Last night, I broke my comedy cherry

Last night I got up in front of a room full of comics and did my first *evar* open mic set. Here’s what I said, adapted from this (if you don’t care about the set, skip down for some specific thoughts).

When I was 18, I moved to Arizona for college … and within one semester had completely failed out of school. The only things I had going for me at the time was that I was working the register at a Jack in the Box and dating a girl who was a senior in high school and living at home with her parents. So to say that it wasn’t a real positive time in my life is sort of an understatement.

Since Arizona wasn’t working for me, I decided to move back to Philadelphia. I had barely enough money to cover the gas for the drive so my brilliant plan was to sleep in my car in rest areas so I wouldn’t have to pay for motels.

Now if you’ve ever done any long distance driving, you’ll know that this was just a disaster. I couldn’t sleep for more than an hour before I’d wake up sweaty and disoriented. And I should have know just how bad I was doing because every time I’d walk into a truck stop, and you have to remember that it’s all long distance truckers and Midwestern families out there on the interstates, I’d get these looks of horror. I’d come staggering in, surrounded by my own personal cloud of failure, and the poor clerks would have to say something like “sir, if you’re going to shop here … you’re going to need to put on some shoes.”

The other thing about long distance driving is that it’s fucking boring. So, and this is really embarrassing, but I had started masturbating while driving to pass the time.

At first the novelty of it was really exciting but soon it became just as mechanical as everything else I was doing. I’d wake up, get on the road, eat half a bag of chips, rub one out, drive for another two hours then fall back asleep.

So I was just outside of Chicago and I was going through the motions of trying to pleasure myself and the car was shaking so bad that the napkins I was using to clean myself up had slid off my leg and onto the floor. And I sort of finish and realize that the cd player, which was on the seat next to me, isn’t just skipping but it’s actually bouncing up and down and the steering in the car has gone to shit.

I pull over and go to get out of the car and I have to sort of tuck myself back into my pants but when I get out of the car, there’s a six inch bulge in my tire. And I’m standing there trying to work myself through the steps of changing my tire when this guy pulls up behind me. He takes one look at me and gently moves me out of the way before getting down and changing my tire for me.

And then he did something that I’ll never forget. He put his hand on my shoulder in this very fatherly way and said, “You’re going to be ok. Just get to wherever you’re going safely, ok?” In that moment I realized how fucked up my life had become. I was clearly just running from my problems. I didn’t have enough money to get back to Arizona if I had wanted to and there wasn’t even anyone I could call for advice. I hadn’t told my parents that I was moving, and I hadn’t really told my girl friend, although I’d sort of hinted at me leaving. But I didn’t know what to say to this guy, so I just nodded and he looked at me one final time and got back in his car and drove off.

As I’m standing there seeing myself through his eyes for the first time, I realize what I must look like. I’m so dirty that my hair looks wet from the grease. My fingernails have gone completely black and I’ve got these black smudges on my face from where I’ve been wiping away sweat. And of course I’m barefoot on the shoulder of this four lane highway and as I look down I realize that I have cum all over my shorts and there’s no way he could have missed it. Thankfully he didn’t say anything.

Now I know that 90% of you don’t care about me doing an open mic night, or about this set. But I’m posting this because I want to show that the work isn’t in the first draft. It’s in the iterations and the revisions. It’s in the doing.

I hold no illusions that I’m going to become a great comic or that I’m going to have a career in comedy. It’s not about that. It’s about getting up in front of people and learning how they interact with the material. It’s about finding out what people find compelling, what they want to sit and listen to and what bores the fuck out of them. It’s about pushing myself to become better.

Because most of this can’t be intellectualized. You can read as many books about writing as you want but until you sit down and actually write the story it’s all worthless. And just slapping some words on the page and calling it a day isn’t doing yourself any favors either. You need to go back to that material. You need to figure out what you’re trying to say and then really see if what you’ve written on the page is saying that.

Otherwise you’re not really putting in the work. It’s only in the revisions where you can push yourself to get better. Where you can start to see what you’re doing right and what you’re doing wrong. And if you decide that you don’t want to put in the work, that you’re perfectly happy with where you’re at skill wise then that’s fine. You have a hobby. But stop pretending that the reason you don’t get any traffic is that your blog isn’t SEO optimized.

I know I’m talking to a small subset of people here. Because most people only want the finished product. They don’t care about blog entries like this. They want the stories about my life. They want the short stories, the novellas. And there’s nothing wrong with that. That’s what I want to be known for. But the problem is that a project of that size takes time to produce. So to those who want to make something great, something that will touch other people, listen up. Most of your audience doesn’t give a shit about your process. They don’t care about the hours of revision. They don’t care about the hours you spent pacing your kitchen practicing. They don’t care about how nervous you are or how much of yourself you gave.

But you still have to do it, you still have to put in those hours, day after day because that’s the only way to get good at it.