What you should do to be better, like me

They say if you’re a comedian that you should write every day. So am I just supposed to start writing? What the fuck am I supposed to write? Something that some drunk laptop snooper will pull up late one night after I fall asleep and read and mock me for? Great. Let’s get right to that. Well I’m putting this on my blog so I guess it doesn’t even matter.

Free association typing is supposed to open up your soul and enter your subconscious. Supposedly there’s this deep trove of art or some shit in there. But apparently you have to write for 7,000 hours before you can get to it. Let me get cracking on that assignment.

Allen Ginsberg said if you write all day you’ll get to your feelings and your consciousness. All day? Really? Fuck dude. I don’t mind thinking all day but writing all day? Maybe I should train my mind to get better at writing for longer periods of time. I’ll turn into this evil little hermit writer who peers suspiciously over his shoulder while he writes and is always showing up a little late for chess matches. There. I changed “appointments” to “matches.” Maybe writing does make your thinking sharper. It’s working! Oh my god you guys it’s working! I’m fucking brilliant now! This only took two paragraphs! What a euphoria I swim in.

I don’t mind thinking ridiculous things all day, some of which are probably tedious or self indulgent or both. If I start capturing all that shit on paper it’s going to document and catalog my ridiculousness. But wait, the redeeming part: No one will care. That’s the best part. No one cares about the minutiae of other people’s lives. Not really. Not for long. Or even if they do it’s a small subset of people. It’s all about what Dave Eggers wrote in A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius. He talked about how many people he’d slept with and then published it in a book that sold millions of copies. Today, how many people in this country could identify how many people he’d slept with when he wrote that book? A few thousand? Maybe? And how many out of that group care? Or know him?

That’s why it’s okay to be brave in this world. Because we’re not going to be here for long. It really doesn’t matter. I mean, things matter. I’m not a nihilist. But it’s okay to do ridiculous things and say asinine comments because there’s no need to be prisoners of other people’s eyes as they said in the Ab Fab courtroom scene.
Four paragraphs in and now I’m writing the end of an 80’s movie? Really, with the schmaltz? That’s the thing with my mind. I always have the junior high bully palling around somewhere in there. Keeping an eye out for sap or hubris or commonplace ideas that have already been stated thousands of times. Nothing new under the sun right?

The bully character can be perceived as bad but I think a big part of him is good actually. Without the editor and the critic it can devolve into drivel. I don’t know why I fight sitting down and writing so much. This reminds me of the time in college when I didn’t write my paper on time and so instead I wrote a small essay explaining why I hadn’t written my paper. That didn’t go over well.

College was fun. College was the best. Everyone was so focused on finding the best things to laugh at. Coming up with ridiculous, funny comments. And just getting really drunk. The drunk part was awesome, I felt, because it allowed us all to let our guards down and really get to know each other. I’m sure the sober kids knew each other well too but I’m pretty certain we had more fun. Sorry, but that’s kind of how it went.

There were people in college that spent their weekend nights holed up in the top floor of the library. What? Why would you do that? So their GPAs were between .0 and .7 points higher than mine ultimately. So what? Are those 6 extra bags of money when you’re 45 going to justify the fun you missed when you were 20? I don’t think so.
But hell, why should I have an axe to grind against those kids? If you have an axe to grind doesn’t that make for good comedy? I feel like in the past 5 or so years I’ve had something of an axe to grind against my peers who just went and did what everyone else did. Like my friend Eva at Case Western. She was 22 or 23 and said she wanted to get married so she could “get her life over with.” She was kidding, but not really. Get your life over with? Really?

It’s not that I have a beef with any particular life path. I just have an issue with the people that don’t put thought into why they choose a particular path. If you don’t think about your life and what it should be like you’ll just drift along and do whatever the majority does. But why is the majority doing what they’re doing? Maybe the majority is sick of the status quo, like what’s happening in Egypt. Maybe everyone else is just about fed up with things as they are but they haven’t reached the critical mass to do anything about it yet. So don’t do what they’re doing because it seems like the proper thing to do.

Sit down and think about shit intensely and drive yourself insane like I do. I don’t really drive myself insane. I like the Dave Eggers idea of having a mind that is constantly churning though. He wouldn’t have it any other way. Churning is the ideal state. Constantly pushing, revising, trying out new ideas, failing, re strategizing, re thinking, and then just drinking with your friends.

I like that I have a day job and do comedy at night. When I was in high school my grades went up when I started working on nights and weekends. I think you have to constantly be putting your mind through a wringer. Constantly show it new things. That’s why I get frustrated when people write off any particular medium. “I don’t watch TV.” What? You don’t take advantage of one of the clearest forms of communication we have available to us, a form of communication that is often elevated to art? Well, that sucks. Sorry to hear that. Any medium can provide new ideas, new information, new ways of thinking.

I’ve got these two new apps on my iPhone that I’m excited about. One is a collection of poetry where you spin a wheel and it puts together a hodgepodge of themes and poems around those themes. The other is an art application that has paintings and bios from great artists spanning different eras. I don’t know shit about art. And I don’t like schlepping up to the Upper East Side on weekends so I don’t spend as much time in museums as I should. But I can scroll through 50 Cezanne paintings any time I want now. That dude did not fuck around. Picasso said basically that he was the father of art or some shit like that. Who knew?

I’m really excited about where technology is headed. Phones are now just constant educational devices if you use them that way. That’s why I don’t download games on my phone. I like spending downtime reading or creating or let’s be honest just doing a great deal of drugs and staring ahead into space.

Striking out at a couples resort

My friend Ally put together an August trip to Jamaica a few months ago. It's difficult to think of anything more depressing than traveling for vacation alone yet as a single person it can be hard to corral several people to go to the particular destination you're interested in at the particular time you can go. So I was glad someone else did the dirty work of organizing and comparing rates and all that time consuming, maddening activity that detracts from getting through Season 3 of Mad Men or rushing home from a bar to watch Jersey Shore.

As it turned out the trip involved five single guys and a couple. It was supposed to be four single guys and two couples but a break up just before the trip left us with the trip organizer as the only girl in attendance. The break up didn't bother me as I was glad to have another person along also not getting laid. But actually we weren't really worried about that, seeing as how we were going to be getting mad tail at the all inclusive, drinks are free 24/7 resort waiting for us in Ocho Rios. It means eight rivers or some shit like that. No one cares what it means. It's a place with a beach.

What we didn't quite think through well enough, though, is the fact that most people aren't going to book a trip to the Caribbean without having an active sex partner tagging along. I vaguely considered this potential stick in the spokes but felt confident that a few extremely intoxicated women “trapped” on an island would be more than willing to force my roommate to sleep in the lobby or out on a deck chair somewhere. If either of us had the opportunity to bring a girl back to our room it was understood the other would bury themselves in sand for the night or find some way to suffer through till morning hit and the bedded down woman awoke to consider her all inclusive walk of shame and whether or not the dalliance would be repeated. It was just a matter of using our charm to show the girls why they should be interested in extremely drunk men sharing a hotel room.

Well they weren't. The brilliantly beautiful daylight hours seemed to carry with them an unwritten code not to hit on women while they sunned themselves and desperately avoided thoughts of work. Exerting effort to fend off awkward advances would have strayed dangerously close to work territory. So we gathered piecemeal bits of sexual intelligence while pretending to read and shared them amongst ourselves, hoping to turn raw, uninformed data into a late night make out session with a well timed and strategically informed advance later that evening.

That might have worked a little better if the entertainment at the resort hadn't surpassed our understanding of how bad live entertainment can be. But once a show that drags on for two hours starts to suck, it has the auxillary effect of stifling the sociability and libido of every audience members in attendance. Except the kids. The kids do not give a shit. They just want to see balloons pop.

I've seen this slow crowd death happen in stand up and it most certainly happens at a resort where 250 captive audience members aren't quite certain what to make of what's happening on stage. “Alright, they started dancing (badly) to that song but then they left the stage a minute in. Why did that happen? Then after the song ended the lights came back on and there was no music and nothing happened for five minutes. Did someone fall ill backstage? Is the show over? Is this an unannounced intermission?” It's one thing to not enjoy a play or a movie. It's another to remain in a state of confusion for two hours and feel your emotions cycle from amusement to scorn to bemused detachment to wholehearted despair.

I can understand how three pairs of dancers missed every possible chance at successful choreography during every song they performed every night while all the while carrying an air that they're taking a well needed pause from sizzling careers on Broadway. I understand they don't have the training they need and we're the assholes for forcing poor people to dance for us. I'm always impressed with anyone brave enough to act or dance on stage. I don't fault them as individuals and as someone who tries his best to entertain crowds I know how tough it can be. But niceties aside, the politely constrained sense of confusion that quickly settled over the crowd each evening during these performances really hampered my game. That's what we're going with for now.

The other thing is that if you only have three single girls in a crowd of 250 people that means you've really got to play your cards right. If they shoot you down your only remaining option is to steal a girl from her boyfriend. The same guy she's sharing a hotel room with and most likely has had sex with in the past 12 hours. That's not going to happen.

Well, it could. What if the guy was being a total dick and she couldn't take it anymore and so he leaves the resort three days early, summoning the next available Chinese manufactured tour bus back to the airport? Now his hot girlfriend is all alone, stifling tears and determined to have a good time anyway. Just to spite him, the fucker. See now we've got a hot girl with an ax to grind and a suddenly lonely hotel room to fill. Just a matter of time before that scenario falls together. Years maybe, but it could happen. Alright, but you don't have to be a dick about it.

So no one got laid. But that's okay. We weren't there to get laid. We were there to relax, have a great time with friends, and take a break from our achievement oriented lifestyles for a while. But mainly to get laid.

The audience

Now that I've been doing stand up fairly regularly for about a year I've developed a sense of The Audience. I never thought much about The Audience before I started doing stand up. I just assumed that if you were funny everyone would laugh and that's that. But audiences are comprised of complex, multifaceted individuals with varying life experiences and motives. Any particular audience member may react one way to a joke one day and in a completely different manner on another.

An individual may laugh at something alone in her home or in a small group of friends when no one else is around. But obviously in a public setting we all place a discerning lens on our behavior to ensure we generally comply with norms and aren't singled out as bizarre or problematic. So to get people to laugh in public you have to navigate your way past the "This is how I'm supposed to behave in public" veneer most people have to get them comfortable and laughing.

In a comedy club, the audience has a predicament. As a single entity, which it becomes to some degree when the show begins, an audience has limited means to express its collective feelings. Each member can't shout out a response or provide feedback or the room would devolve into chaos. So the feelings an audience can communicate most clearly are approval, concern, and disinterest. As a comic, I have to respect the fact that they only have a few choices. Too often I see comics interpret silence as an indication that the audience wasn't smart enough to understand the joke. No, my friend, they got it--it just wasn't funny.

So for me I am trying to respect the audience's predicament, treat them as an equal, and build up a trusting relationship where they feel comfortable with me and natural in their own skin. Obviously this is one of the primary challenges of stand up. Hopefully demonstrating respect for the people sitting there listening to you will help build a successful evening.

Treating success and failure the same way

I'm grateful for the new MLB Network channel. They have more time to go in depth on baseball, well beyond the tired 3 minute SportsCenter clips. And watching spring training games in HD is such a nice contrast to the tiny box scores I used to get in the paper as a kid.

Anyway, I feel that most baseball players and managers give better interviews than athletes in other sports. They're more likely to go in depth about their challenges and show a healthy respect for the game. It's such a difficult sport no matter how good you are that an overall sense of humility is usually the rule. And humility typically leads to deeper thought and introspection than you'd see from some blowhard wideout on the Eagles.

Pitchers in particular learn how to be humble and resilient. Over the course of a career in the big leagues every pitcher will have down times and struggle. Which is when you really have to use your mind in a disciplined manner in order to persevere. As a commentator who had recently interviewed a struggling pitcher about his mentality put it:

"You have two choices--You can let it eat at you or you can learn from it. Last year he got caught up in trying to do too much, to control things he couldn't control, and letting things bother him more than they should. You have to start to treat success and failure the same way. You can't get too mentally up or down. Easier said than done."

A lot of this applies to stand up. No comic will have amazing gigs every night their whole career. A lot of it is going to be struggle and half empty rooms and punchlines that don't hit. But I'm trying to learn how to treat success and failure the same way. Do good, do bad, it doesn't matter. Keep getting out there and doing it day in and day out and focus on learning more than success.

In this vein here is a snippet from an interview with author David Shenk:

Question: How do we go about finding the genius in all of us? What steps we can take to unlock latent talent?

David Shenk: Find the thing you love to do, and work and work and work at it. Don't be discouraged by failure; realize that high achievers thrive on failure as a motivating mechanism and as instruction guide on how to get better.

Amateur arts

I did a set tonight and I was like at least the 15th comic to come on. The guy before me--it was his first time doing stand up comedy EVER and he struggled. It was quiet for like 3 minutes out of 5. He got a few laughs but overall people were pretty disinterested/uncomfortable.

Anyway, the SECOND he stops talking everyone starts talking to each other. Why wouldn't they? That just sucked for 5 minutes, I'm bored, let's talk about something else. I have such empathy for the crowd now. Anyway, I go up and people are still talking through the first joke. Some are listening, and they laugh. Then I do the second joke and I win over a few more people. Then by the time I got to my 4th joke no one was making a noise. I feel more proud of that fact than a laugh that any particular joke got. An hour and a half into an amateur comedy night I got everyone in the room to think "Alright this guy could be funny." At this stage that's all I really want. They're giving me a chance. It's a nice metaphor for my life overall. People in this new field are definitely giving me a chance.

Also, I have a newfound respect for arts at the ground level. It's one thing to go watch a Broadway show, it's another to see the star when they're starting their career and not many other people are in the audience. I think that's a vital component of what makes art art. There's something aspirational and hopeful about it when it's done well. When you watch people new in a field trying to get better you're buying into the whole artistic enterprise. You're implicitly stating through your attendance that the creation process is just as meaningful and enjoyable as the end product. That you don't require a major studio to green light your entertainment. It's more personal and intimate.

Having said that, parts of it suck. But it's good to pause to recognize things that may be transcendent.

Fandom. Almost rhymes with bantam.

Intense fandom over time seems to depurify what it is that made you a fan in the first place. You love a certain singer for whatever basic response they elicited in you but then that high goes away. So then you read about their background to feel closer to them. That intimacy feels nice for awhile. Sooner or later it becomes less about admiring talent and more about the fact that this person you’ll likely never meet is important to you. Why are they so important though? What does it mean if you really love an artist? At some point the connection requires more and more intricacy and work. You take pictures, but then the pictures aren’t good enough. You compare opinions with other fans and see who took the best pictures. Well, my picture was good but it wasn’t the best. If I was a better fan I would have gotten closer to the stage. In conclusion, music fans are crazy.

Graffiti

Have you guys noticed the graffiti that’s on the subway tunnel walls when you’re between stations? What insane person is going down there and doing this? Is someone just standing at the end of the platform with his buddy and he says “Fuck it man. We’re going in that pitch black tunnel that a train could enter any second and we’re spray painting drawings of our dicks. You in?”