So yesterday I had to perform an original joke that I wrote in front of my teacher, The Professional Comedian, and all of my classmates, AKA “We Who Are Now TOTALLY Convinced That We Absolutely Are. Not. Funny. At All.”

I pretty much spent all of last week having an extended nervous breakdown, dying 1000 tiny deaths every day and feeling as though my skull was slowly pulling itself apart into painfully sharp pieces that then lodged themselves deep inside my brain.

I was completely unprepared for this class. I felt that because I am comfortable performing in front of people, and because I can make people laugh pretty easily, and because I write a humor blog that I would of course be an immediate expert at stand-up comedy.

It was a bit tough, the fitting of My Inflated Head through the classroom door last week. However I soon realized that, deny it as I might (and Oh, how I did!), I really had no choice but to admit that I was going to suck at stand-up comedy for a while, until I actually learned how to do it. And since I would rather swallow jagged shards of broken glass than ever suck at anything, this has proven to be quite a challenge.

Especially when I tried my very first joke out on my husband, and there was Total. Silence. This did not bode well for either of us, nor did it do anything to sway me from my belief that all of my joke writing attempts up to that point warranted Immediate Death By Stoning.

However I did survive last night, and my joke even got some laughs. So when our IT department gets back from its ski vacation, and if I can watch the recording without hemorrhaging from the eyes, we might see what we can do about adding some video to the site.

As of Monday night the clock has officially started ticking, counting down the hours until The Moment I Have To Get Up On Stage In Front Of Hundreds Of People And BE FUNNY! (Otherwise known as March 26th.) On this day I will take the stage at The Punchline and perform a 4-minute routine I’ve created, and hope against hope that the nice people in the audience will at least pretend that they think I’m as funny as I do.

All of which is great, except that seriously? I have never felt less funny in my entire life. I have to write one joke for next week’s class-one!-and it’s as if some external invading force has leached all of The Funny out of my bones and replaced it with Humor Kryptonite.

Every idea I have is immediately smacked down by my internal White Hot Hammer Of “I cannot believe you think that’s funny!”

I open my mouth to speak, and instead of words, giant slimy slugs tumble out, which I guess is nice in that it saves my tender, precious words the trouble of being born into this cruel, cruel world, and then shriveling up and dying a painful, humor-less death.

I go to the keyboard to type and from my fingers fall huge lead weights, each one burdened by the weight of all my Un-Funny Ideas.

It could be a really long six weeks.

So…how was your day?

Image courtesy of FreeDigitalPhoto.net.

Because yesterday I attended my very first class in stand-up comedy, taught by a real live stand-up comic who has actually made a living by being funny in person, as opposed to just documenting their random mental snarkiness on the Internet for free.

This is very different from the “live” situations in which I normally place myself, such as teaching a Spanish class. In those situations everyone is more than happy to support the illusion that I am actually funny, since they know that if they don’t I could very well say that I’ve just taught them the proper way to ask, “Would you be interested in doing business with our company?” when in truth they will have just proclaimed to their potential business partner that “You are a large monkey filled with giant, hairy balls of cheese.”

It was also different because, as someone remarked, most of us there were used to being the funniest person in the room. But now, there we were in a room FULL of “the funniest people in the room.” That, plus the fact that out of 17 people, only 5 of us were women, made for an interesting dynamic, to which people tended to react in extremes. Either they hung back and didn’t say anything, or they reacted in manner which can only be described as, Whipping It Out Onto The Table At The Slightest Provocation.

It is hard to be a creative person, hard to consistently offer up little pieces of your soul to others never knowing exactly how they’ll be received. And I fully admit to having my own fair share of ego.

But I don’t think that’s any excuse for, when you are three men working in a group with one woman, and the woman notices the three of you completely taking over the exercise for which you all are responsible and so speaks up to make sure that you include some of her material too, that you treat her either as an hysterical, irrational female, or a bitch, and condescend to include one of her jokes with the attitude of someone “throwing her a bone” so that she’ll just shut up already and let The Men get on with the real work.

However I am finding quite a bit of comfort in the saying that, “The pen is mightier than the sword.” Because I? Am the one with the blog, a highly-trafficked piece of cyber-space where I can state, firmly and unequivocally that clearly, I am Just Too Much Woman For Them.