Harnessing the healing power of snark
As you may recall if you’ve been reading this blog for a while, last spring I participated in Jeff Justice’s Comedy Workshoppe. For graduation we each performed a 4-minute routine on stage at the Punchline, and while I don’t yet have the video I do have the audio, which I have handily turned into my next podcast offering.
Enjoy!
Last weekend we went to the Tennessee Aquarium which is, without a doubt, one of my absolute favorite places on earth.
As we were innocently walking through the doorway into the exhibit of seahorses my husband suddenly grabbed my elbow and said, very calmly, “Just keep moving.”
I was instantly alert, because that is his code for informing me that, “HOLY F*&%, THERE IS A SNAKE IN THE IMMEDIATE VICINITY!!”
Once he had deposited me at a safe distance he went back to check out the snake, because he is a guy, and guys think snakes are cool, and apparently there’s nothing anyone can do to change that. As a matter of fact, when I was telling this story to a friend of mine this weekend he said, “Cool. Did I ever tell you about the time that I kissed a snake?” (Me: Hm, really? Great. Never touch me again.)
There was quite a crowd of people surrounding the aquarium worker who wanted to touch the snake, despite the fact that every few minutes she would occasionally broadcast such helpful alerts as, “Make sure you stay away from its head.”
My husband, of course, was very excited about the whole experience and wanted to tell me all about it when we met up again.
I had a hard time listening due to the fact that he had let the snake coil its tail around his arm, ON PURPOSE, and not only that, but he had actually enjoyed the entire experience.
Me: Why did they make you wash your hands before you touched the snake?
My husband: They wanted to make sure I didn’t give it any germs.
Me (dripping with sarcasm): Oh yeah, wouldn’t that be a shame?
Last week, the final week of our comedy class, was grueling. We met Monday and Tuesday nights in order to hammer out the final version of our routines, and even though I was a lot better at the writing, it was still a lot of work.
After the whole Having To Swallow My Pride thing the writing was actually the hardest part for me, because I have what I would call a very hedonistic approach to writing. I love words, especially adjectives and adverbs. I love sentences that run on for an entire paragraph, building up in a gradual crescendo that leads to a big humor payoff at the end.
But if I learned anything over the past 6 weeks, it is that writing for stand-up comedy is definitely more of a “wham, bam, thank you ma’am” proposition.
Last night I successfully performed my very first stand-up comedy routine at the Punchline here in Atlanta. Even though I did start to lose all feeling in my hands and feet two people before I was supposed to go on, and even though after 6 weeks I still could not work the microphone correctly, I did remember all my lines, and people genuinely laughed.
It was a pretty huge experience for me, and I still haven’t taken everything in yet. So I’ll be back with a more detailed story after I’ve processed things a bit more and figured out how to get all of the spray wax out of my hair (more on that later).
But I did want to let you all know that I survived, and to say THANK YOU!! to everyone who has been so nice and come by to leave me encouraging comments, and to tell you about this one way cool thing that happened last night.
As I was standing outside the Punchline waiting for the show to start, I looked over at the people standing in line and who should I see but the amazingly awesome Miss Doxie, who it turns out is good friends with one of the other members of my class.
After the show I went up to talk to her, and even though she was having a wonderful time preparing for a fun evening of Not Being Accosted By Me, she was totally gracious and friendly, and did not at all mind the fact that I and my spray-waxed, 1980’s-style, frizzy, bushed-out, bouffant-ish hair (pivotal to one of my jokes) came up to confess our undying blog-love for her. Miss Doxie TOTALLY ROCKS!
By the time weeks 3 and 4 of our comedy class rolled around, it was time to get down to work. I’d written and performed about 2 or 3 original jokes by this time, and even if I did not have my classmates rolling on the floor with laughter, I’d realized that it was highly unlikely that I’d actually contract Death By Sucking.
This was hard work. Especially on the days when I’d written what I believed to be the most brilliant piece of comedy ever known to man and the teacher responded with comments like, “That’s the third time I’ve seen that joke and I still don’t get it.”
It was especially hard for me because I so Want To Be Right. And I believe that I am right, and that if I just will it hard enough I can convince the world that I Am Right and They Are Wrong. That my work is funny, and they should be laughing at it. (I’m sure you can imagine how well that worked.)
I finally realized that I had a choice here. I could be “right” and miserable, or I could be willing to be wrong, willing to learn what actually works in comedy, and learn how to write jokes that actually would make people laugh. But I really had to think about this before I could decide. Like, for months.
But I finally decided to swallow my pride (Important Side Note: Pride? Does not taste good, even washed down with regular Coke) and admit that I was going to have to be bad at this for a while before I could learn how to be good. And, I was. And, it sucked. And, I did not die.
And then, one day, a miracle occurred. I wrote a joke, and lo, it was funny, and the class, they did laugh. And it was very good.
Especially since the teacher is just as much of a smart ass as all of us, and every time we grudgingly came around to doing things his way he’d say things like, “Hm, it’s almost as if I know what I’m talking about.”
So I’m off now to the Dress Rehearsal. If I can still form a coherent thought when I get back, I’ll let you know how it goes.
The week before I had to perform my very first original joke could be summed up in this way: Extended Nervous Breakdown Accompanied By Painful And Prolonged Migraines.
This was the scariest thing I’d had to do since I had to take my 3-hour oral exam/thesis defense for my Master’s Degree, discussing abstract, graduate-level literature and linguistic concepts in an entirely foreign language. But at least for that I had 4 years of college and 2 years of graduate school backing me up. Whereas with the comedy performance I was pretty much on my own.
And let me tell you something. When you are standing so far out of your comfort zone that it’s not even a blip on the radar, feeling as though you’re about to dive headfirst into the Grand Canyon Of Suckiness with nothing to break your fall, Believing In Yourself and Focusing On The Positive can just go ahead and suck it.
The problem was that I knew what was coming. While I have gotten pretty good at writing humor that people read, I had finally been forced to admit that truly, I did not have the first friggin’ clue as to how to write a joke that was funny when it was spoken. I’d been made painfully aware of this fact by the numerous times that my carefully crafted written jokes landed with all the grace of the Hindenburg plummeting to its fiery doom when I attempted to transfer them into a “humorous” Toastmaster’s speech.
So I was pretty sure that this class was going to be like the military, in that we and all of our old notions about humor would be broken down, in order to be reformed into something shiny and new. (I mean, I sort of assume that’s what they do in the military-I don’t have any personal experience in that area. I’m such a wuss that the only military that would ever take me in would be “The Army Of People You Send In When You WANT To Be Conquered”.)
And I was right. Since everyone was still pretty much operating out of defensive mode, and since we’d received no actual instruction in joke writing at this point, most people tried to go for the “clever”, easy laugh-sight gags, puns, references to sex. (I played it safe by poking fun at my big, bushy hair.)
And after each of us had performed we had to remain standing in front of the class while he critiqued us what (if anything) worked, and what did not. And so the break(ing) down began.
I think for me, the most interesting thing about taking this stand-up comedy class, besides the process of learning how to write spoken humor that will actually make people laugh, has been all of the personality “buttons” that this experience has pushed in me.
And so, being who I am, I decided that it wasn’t enough that I had to-in just 6 weeks-learn how to get up in front of 281 people and deliver a 4-minute, funny, stand-up comedy routine. I decided that this would also be The Perfect Time to take apart various pieces of my psyche, mess around with them for a while, and then attempt to put all the pieces of my mind back together again. Because really-who wouldn‘t?
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.
