I lived in Gainesville, Florida from six months old to about three-and-a-half. I went to Disney World at least once a week. I think being so overly indulged at such a young age has a lot to do with who I am now. My love for dinosaurs, my dream of being a movie director, my well-balanced narcissism. All because I lived in Florida for three years. I was an only child at this point, living near every kid’s fantasy, getting whatever I wanted. I got to see my favorite movies come to life, and go on the park rides. Surreal is the only word that comes to mind when I try to remember living there.
I didn’t talk until I was about three years old; unfortunately now I can’t shut up. I don’t think there was any real reason, or that anything was discovered. My parents were really freaked out and constantly taking me to the doctor because I refused to talk. I am certainly happy with how much I use my scissortongue to torture them now. I wish I knew more about it; it seems so “over with” that it never really affected me, or perhaps I never thought about it enough to realize the repercussions. Maybe it is a connection to my potentially crippling social anxiety I can exhibit sometimes. If I think about doing something long enough, I will psyche myself right out of it. I hate waiting around, or telling myself I am going to do something. I just have to go and do it, sometimes impulsively. Dwelling on things is definitely a fault of mine, and the topic always get darker and worse in my head. All said and done, I know there is something important behind this; I just don’t know what. I like to think that refusal to talk has only made my voice louder now.
Up until about high school where my interests were almost exclusively math and science based, I wanted to be a movie director, or at the very least, in entertainment. In high school I was such a nerd, particularly with computers, I was programming and trying to soak up as much knowledge as I could. Movie directing wasn’t on my mind at all, but my friends and family always mentioned I should do stand-up. I was always told I was the king of one-liners, and I had a comedian’s look and voice. Honestly, I had no idea what the hell any of that meant, and I don’t think they did either, but I’ll gladly take what seemed like a compliment.
The summer between high school and college I spent a day in the city. Ultimately, my plan was to see a friend of mine, Andrew Richards, do stand-up at Comix. Comix was a really nice club in the Chelsea Market area, it’s closed now, they couldn’t pay their comics. This was the first comedy show I ever went to in a club-I absolutely loved it. I think that moment was it for me; it was something I had to do. Whenever I picture a comedy club, the look and layout of that place is what I imagine. It was absolutely amazing. It was just a really profound experience. Lucky for me, I was good friends with Andrew. We went to high school together, and he also went to Stony Brook, but he was two years older. He was always telling me I should do stand-up, how funny I was and tailor-made for it. One of my biggest regrets is not listening to him, because I didn’t do stand-up until I was 22. However, I started writing, everything I thought, I would write it down and hope to use it one day.
So on January 22nd (or maybe it was the 23rd) of 2014, I just went into the city and did stand-up. There really isn’t much more to that story other than one day, I checked when I could go on at an open mic, and left for the city. It was as simple as it was impulsive. I basically bombed for four and a half minutes, which was not as bad as I thought after I got off stage. My first real though was “I can do this, and I am going to keep doing this.” So I went crazy with this new thing, night after night, joke after joke after joke. My favorite part was I didn’t tell anyone; no one knew. My closest friends had no clue until I told them in June, which was by accident, and they were the first to know. It was incredibly weird, just disappearing all day. I only ever did it for the laughs, and there is a Seinfeld quote that always comes to mind, from a HBO special he did with Louis C.K., Chris Rock, and Ricky Gervais. They’re discussing when they got into comedy and the motivations and Jerry says, “success wasn’t my objective, I just wanted to be one of those guys,” and that’s all I want either.
On Thursday January 22nd of 2015 I had performed in a talent showcase. Basically a club asks four or so comedians to perform in front of privileged agents, managers, and other club owners including the particular club’s owner. I spent much of that week getting ready and didn’t sleep the night before as I was working really hard on my material, checking wording, syllable count, and reciting in my room to my dog. It went well but was insanely grueling and nerve racking. However it was one of the best and most rewarding things I have done, it has definitely opened more doors for me around the city and other tristate clubs.
After all that I’ve decided to throw out all the jokes and material used in my act over the previous year. As fuel to a more creative fire, this will give me the push to stay fresh, get better, and dig deeper when I write and create. It’s difficult because it is my first “stuff”, my roots, the beginning of something I love and use and made. They all helped me fail (a lot) and succeed (a little), they were all hard to come by, some harder than others, and many took a lot of work to come together or perfect. They fit a lot of categories, raw, jarring, unexpected, usually trashy, and rarely luminous in all the wrong ways. Not all of them were real but the realest we’re definitely the funniest.
Currently I am just writing and performing, just “going to the gym” as they say. Constantly looking for stage time to get better and improve my act and my material seems to be the state I am in presently. I haven’t been so active lately being so busy with school and work and all but I still find moments to write and brainstorm. Still working on my scripts and improving jokes here and there. A joke is never done, ever. You just run out of ways to tell it or make it funnier or improve on it in some way. It takes an incredible amount of time, effort, and thought to just get a few jokes out and I am just trying to build toward small goals. My next is having a solid 40 minutes to an hour by the end of the year, however that is a pretty far stretch unless I strike a lot of gold. As for some really long term hopefuls that I have for myself, I would really like to write and perform a special and have it picked up and distributed. I’ll be honest and say I have no idea how I get that done and I am probably pretty far away from that point, but I can certainly dream. I think ultimately I would love to have a show at one point, not sure what or how or even the format, but I would just like to work on or for a big production show in some capacity. I’m sure all of this seems very spitfire and that’s because it is, I don’t intend to rigidly define my career path with any specific goal in mind, I prefer to think of myself as being very open ended to opportunities that present themselves to me.
So this brings us to writing jokes, the hardest thing in the world. It is hard to think of a topic to write a joke about, that is the first hurdle, then actually writing it is pretty tough, now imagine me trying to explain to you how I do it. This type of writing is profoundly personal, there is no right or wrong way to do it, however there are some simple guidelines you sort of just…pick up along the way. The biggest thing I’ve probably learned is joke writing structure, which usually consists of a sentence or two of setup, and a quick punchline. The best jokes get all of that done in a few words or decent sentence, but generally the rule is as stated a second ago, a sentence or two setting up, followed by a very short, quick punchline, I’m talking about count syllables if it is too long. Personally, I am not sure how this was figured out, I suppose I just heard enough jokes that I wrote with that subconsciously in my mind. There is no rules really in comedy, nobody’s there to tell you what you are suppose to do and how to go about it, it is extremely freeform, and learn as you go. A great deal of things I learned on my own, like how to manage time, crowds, use my voice and body to construct ideas and jokes but pretty much everything pertaining to the actual writing is not something you want to be taught. First off, you can’t be taught, you either can or you can’t, unfortunately it seems that dry. The second major issue, is because writing is so personal, it almost always comes with a trace of “you”, so the fear is you will have another writer’s impression in your work or style.
Now while much of what you learn as a comic is learned from experience like I mentioned, I do have some backup to my claims. For instance, Zen and the Art of Stand-Up Comedy by Jay Sankey can corroborate much of what I state above. He doesn’t spell it out for you for reasons already obvious, but the information does fall in line with much of how comedy experience culminates. One of the major things I took away from this was the term “tags” which are additional jokes after your initial joke and punchline. Tags are usually one liners furthering the topic and joke, they are quickly and usually witty to compound laughter. I knew what tags were by definition, and how to use them, but not the moniker for them.
Sadly, very little of my schooling and not much of anything in my normal life has contributed to my comedy in any impactful way. If anything, my everyday life has simply been a farm, fertilized by the manure that are the stories of my life, potentially becoming jokes. If school has helped me, it has basically helped me learn, shown me new topics, and given me some pointers on writing and presenting here and there. Stand-up, like I mentioned above, is nothing you can ever be prepared for, and you either can do it, or you can’t, and you find out very quickly.