Young MJ Says It's not too soon

I once was asked to be part of a gig for a retirement community in Marina Del Rey.    Being the laugh whore I am, I immediately said, “yes.”   The only stipulation, the booker said, was to “go easy on the content.”   I guess the thought was that a community of Jewish retirees would probably not find the funny in date rape and Holocaust jokes.  “No problem,” I said.  The Auschwitz Roofie bit I had been working on still needed a little polishing anyway.

When I showed up on the night of the show, the booker gave me the line up.  He had me going up last which, at the time, I thought sucked.  By the time I would get up it would be way past grandpa’s bed time and I thought I would be facing a dead crowd. (pun intended)  The general consensus was that everybody was going to be clean.  The old people were going to love us the way they love puppies and grandchildren and Bob Barker and we were all going to kill.  I still was not sure about my set list but I figured that I had time to figure it out as the show went on.  So I pulled up a stool at the bar, ordered a beer and proceeded to watch the show.

What happened next taught me a very valuable lesson in stand up comedy.  Comic after comic got on stage and gave the “family friendly” version of their comedy and comic after comic bombed miserably.   It was truly horrifying.  This crowd would not laugh at shit.  I actually heard one woman comment on how cold her lobster tail dinner was and she was sitting on the other side of the fucking room.  I decided then and there that if I was going to bomb, I was going to do it without censoring myself.

When they called me up to the stage, the room had about as much energy as Steven Hawking’s fast twitch muscle fibers.  I grabbed the microphone, looked out into the crowd and said, “This is a nice community you have here.  The door man said this is a good place to come to die.  I didn’t know he was talking about comedians.”  The audience roared.  It was like they were on their death beds; about to emit a death rattle and I came by and hit ‘em with the old defibrillator paddles.  “Clear!” was the thought that came to mind.  I stuck with it.  I talked about everything from Asians humping drinking fountains to penis enlargement pills to why retarded people always seem to have shitty haircuts and they loved it.  There was one joke I always had hesitation telling because it was about 9/11 but if there was ever a time to tell it, this was it.  I won’t get into the set up but the punch line is, “Why don’t we have a 9/11 Bowl?  Every year it could be the Jets taking on the Steelers.”  Funny and clever, huh?  No?  Well fuck you, the audience laughed.  All except for one asshole who had to yell out the most clichéd heckle of all time.  “Too soon!”  Too soon?  It was two thousand goddamned seven!  If six years was not enough time passed to make light of the worst attack in the history of American soil then there never will be.

After the show, many of the audience members were coming up to me, shaking my hand, asking me when and where they could see me again and generally kissing my ass.  As the line was coming to an end, the old guy who yelled “too soon” stood there, arms crossed, giving me the stink eye and said, “You disgust me!  You’re inappropriate, crass and you shouldn’t be given a microphone!  How could you make fun of 9/11?  You’re sick!”  It was the single greatest compliment I have ever received as a comedian.

Aside from the fact that I was not making fun of 9/11, rather I was commenting on the pervading commercialization of EVERYTHING, I was in disbelief that somebody could come to a comedy show and be offended, not necessarily by what was said, but by when it was said.  Like I needed to wait twenty years before he would laugh at my 9/11 Bowl bit.  This whole notion of “too soon” in comedy is something of an enigma to me.  Tragedy happens every day and I know time heals all wounds and all that shit but what about laughter being the best medicine?  I mean, if I had to pick a cliché, I choose that one.

This is stand up comedy, people.  Isn’t it the comedian’s job to tap into whatever the collective consciousness is of the audience and exploit it?  Call it?  Put it out there?  Let them know we’re all thinking the same thing and its okay to laugh?  If we have to wait for some designated time before talking about a certain subject, how much is that subject going to resonate with the audience?  Hard to get laughs these days with Magna Carta material.

I write this on the day of Michael Jackson’s memorial in downtown Los Angeles.  You won’t be hearing any MJ jokes from me.  Not because it is too soon; because it is too overdone.  Frankly, we’ve been hearing Michael Jackson jokes ever since we found out he lived with a monkey.  No, not Blanket – the other monkey, Bubbles.  Inevitably though, we will be hearing Michael Jackson jokes in all the clubs and inevitably we’ll be hearing some douche bag yell, “Too soon!”  I don’t suppose there is much we can do about that.  What we can do is to keep talking about things that are in the moment.  I haven’t heard enough Farah Fawcet anal cancer jokes.  What about Ed McMahon?  David Carradine was starting to make some waves before MJ took his thunder.  Keep up the good fight my fellow comedians.  It’s never too soon.  Go Seahawks!

Just You and the Mic

This piece is not for comedians.  This piece is not for comics.  I make the two distinctions because I’ve heard that there is a difference although I am not sure what they are.  I’ve heard the cliché that, “A comic says funny things.  A comedian says things funny.”  I think this is a misquote from Ed Wynn, Vaudevillian comic / comedian from yesteryear, to draw a distinction between how much of comedy can be attributed to verbal content and how much to acting and persona.  Another interpretation is that a true comedian can make the phone book hilarious.  Either way, it parallels the same self righteousness of an old fraternity adage I heard in college.  “Don’t call my fraternity a frat.  You don’t call your country a cunt”  How do they know what I call my country?  I know I’m digressing.  No, this piece is for anybody who performs and / or is interested in stand up comedy and has the same questions I had when I first got started.

Let me first start by saying that I am no authority.  I don’t have any TV credits to speak of.  No HBO specials on the way.  I have been doing comedy for just under three years which, in comedy time, means I’ve just started to sprout my proverbial comedic pubes.  However, I have been going out to comedy venues four to seven nights a week for the majority of my comedy “career” so what I do have is perspective.  Many conversations with stand-ups, both green and seasoned, have shed some light on some common beliefs and misconceptions that seem to pervade the world of stand up comedy and, in my opinion, all of them can be summed up with one rule of thumb:  Nobody knows what the Hell they’re talking about so don’t listen to anybody.  Groundbreaking, huh?  Sorry if you were expecting something more but it is true.  Almost every question you may have about stand-up can be answered with that statement.  Don’t believe me?  Let’s examine.

To bring, or not to bring: that is the question.  The great debate here in Los Angeles and many other large markets is whether or not to do bringer shows.  For those new to that term, bringer shows are shows that producers put on where they ask you to bring a designated amount of people in exchange for stage time.  Most stand-ups I’ve talked to cringe at the mere mention of it.  “I don’t do bringer shows,” is the common response.  “It ruins stand-up comedy by giving shitty comics stage time just because they bring a bunch of friends,” is another.  Well that, certainly, is one way to look at it.  Another way to look at it might be, “How can you ever expect to be a headliner if you don’t have any fans?”  Comedy is as subjective an art form as they come but I think most people can agree that the funniest people are not, necessarily, the most successful.  Unfortunately, show business is still a business and at the end of the day, what’s going to open more doors for you, how many asses you can put in the seat or that sweet joke you have about baby AIDS?  Nobody knows what the Hell they’re talking about so don’t listen to anybody.  If you don’t want to do bringer shows, don’t do them.  If you want to do them, do them…and work on that baby AIDS bit.

Question:  What’s better, edgy and blue or clean and clever?   Answer:  Who gives a shit.  Another common conundrum I see many new comics face is what style they should adopt.  On one hand you have the easy to attempt yet difficult to pull off, “R-rated” comedy.  On the other you have the less popular yet even trickier, “TV friendly” comedy.  I hear it go both ways.  “Audiences in these tough times aren’t going to like you if your jokes are about abortions and 9/11.”  Tell that to Doug Stanhope.  “You can’t really call yourself an artist with observations about Pop Tarts.”  Tell that to Brian Regan.  When it comes to style, a lot of advice gets thrown around.  If you do the open mike at the Laugh Factory here in Los Angeles and you curse, you immediately get thrown off stage.  Their argument?  You can’t curse on The Tonight Show.  My retort?  Fuck The Tonight Show, I’m just trying to get a showcase.  If you haven’t picked up on it already, I tend to lean towards the dark side.  However, I have the utmost respect for those that can be clean and funny.  Unfortunately, most new stand-ups are only doing open mikes and as anyone who has performed at an open mike in front of a crowd of cynical comedians will tell you, the only way you’re going to get good laughs from comedians is if the material is dark and strange and dark and did I mention dark?.  Put it this way, molestation by a transvestite priest in the basement of the Anne Frank house could be considered a hacky premise at an open mike.  Consequently, this type of feedback and reinforcement leads many comics to go blue when, by nature, they probably are not.  Nobody knows what the Hell they’re talking about so don’t listen to anybody.

It works for any question you may have.  This piece would not be a piece if I went into every single question a new stand-up may have, it would be a book.  So I’ll summarize.  “How often should I write?” Nobody knows… “Should I move to LA or New York or hit the road?”  Nobody knows… “How much time should I dedicate to hanging out at clubs and networking?”  Nobody knows… “When can I quit my day job?”  Nobody knows…  “Are stand-up workshops beneficial or a waste of money?”  Nobody knows… “Is there really a God?”  No.

Realizing that nobody really knows anything is actually quite liberating, both in comedy and in life.  Remember all those real estate “experts” that told people to buy in 2006?  You get the idea.  The concept of “Nobody knows” really dawned on me when I kept watching interview after interview of megastar stand-ups say the same thing when asked, “Any advice?”  Every single one of them says, “Just keep getting up as much as you can.”  I guess that is the only real answer to anything in stand-up.  The rest will sort itself out.  But what do I know?  If you got this far into the piece, you didn’t listen to the rule of thumb anyway.  Or maybe you did.  Damn, I hate paradoxes.  Go Lakers.