STAGE TIME Magazine: A Comic Is Born by Andrew David

I honestly don’t remember when I first decided to become a comedian. I can
remember wanting to be a comedian for much of my life, but plenty of people want to
be a comedian and never even pick up a mic. I can ballpark it pretty good when I
decided to go for it: sometime in college this past year. I just can’t remember the
actual occasion. After I graduated, people started asking me, “Well, what are you going
to do now?” which today means something than it did in the days of Dustin Hoffman
and plastics.

“I’m moving to New York to become a comedian,” I’d reply.

“Oh really? When did you decide to do that?” they’d ask. They really meant to say:
“You went to college and now you’re going to be a goddamn comedian. What gave you
this brilliant idea?”

“Oh just recently,” I’d say. “I’m gonna give it a try for a few years before I head to
grad school.”

And I’d say this knowing that I was underestimating how much work it takes to become
a successful comedian. It’s like saying, “I’m gonna work on Broadway for a few years
and then hit med-school real quick.” But somehow people bought it. Telling this to my
professors, parents, and my friends’ parents somehow relaxed them, and I was able to
quickly re-enter their good graces. If I had really wanted to be honest, I’d tell them
that I am going to become a comedian, and only after I have failed to the point of
being booed off stage at every comedy club in the city and beaten by the other comics,
then I’ll be going back to school.

So I’ve come to New York. Because this is where you go to become a comedian, it’s like
the great Harlem migration 100 plus years ago, except you don’t have to be black.
Comedy is huge here; there are new clubs opening in bars and cafés all the time. On
any given night there are likely to be hundreds of open mics. Maybe it was the success
of Seinfeld, or maybe it was the success of SNL, maybe it’s just that political humor is so
fucking easy these days, but for every hopeful blue-eyed baby comic who dreams of
getting on stage in this city, there is a mic and an audience waiting.

That is not to say that arriving here a month after graduating wasn’t intimidating. I had
never been onstage before, and I was going to make my first appearance in the city. It
wasn’t hard to find an open mic nearby. The Underground Lounge on 107th and West
End put me onstage right away. I got there early and figured I would work on my
material and have a few drinks before going on.

Five Jack and Cokes later I had a little trouble standing up. I think I literally fell into
the mic stand as I lumbered onstage, but at least I got some chuckles from the
audience. My set went terribly; I was obviously wasted and my jokes didn’t work. In the
seven minutes I had onstage, my entire future as a comic flashed before my eyes. No
one laughed at my punchlines or set-ups and when people did laugh, it was at things I
never expected.

At one point, I did a fly check that drew some pity-chuckles, though it quickly became
clear that the audience was laughing at me, not laughing with me. The problem was
that I had written my jokes a few months before, when I was trying to mimic the style
and timing of my favorite comic legends. After that first night, I realized that trying to
write jokes like Bill Hicks and George Carlin was impossible and so I made the difficult
decision to throw away nearly all of my material and start from scratch.

So I sat at my computer, thinking about my comedy.

“What is my style?” I thought to myself. “What do I do?” These questions, while
existentially terrifying, did not seem inherently funny. “I have to learn to relax,” I told
myself. “Fuck the audience and what they want to hear, I gotta write jokes that I want
to tell.”

“Fuck the audience” then became my mantra. I would simply write down whatever came
into my head, funny or not. I would not worry about who was going to be watching me
or what kind of humor they would expect. I also decided no more Jew jokes. I am a
Jew, and so are many of the comics in the city, and Jew jokes are still in many people’s
repertoire, but not mine. It’s not that I think they’re racist, it’s that I think it’s hacky to
milk the Jew thing after it’s been pretty much put to bed. In any event I figured my
new act would be edgy and not Jewey.

The next bit I wrote did not begin as a joke. It was an idea I had been working on in
essay form throughout college and when I looked back over my writing, it leaped out at
me as something that could work for comedy. Now billed as “Outer Space” in my
notebook, the bit has evolved quite a bit. Initially, I began the bit by discussing the
garbage problem in America. I discuss the overflowing landfills and the garbage
tankers that spew trash all over the Atlantic coastline. In the punchline, I suggest that
we shoot these huge trash heaps into outer space, or even at the sun, and we wouldn’t
have to worry about them anymore.

I worked out the wording and felt it would work onstage. Not necessarily, because I
thought it was funny, but because I had come up with I felt I could sell it. I felt I was
on a roll and I soon came up with a bit about politics and the Bush administration. I
had never written a political joke before, but armed with my new mantra I decided to let
it flow. It begins with the line, “Thank God, Bush enacted that energy policy because it
was getting hot outside.” Whether it was funny or not it seemed like something I could
sell. I felt it worked with my personality. I ended up getting about three minutes out of
the Bush administration. Too bad he got eight years.

At my next performance there were roughly seven people in the audience, six of them
other comics waiting to get onstage. I was relatively sober and armed with my new
material, and when my name was called I ran up on stage to greet the audience. It was
a bad crowd; no one had been laughing all night, but I was determined. For me I was
doing the Tonight Show with Johnny Carson; those people were gonna laugh even if I had
to get off stage and tickle them.

About fifteen seconds into my new stuff, I realized I would be falling short of the eight-
minute mark, and so I knew I had to work some other stuff in on the fly. I decided to
make my bits longer by adding little observations into the whole, literally trying new
jokes out as I thought of them, and the comics actually laughed. I improvised a bit
about gay men being able to say whatever they want to women, and it killed with six of
the seven member audience. Once that joke worked, all my other jokes seemed funny,
and I had ‘em. For the first time I felt like a comic.

I got off stage and felt like I was Warren Beatty after screwing Madonna in the 80s.
Just without the Dick Tracy hat. I flew to the bar to meet some friends and celebrated
my good night. Now I’ve been told by other comics never to give yourself too much
credit or too much self-congratulation, but I guess I couldn’t help it. Those seven
people made my career; they made it seem possible and the next day I immediately
booked myself for the following week and got back to writing.

The next week I bombed, worse thaan before, but this time it didn’t matter. I knew I
had done it once, and now the bug had bit me. But the best thing that happened in
that first week wasn’t just getting to go on stage and getting laughs, it was what I had
learned. There are plenty of terrible comedians who make a living at comedy.

I suspected this before I came to New York, but never really understood. I have seen
headliners that stink, people who insult the audience or people who use falsehoods to
set up their jokes. There are people who bring boom boxes onstage and people who
flip out when they flub a punchline. Now I am no one to disparage someone’s style, but
all I can think when I see a bad comedian making money is, “If they can do it, well
then so can I.”

I learned the second lesson from being onstage. People didn’t laugh if they thought I
was trying to be a comic. As clichéd as it sounds, whenever I loosened up and was
myself, that’s when the audience started getting my material. If I am going to make it
in this business it’s going to be on personality.

Personality gets you in good with the audience, the club owner, the booker, and
especially talent agents. Even if the audience doesn’t like your personality, you’ve got
to give them something real, so they believe what your saying. The last thing you want
to do is make them believe that you aren’t legit, or that what you’re saying and doing
is somehow an act. Because even though comedy is an act, it has to look natural.

Since my first few performances I have been able to get gigs at the New York Comedy
Club and the Laugh Factory. I am still pretty sure that I’ll be keeping my day job for a
while, but I could not be happier with my progress. I write everyday now, coming up with
new material is easy when you begin to learn your own personal shtick. But above all
else I can say that comedy is fun when it is going well. There is nothing that I would
rather do and no job could be better for a wise-ass like me.