sets with sly winks to the deluge the audience had just been exposed to.

In the end, it was a great night - for the comics at HA!, who showed how professional, amazingly talented, and able to deal with everything they were; for HA! Comedy Club and its staff, which proved how incredible a venue it was by surviving fire and flood, fixing everything at an incredible speed (all showrooms were up and running by the next day!), and for making sure everyone was safe and enjoyed themselves; and for comedy itself, which proved once again that "anything can happen."

Over-the-Counter Comedy @ EastVille Comedy Club

Sam Morril and I have been producing Stand-Up Comedy: LIVE at the Sage Theater every Thursday at 10 PM at the Sage Theater (711 7th Ave., between 47th and 48th St.) for more than a year and a half now.  In order to expand and give people additional opportunities to see unbelievably good comedy for unbelievably low covers in New York, we have started co-producing a second weekly show every Monday at 9 PM at the EastVille Comedy Club (85 East 4th St., between 2nd Ave. and Bowery).  Over-the-Counter Comedy: A Cure for the Mondays features amazing talent (this week we had Todd Barry!) and is only $1 (the club's two-drink minimum still applies).

We sold out this week and have some INCREDIBLE special guests lined up for next week, so make sure to make reservations on our VIP reservation line (206.312.2954) to guarantee seats!

Records

It's funny how quickly things change.  A little more than a month ago, I posted about doing 21 shows in 14 days and how that was a personal record for me.  I just looked at my calendar and realized that, since moving to New York 9 days ago, I've performed on 26 shows!  Living in New York - which drastically cuts out most of my commute to comedy clubs  - definitely has its advantages!  

I should note that the reason the number of shows is important is not so much for the number itself but the amount of material I can work on and polish with the stage time I have available.  I look at every performance as a means for making my act and me as a performer better, so the more shows I do, the better my act and me as a performer gets.  Over the last 15 or so shows, for example, I've managed to add several new jokes I really love, tweak some classic stuff and add some solid laugh lines, and redo my on-stage look a bit.  I've also I also have been hard at work carving out a solid 30-45 minute feature set, firming up jokes, adding them to a master set list, and then putting them aside for a bit to free up room for firming up new jokes.  Yesterday at HA!, I did a 20+ minute set that went really, really well - I love what you're able to do in that amount of time in terms of character development and the relationship with the audience you're able to build.  As I gear up for road work and touring, I look forward to more and more of these longer sets!

Thanks to everyone who has come out to see me perform - you're the reason I'm able to do this crazy awesome job (can I even call it a "job"?) every night, so I can't thank you all enough!