Self-Inflicted Wounds: Heartwarming Tales of Epic Humiliation

by Aisha Tyler

  Being an arrogant little snot with a freshly minted Ivy degree and no money to go out and do stuff like normal people, I sat on my dumpster-rescued futon and watched a lot of comedy on this channel while eating Smartfood by the fistful. And inevitably, after each set, I thought arrogantly and snottily, “Man, that sucked. I could totally do better than that guy.”

  It was this kind of unfounded and breathtaking hubris that made me quirkily adorable, and also highly likely to lose a limb or get stabbed by an itinerant tattoo artist someday.

  Buoyed by my enthusiasm and total lack of experience, I immediately set about writing down my joke ideas in a little spiral notebook. Anything that struck me as funny, I would jot in my book for later consideration. I threw myself into this task with relentless focus. I would scribble all day long in tiny wavering script, the ink-riddled pages of my notebook starting to resemble an unhinged rant penned by Kevin Spacey’s serial murderer in Seven. My coworkers thought I had some kind of late-surfacing OCD that caused me to write things down compulsively. They started avoiding eye contact. They started calling me Rain Man. They started reporting me to Human Resources. No matter. I was undeterred.

  Mind you, I was not writing down good jokes or even jokes at all, really. I was writing down ideas for jokes. Comedians call them premises. These are not anything you can actually say in front of people. They are unformed, ill-conceived, malnourished concepts, and no matter how much potential they have, or how well-intentioned you are when you deliver them, they will not get laughs.

  I did not know this at the time.

  Seven months after I started scribbling things down in that notebook like the foreword to a hermit’s manifesto, I screwed up enough courage to actually perform. My obsessive-compulsion in full bloom, I had done extensive and meticulous research on where and how to do a first comedy set. I may have hated my job, but I sure did love the organizational skills and access to clerical resources that came along with it. I had addresses, show times, and phone numbers all charted and cross-referenced—every opportunity for soaring comedic triumph or agonizing creative demise arranged meticulously in an easy-to-read grid. I had discovered after several phone calls that the best open mike for beginners (well, the only open mike for beginners) was at a club in the Sunset district called the Holy City Zoo. They had a show on Sunday nights, and the fee for performing was two dollars for a hefty three minutes, which to me seemed inordinately fair and a bargain besides. I didn’t know much, but I did know you couldn’t pay two dollars to get on stage anywhere else, except for maybe the world’s saddest strip club.9

  So I settled on a scant list of wobbly “jokes,” and rode the bus to the club on a Sunday night with my boyfriend in tow, both for moral support, and so he could carry me home should I happen to bomb and try to drink myself to death after the show in despair. I felt optimistic, breathless even, over what was about to happen as we disembarked from the bus in the evening fog. And as we arrived at this adorable little shack of a club in the middle of a block of used bookstores, thrift shops, dive bars, and walk-up dim sum counters, I was struck by one very apparent truth.

  I was super fucking late.

  I hadn’t realized that a part of the transaction for getting stage time at this place was that not only did you have to pay for your stage time (utterly disproving any misconceptions about meritocratic ideals ruling the entertainment biz), but it was also first-come, first-served. Now, people have called me many things, but one thing they have never called me is first-come. I am nice, reliable, trustworthy, charming, supportive, and I make a mean Manhattan. But I am never, ever first-come. The earliest I have ever been is second-come, and that was remarkable enough for me to take a few snapshots and tweet about it, which also tells you how recently in my life this moment occurred. “Be on time” is a recurring New Year’s resolution for me, getting replay on my list more times than Taylor Swift at a bat mitzvah. The only thing I have resolved more often is to get more sleep.10 You can also see how those two goals might be at odds with each other. I have definitely succeeded in getting more sleep, but it has directly and severely undermined my efforts to be on time. One cannot have it all.

  So I get to this club, and I’m terrified, and I’m confused, and I’m anxious, and I’m late. What’s worse, the seductive aroma of char siu bao is wafting over me like college sex, and I can’t decide whether I want to do standup or eat a fuckload of dumplings and pass out in a puddle of pork. But my boyfriend encourages me; we’ve come this far, and on the bus no less, and what do you have to lose except for your sense of self-worth and respect? He has a point, and when he promises me as many steamed buns as I can eat afterwards, I reluctantly agree to move forward.

  I get in line. I am dead last.

  This means, I discover when I finally get to the front of the line and plunk down my two scrills, that I will also go dead last on the lineup for the night. Again, I know very little about comedy, but I’m crystal clear this is a bad thing. The only time going last on a lineup of performers is good is when you are Jay-Z and you are headlining Coachella. And even then, half of the audience is drunk or on Ecstasy and the other half made a break for their cars right after deadmau5 so they could get out before traffic turns the parking lot into an actual parking lot, and they are forced to sleep off a tummy full of pot brownies in the backseat of their Priuses. Still, I have come all this way, I have been bribed with dumplings, and when there are dumplings involved, I deliver.

  That night was long. My set was right before closing, at 1:52 a.m., which allowed three minutes for me to perform, and a couple of minutes for the show host to say good night and sweep out any remaining customers or sleeping itinerants before they shut the doors. The show started at nine, and after the host did ten minutes, each comedian got three to perform, which meant there were approximately one million comedians before me.

  I know this may shock you, but not all of them were good.

  Some were. There was some real talent in there, some inspired ideas and well-crafted jokes, and even a few true geniuses in the bunch. But mostly it hurt. Hurt to watch, hurt to listen, hurt to laugh, hurt to think that would be me in just over three short hours. It was terrifying, and it went on forever. I almost fled several times, but I did not want to lose my two dollars. That was like ten percent of my $20 recreational budget. There was no going back.

  When I finally went up on stage, I felt brave. I had seen almost every possible iteration of a comedy set performed onstage: some killed, some bombed, separated by every possible configuration and result between. I knew I wouldn’t destroy, but at the least I might do better than the guy who ate powdered donuts while reading aloud from The Tao of Pooh. As I climbed up there, I said to myself, “Be brave. No matter what happens tonight, you won’t die.” And that, at least, was true. I did not die.

  Not literally, anyway.

  The silence of a darkened nightclub at 1:52 in the morning after three-plus hours of comedy can be so oppressive as to feel like a weight. Like a giant has climbed upon your shoulders and taken a seat for a few hours to think. It can squash you, push the air out of your lungs, turn everything dark. I can’t tell you what jokes I did that night, because honestly, they weren’t jokes. I can’t tell you what unformed premises I presented, because I blacked out soon after ascending the stage, the rest of those three minutes unfolding like an out of body experience of which I have no memory, just the faint sensory recall of sweat pooling in the hollows of my collarbone, the deafening bass drum of my racing heartbeat, and the crisp, dry taste of pennies in my mouth. All I know is that I was not funny, and I was not getting laughs.11

  Except for one.

  Just one.

  I got one laugh, around eighty percent of the way through my act. I don’t know what got it, and I was never able to reproduce that exact laugh ever again. The next twenty, or fifty, sets I did were exercises in how long someone could stand before a group of utterly silent people.

  The rest of my set was workmanlike, shot
through with terror, and preeminently forgettable. I shambled offstage to a smattering of applause, and by smattering, I mean the bartender, who wanted to go home, and my boyfriend, who wanted to go home. I was exhausted, confused, and like a soldier with PTSD, I just wanted to forget. I might have hated my job, but at least the entire office didn’t get together to critique my work while I stood at the blinding center of an overhead klieg. Spending the rest of my life in a nice quiet cubicle with my instant noodles and my broken hopes and dreams suddenly seemed like a perfectly fine way to die.

  But that one laugh, like a single transcendent experience on a highly potent drug, was enough to change my brain chemistry forever. Afterwards, my boyfriend and I went and ate our weight in dumplings.12 And after that, he got laid.13

  The next day, when people at work asked me how my big debut had gone, I told them the truth: it was terrible. And somehow, I couldn’t wait to do it again.

  I had decided to try something terrifying, I had tried it, and it had been, indeed, terrifying. But I had done it. And that was my first step out of being mired in a frustrating and unsatisfying dream job, and into being mired in an even more frustrating but supremely rewarding dream career. And while that night was traumatic and on the whole pretty scarring, it did drive home another old piece of pabulum: you’ve got to venture if you want to gain. And if you actually get off your ass and try to follow your dreams—make yourself a little uncomfortable in pursuit of what you want—holy shit, you might just achieve them.

  Or at the very least, get to destroy a plate of char siu bao, ride home on the bus, and have hot dumpling sex. Which is the best kind, because you get to use up all the leftover duck sauce.

  ( 21 )

  The Tenth Time I Did Standup

  “Truth alone wounds.”—NAPOLEON BONAPARTE

  “Truthfully, I suck.”—AISHA TYLER

  This was as awful as the first time, only without the dumpling reward at the end. So, actually, this was way worse than the first time. Suck minus dumplings equals super suck.

  If I could go back in time and tell myself not to do this set, I would.

  No, wait. I wouldn’t, because bombing so hard you get a bruise on your ass is the only way you get any funnier. We learn from our mistakes.

  And if the bigger the mistake, the more we learn, well then this elevated me into genius territory.

  So, yeah. This time really sucked.

  ( 22 )

  The Hundredth Time I Did Standup

  “Great is the power of habit. It teaches us to bear fatigue and to despise wounds and pain.”—MARCUS TULLIUS CICERO

  “I can’t feel my face.”—AISHA TYLER

  Comedians have a name for newcomers who have only been doing standup for a few years. We call them babies.

  Baby comics, specifically.

  We don’t call them baby comics because they are infants. Sometimes they are literally young—high school students, or worse, precocious middle-schoolers full of moxie and innuendo whose parents have to drive them to the club and wince delicately through five minutes of wobbly material on jump rope and homework. But just as often, they are a middle-aged cubicle jockey who decided to recklessly chuck it all—job, relationship, kids, self-respect—to become a comedian.1 These people are called baby comics because they have absolutely no idea what they are doing, stumble about aimlessly, are prone to outbursts and tantrums, stare at you uncomprehendingly when you offer help, and occasionally shit their pants.2 Regardless of their age, baby comics are immature, undisciplined, hysterical, emotional, self-centered, and totally without humility.

  It is hard to believe I was ever one of those.

  Baby comedians are all the same, and they are very easy to spot if you know what to look for.3 No matter their age or provenance, they all have the same complaint: nobody gets them.

  It is an almost universal refrain: every comedian who has been doing comedy for three years or less will tell you that they are brilliant, before their time, the next coming of Richard Pryor, and others just don’t recognize their genius. People are trying to stand in their way, keep them down, cockblock their stardom. Every baby comedian is confident they’ve got what it takes, that stardom is just a shortcut away, and if people would just give them the respect and adulation their startling brilliance deserves, they would have their own sitcom by Christmas.

  And every comedian who has been doing comedy for ten years or longer looks back at their three-year-old comedian self and thinks, “Geez. What an intolerable douche.”

  When I was a baby comic, I kept looking for the secret. The hidden key, the magic trick that would help me bypass all the waiting and sucking up and bombing and suffering and zip straight to comedic stardom. I was convinced it existed, and that older comedians I admired, who told me that the only “secret” was hard work multiplied by time, just didn’t want to share what they knew. Like some MLB home run phenom or blood-doping cyclist, they all kept claiming their success came from focus, discipline, and drive, when I knew it really came from a shot of something clear, potent, illegal, and undetectable. All I needed was a phone number or shady address. I needed the BALCO of comedy. I was positive it existed; people just weren’t coming clean.

  What is most charming about youth, both literal and comedic—enthusiasm, optimism, bright-eyed hubris—is also what sucks most about it. Young people are swaddled in delusion. You think you are more awesome than you are, the world more interested in you than it is, your countenance more dazzling, your ideas more captivating, and that LeBron James was just a natural talent recruited from a neighborhood pickup game. You don’t want to practice, you don’t see the value in sacrifice, and you are convinced there is some vast comedy conspiracy to keep you from buying your first Bentley and dating a model by the time you are twenty-five.

  Wow. You are a douche.4

  Unfortunately, much like the actual process of growing up, there is no shortcut out of metaphorical comedy childhood either. Every baby comic is looking for an easy way out, a secret door or magic bullet, a red pill that will make everything go away—make the shitty open mikes and stone-faced comedy bookers and sleazy club owners evaporate, leaving in their place a late night spot on Conan and a week of sold-out shows at Madison Square Garden. These babies are convinced that anyone with a moderate amount of comedy success has figured out this chute-and-latter secret, and if they can just prize it from their elders, they’ll be well on their way to hosting the Emmy Awards.

  Sadly, like friendly aliens or gay Latino Republicans, this shortcut to fame just does not exist.

  Sure, there are people who have shot to infamy quickly and without serious effort. I am thinking, of course, of the ilk that populate such heady dramatic fare as Jersey Shore, Pregnant and Sixteen, and any of a variety of surgically augmented and mentally demented Real Housewives.5 They have, indeed, lucked out. Their main talents seem to be their proclivity for psychotic outbursts, the ability to funnel their husbands’ money into fresh sets of breasts, a love of getting drunk on boxed wine in the middle of the day, and a deft proficiency at snatching the weave off a bitch.

  But that is not fame, and it is not earned through any real talent, or by putting anything meaningful, helpful, or good into the world. It is infamy, not fame. Ignominy, notoriety, celebrity—they are poor substitutes for actual ability. Infamy is not real. It does not last.6

  Real success and accomplishment, at whatever it is you are passionate about, requires real work. Real sacrifice. Real disappointment. Real failure. And it requires the ability to scrape your sorry ass up off the floor, stumble to your feet, wipe the rivulets of watery drool from your face, and do it again, like an obstinate toddler running against the wall with his head in a bucket.

  This is the thing that baby comics do not understand. It is the thing that I did not understand, until I had done my hundredth set. It was not a memorable set, or even a particularly good one. I don’t remember the jokes, or the crowd, or the club, the town, what night of the week it was, or
how much I got paid. What I do remember is how I felt. Because somewhere around set one hundred, I realized something that had evaded me up until that point: it was going to take hundreds more sets, just like that one, to get where I wanted to go, and in all probability I would never actually get all the way there. I was in this thing for the long haul, and that haul was going to be much longer than I had hoped. But that night, I realized for the first time that I loved what I did, that the comedy itself, the elation of creating art, expressing ideas, making other people laugh, was its own reward, and that passion for my work was more important than fame or the false adulation of a bunch of people I didn’t know or care that much about anyway.

  That, I realized, was the secret. And that night was the moment I finally saw it clearly. The work is the reward.

  That’s what I tell baby comics now. Don’t do this because you want to be famous, or rich, or get laid.7 Sure, everybody’s gotta make a living. But don’t get into comedy because you imagine yourself riding in a Bentley with a bevy of porn starlets and a shitload of gummy bears. Do this because you love it, because it imbues your life with meaning, because you have something you want to say—no, need to say—and you cannot live without saying it. Because in all likelihood you won’t become famous, or you will run out of stamina way before you run out of road, or the rejection and thanklessness of the business will grind you to a bloody smear on the pavement, and if you don’t have your passion to drive you forward, nothing will. It’s great you’re talented. It’s fantastic that you’re unique and there’s never been anyone in the history of comedy quite as amazing as you. But that guy over there—who is half as talented as you—gets up twice as early and works twice as hard. And he can snatch a mean weave. You’ve got work to do.