Self-Inflicted Wounds: Heartwarming Tales of Epic Humiliation

by Aisha Tyler

  Here’s the thing: you may truly be talented. You may be a creative genius or a mad scientist or the next Larry Page, running around with the next decade’s life-changing technology scribbled on a cocktail napkin. You may be the third coming of Richard Pryor,8 funnier than Eddie Murphy trying to get into the hot tub when the water’s too hot. You may, indeed, be fucking awesome.

  No one gives a shit.

  No matter how incredible you are, how naturally talented and touched by greatness, you still have to do the work. Chris Rock still goes to dive bars and open mikes and struggles through thirty minutes of wobbly new material to get three great new minutes. Michael Jordan, cut from his high school team, practiced for hours and days and weeks and months to become the player he was, and then after that, he practiced some more. At his height, Tiger Woods was on the range drilling for hours every single day.9 Talent is not enough. It’s not even close. Hard work is far more valuable than talent. The world is littered with brilliant, talented, lazy nobodies. Almost the entire workforce of Starbucks is populated by a bunch of geniuses that “nobody gets, man.” If you have talent and you don’t have the stones to get up every day and perfect that talent, accept criticism, look at yourself honestly, suck on the hard lozenge of failure, and try to constantly and consistently improve, well then, you don’t have shit.

  Baby comedians are generally wallowing in talent. Dripping with it. An army of undiscovered superstars sleeping in their cars and living on chicken wings, expecting that any minute a dude in a suit is going to knock on the glass and ask them to roll it down so he can whisper through the opening, “I’ve been looking for you everywhere. Follow me! I’m going to make you a star.”10

  Grownups, comedians or not, realize that excellence requires not just early, but constant, unrelenting work and sacrifice, and that reaching a peak does not mean you will stay there. There will always be someone more talented than you, younger than you, hungrier than you, better looking. This is an immutable truth that comes with living on a planet where people are humping like rabbits and making more people as fast as they can, hoping the next one down the chute is going to be Miss Toddler and Tiara 2027. Do you think that girl who’s been greasing her teeth with Vaseline and holding a microphone since she was three years old, who remembers what it was like to sleep in the back of her parents’ pickup truck and live all day off the free breakfast buffet at the Holiday Inn,11 is going to feel even a morsel of remorse when she passes you up like a rocket and knocks your star out of the firmament with a satisfying pop? No. That creepily precocious little girl is not just headed your way. She is gunning for you.

  So what are you going to do about it? Whining about how you are brilliant and no one is giving you a chance ain’t gonna do shit. You better get to fucking work.

  And yes, you may work your ass off, all blood and sweat and tears and sacrifice and long nights and burned weekends and failed relationships and a transmission falling out of your shitpile of a car, and you still may not get to where you wanted to go. That is a reality of life. Shit happens, people are mean, puppies die, and things don’t always go your way.

  But even if you never quite accomplish your dreams, if you try your hardest, you’ll never look back and think, “If only I had gotten up off my ass and given it my best.” You’ll look back and think, “Man, I put my heart into that. It sucks that I didn’t make it, but at least I know I really gave it my all. And it also really fucking sucks that puppies die.”

  Life is short, and no one gives a shit about your problems. Get up, get out there, and as the kids say, get to grinding. Do that hundredth set, and then do the hundred-and-first. And then do one hundred more. You’re just getting started.

  Talent is what you’re born with. Success is what you do with it.

  I’m gonna use mine to save puppies.

  ( 23 )

  The Time My Worst Standup Nightmare Came True

  “Fools, through false shame, conceal their open wounds.”—HORACE

  “I would feel embarrassed, if I was capable of feeling anything at all.”—AISHA TYLER

  Everyone has a nightmare scenario about what they do for a living, a recurring bad dream they have had about something going terribly wrong in their workplace.

  For most, it is suddenly waking up at work naked, or oversleeping on the morning of the biggest meeting of their careers, or being completely unprepared for a major presentation, or having the boss walk in while you are banging his/her wife/husband/cousin/daughter/housekeeper/other hot relative over their desk in mid-stroke.1 Everyone’s got a subliminal hell scenario—elaborate, humiliating, disturbing or just plain terrifying—that crops up every once in a while in your subconscious to scare the shit out of you. This is one of the realities of being human. We are afraid of a lot of stuff.

  For me, after the naked-in-class nightmare and the one where I can fly and it’s awesome and then suddenly I can’t fly but am already in mid-flight and tumble end over end screeching wildly down to earth, at first very disappointed, then after that very dead, the main irrational fear I have is performing with my fly down. I don’t know why I am so afraid of this happening. It’s not such a big deal. Unless you are rocking it commando, most women with their fly down don’t risk exposure of any great magnitude. Maybe people see your underwear, but I am so OCD (and was so drilled by my mom on that whole hysterical “wear good underwear in case of a car accident” scenario) that mine are always at least minimally presentable. And indeed, the times that my fly has been down and I’ve noticed, it has usually only involved a bit of minor placket exposure. Nothing to freak out about.

  So why is this such a bugaboo?

  I could throw out a bunch of theories around the “laughing at me versus laughing with me” concept, and I suppose that might be part of it—the idea that you get up on stage and you’re destroying, everyone laughing in merry and unbroken lengths, and then halfway through your set you realize that the audience isn’t laughing at any of the right parts of your act, or any of the right times. Instead, they are just tittering away through the entire show, regardless of pause, pretense, or punchline, and you realize with horror that none of the laughs you got count, because they weren’t earned by your brilliant material, but because you look like an Abercrombie & Fitch ad gone awry, your pants gaping like a just-caught marlin on a schooner deck.2

  But I can’t be sure that is all of it. I think this fly-down fear is irrational, like a fear of clowns or ducks, or a love of lite country music. You can’t explain why you feel this way, you just do.

  For years, this was my number one fear when it came to performing, and I would check my fly obsessively and repeatedly to make sure it didn’t happen. If I ever develop an Asperger’s-like behavioral pattern, this would be it. I would check my fly repeatedly in the bathroom. I would check my fly repeatedly in the back of the club. I would tell myself it was zipped, then look down to make sure as I made my way to the stage. And occasionally, I would surreptitiously try to check it while I was actually performing, either by trying to look down without looking as if I was trying to look down, which was insanely hard to do and made me look like I was trying to avoid the gaze of the audience in a fit of snobbery, or as if I was in the throes of a grand mal seizure. I would occasionally supplement this behavior by trying to work the fingers of my left hand stealthily toward my fly to check that it was firmly secure without anyone seeing, which is impossible to do discreetly when you are standing on a stage illuminated by spotlights and keenly observed by hundreds of people. I’m sure it made me look as if I had some kind of itching condition of the crotch, or was trying to masturbate in public.

  None of this was any good of any kind. Period.3

  This fear grew, slowly becoming more and more debilitating. If we lay this scenario against the Hitchcock Axiom of Suspense—which holds that what is feared and anticipated but unseen is most terrifying—then me striding on stage with my fly splayed open to the world was slowly becoming more frightening than the shark in
Jaws.4 I could not stop thinking about it, and, much like the shark in Jaws, it made me never want to get in the water again. Only the water was comedy, and I was a comedian. I was gonna need a bigger boat.

  Things came to a head (ahem) one night when I was having a particularly thrilling bout of OCD that peaked with me being afraid I would have to pee on stage (a lesser paranoia, but just as fun-making). Any comic will tell you that they never have to pee right before they go on stage, and then the minute they step up there and remove the microphone from the stand, the Falls of Niagara begin raging behind the flimsy muscular dam that is the gateway to their bladder, and all they can think of is running faucets and Malaysian monsoons and the slow tinkle of pelvic release.5 I had been going to the bathroom right before my set for weeks at this point, trying to avoid the lower-quadrant discomfort that came with having to pee and realizing you still had to stand before a room full of people for twenty more minutes without crossing your legs like a whizzy third grader. I would work to time this perfectly so that when I emerged from the bathroom, freshly evacuated, the show host would just be in the midst of thanking the previous performer, right before terribly and inexplicably mangling the shit out of my name.

  This had been working beautifully, because peeing right before I went on stage meant a) I didn’t physically have to pee when I went up there and b) I knew I didn’t have to pee, because I had just peed.6 So when I would feel the urge to pee, I could say to myself, “Self, you just peed. Shut the hell up and get through this bit about how you love meatballs.” This strategy had been foolproof, which was saying a lot in my case.

  So on this particular night, I had worked my way to the bathroom with what I believed to be plenty of time to pee, stare furtively one last time at my palm-sweaty piece of notepaper with my list of jokes, and ascend the stage. Only, for some reason, on this day, the pee gods conspired against me, and my complex plan came to naught. The guy on stage before me cut his set short for some reason (I like to think he had been paid to, or had some unspoken vendetta against me; I can’t be entirely sure), and as I sat down on my carefully constructed little pillow of toilet paper assembled atop the toilet seat7 in this marginally sanitary club bathroom, I could hear my name being called—faintly yes, but distinctly and unmistakably—from the stage.

  And not in that “this is the first time I’ve said it” way, but in that “Bueller, Bueller, I’ve been saying this shit for what feels like hours and I’m about to give up and launch into one of my classic old people driving bits” way. If I didn’t get up there, and pronto, I would lose my stage time, which is akin to allowing someone to take your lunch at school when you know you won’t have access to food again until seven p.m. at least, or nine p.m. if your dad worked late. I freaked.

  I rinsed my hands cursorily (they definitely were not clean), sprinted to the stage, and launched into my set, so breathless I didn’t even bother to correct the host’s pronunciation of my name.8 And miraculously, despite my harried start, things were going well.

  Until, like Trinity in The Matrix, everything the Oracle told me started to come true. People were laughing more than they had before, and longer, and in all the wrong spots. They weren’t making eye contact. They were whispering to each other.

  There was surreptitious pointing, and the startling tang of a mocking undercurrent. I could feel it. I knew it well. Thinly veiled mock. It was like an old friend come home to roost. It was third grade all over again.

  I knew. I knew right away. As my hand worked its way toward my zipper in classic creepy guy on a park bench fashion, I already knew it. My fly was down.

  I touched it, I panicked, and I froze.

  What do you do, when your wildest dream, or in my case, worst nightmare, comes true?9 You adapt, or you die.

  Okay, fine. You don’t die. You zip up your zipper. You tell the crowd you can’t believe they didn’t tell you your fly was down—how could they let you hang like that, you thought they were your friends—and you keep going. And that was what I did. I kept going. I was embarrassed, I was flustered, I was completely thrown, but I kept going.

  My set was fine. My pants were fine. I was fine. My underwear, as perfectly immaculate as ever (god forbid that car accident), were fine (and entirely covering the precious cargo within). And as I wrapped up my set and stepped off stage, I realized something: the thing I had dreaded most had happened to me, and I had survived it. I felt a peculiar strength in that. Nothing could shake me now. I was unflappable.

  There were still plenty of things to fear irrationally. War, locusts, a zombie apocalypse, or a Palin presidency might still give me a rattle. But being humiliated in front of a room full of people no longer held the same power over me it once had. I had been embarrassed, I had joked about it, and I had moved on.

  Once you looked it in the face, that stupid mechanical shark wasn’t so scary after all.

  Although I still won’t get into a pool at night.

  ( 24 )

  The Time I Wore That Awful See-Through Dress

  “The optimist already sees the scar over the wound; the pessimist still sees the wound underneath the scar.”—ERNST SCHRODER

  “Everyone can see what I’ve got going underneath this dress.”—AISHA TYLER

  I blame Jennifer Lopez.

  I blame her for so many things—extreme hair extensions, tiny Fiat cars, my deep feelings of inadequacy about the size of my ass—but mostly I blame her for this.

  See, there was a time in our nation, not so long ago, when all you could see, all you could think about, all you knew, unless you were living in some kind of government-funded biodome deep inside the Earth’s crust, was J. Lo.

  She was in every video, every movie, on every red carpet, the cover of both Vanity Fair and People en Español (so greedy!). She was Jenny from the block, dating first a black luminary (P. Diddy) and then a Caucasian one (B. Diddy) and generally making people from every ethnic group wild with jealousy. She was killing it for a long run there, and whether you were a fan of her music or not, you couldn’t help but root for her when she used what she learned in her Tae-Bo classes to beat the shit out of her abusive ex-husband in functional yet flattering stretch pants and that ridiculous short wig in the Oscar-worthy film Enough.

  J. Lo was on fire.

  And the moment that started it all, in the opinion of almost anyone who knows (or at least anyone who agrees with me), was that dress.

  That unholy Versace dress she wore to the Grammys on P. Diddy’s arm, the one that was cut down to here and up to there and was one thread away from revealing the color, size, and temperature of her fallopian tubes. That dress was crazy and beautiful and confusing and a little dangerous and a whole lot slutty and it was all anyone could talk or think about for months after she wore it.

  Including me.

  Well, actually, not including me. Including my stylist at the time. She was obsessed. See, a big part of the whole “wear some shit on the red carpet and get your picture taken” thing is that you want to make news. Looking nice and conventional and clean and pretty is boring. Nice doesn’t get headlines, especially if you are the host of a cult television show on a to-remain-nameless network that gets only marginal numbers despite broad name recognition of the program. You are a minor star in a minor constellation in a long-forgotten quadrant of the night sky. You want to be noticed, lady, you gotta get out there and make them notice you.

  Unfortunately, I was married and so could not make news by dating a rapper or dating an actor or dating a rapping actor; I was not a drunk or a drug addict and so could not make news by going into rehab; and I was not an idiot so I could not make news by falling out of an Italian roadster wearing a miniskirt with no underwear and a perfectly groomed undercarriage. Alas, I was just a regular old comedian with a decent gig who worked hard, and what the hell would that ever get me? I needed to make a splash.

  Ugh. Why am I smiling?

  My stylist suggested this could be done on the red carpet. I would wear some
thing eye-catching and risqué, something that would be sure to get people’s attention and a few inches in the fashion rags, or at the least, on this newfangled thing called the Internet. All I needed was a total lack of shame, a temporary lapse of fashion reason, and a very nice pair of underwear.

  I don’t know why I let her talk me into this. It was a bad idea, poorly conceived and even more poorly executed. If I had seen another person in this dress, I would have sprinted for a pen and paper with which to write a litany of jokes about how bad they looked. I looked sad, and naked, and confused, and as if I had forgotten part of my outfit at home.

  This was not J. Lo material. This was J. NO material. I looked like a drag hooker from Queens.

  Somehow, I actually agreed voluntarily to wear this dress. I think at the time I was just excited that I was in decent shape and that nothing was jutting out awkwardly and I had no visible homunculi. In the house of delusion that was my mind, that made me just one step away from Elle “The Body” Macpherson.1 I agreed, of my own volition, not only to put on this dress, but wear it out. In public. And then stand in front of photographers so they could take pictures of me wearing it. Using flash photography. Pictures that, like the Internet, will never die. Even if in a million years the entire planet folds in on itself like an ouroboros and slowly collapses into dust, the Internet will still persist, and on it will be dozens of photos of me in this awful dress.