Prior to last week, the bravest thing I’d ever done was save the life of the family cat. I was fifteen, and one night the little guy was alone in the dining room playing with my mom’s purse. Somehow, the straps had wrapped around his neck in a way that when he tried to escape, they constricted. I heard the cat wailing and rushed in and freed him.
You’re welcome, Toonces, but saving your life is no longer at the top of my “most courageous acts” list.
It has been overthrown by five minutes of telling jokes in front of a group of strangers in the back of a Culver City coffee shop. My first open mic performance probably would have gotten more laughs had I included the story about the idiot cat, but I got a couple chuckles nonetheless, and for that I was overjoyed.
I’m obviously exaggerating on how courageous this act was, although Jerry Seinfeld put it best when he said that more people are afraid of public speaking than dying – meaning “at a funeral, more people would rather be in the casket than giving the eulogy.”
If anything, trying stand-up was like watching your older brother play a video game and wondering if you could ever be as good as he is. And then he hands you a controller and you say, “Okay, what are the buttons?” You can’t expect to beat the game on your first try. Blanka has to kick the shit out of you 38 times before things really start to click.
I was well aware of this analogy last week when I took the stage for the first time. Due to all of the horror stories I’d heard about comedians when they were first starting out, I expected disaster. I’d anticipated crickets. (Oh, that’s where he got the title.) Because of this, I was not thrown off when some of my jokes didn’t land laughs. I didn’t acknowledge my embarrassment or blame the audience. Instead, I reworded a few setups and changed my delivery on a couple punch lines and tried again the next night.
Result: more crickets.
Begrudgingly, I scrapped my bits about petting zoos and coming out of the closet via Facebook and replaced them with new material. (RIP, by the way. Those bits will be funny someday. But right now, I just don’t think we’re meant to be together.)
Two days later, I participated in a workshop (great feedback!), followed by a 4-minute set a few hours later in which I froze up midway through and had to search through my phone’s notes app for the set list (great fuck-up!).
I scrapped my opening joke, reordered the set list, and rehearsed over and over.
A few days later, I was back where I started at the open mic in the Culver City coffee shop. I had my best set yet, and I couldn’t wait to do it all again. I was confident. I was blissful. I was convinced that I was prepared to move past “anticipating crickets” to the next level – whatever it may be.
Then I remembered that first night when I struck up a conversation with a female comedian who’d been doing open mics for two years. She said my first-time jitters were cute. Her confidence was almost unnerving.
Cut to two hours later when she went on stage. I’d gone up an hour earlier and was interested to see how a veteran like her would perform. You can imagine my surprise when she didn’t have any punch lines. She had a trite bit about her boyfriend refusing to go down on her, and then she closed with two jokes she’d written that night riffing on other peoples’ material.
Despite spending two years on stage, this woman had no regular routine. No go-to joke to save herself. Hell, she didn’t even look like she wanted to be up there. She looked surprised by the bombing, uncomfortable and embarrassed.
And my newfound confidence – which had only been in my possession for about ten minutes – was quickly sobered with this realization: Don’t forget the crickets, cat man, because they sure as hell won’t forget you.
For more from Hank…
Past work on FlipCollective.com.
To follow him on Twitter.
To befriend him on Facebook.
To send him an email.
