Self-Inflicted Wounds: Heartwarming Tales of Epic Humiliation

by Aisha Tyler

  I hate this dress. I hate the pictures of me wearing this dress. I hate that these pictures continue to resurface more than a decade after they were taken. I hate to think that people might think this is how I like to dress, or how I ever liked to dress. I hate to think that people are basing any opinion or understanding of who I am as a person on the fact that I wore this dress.

  But the fact is, I wore it. And I have no one to blame but myself.

  Think about that the next time you dress to go out of the house and decide to wear black socks with sandals, or a top that leaves your threadbare seven-year-old bra-straps visible to the world. The days of looking like anonymous shit are over. You may not be a globe-trotting Latina pop star with a multimillion-dollar fortune and two adorable twins, but . . .

  Actually, that’s it. You’re not a globe-trotting Latina pop star. Put on a decent shirt. Change your socks. Take off that mesh half-shirt. It’s not 1983. Pull those sweatpants down to an area of your abdomen that doesn’t make it look like you are smuggling a package of veal chops in your pants.

  Pull your shit together. People are looking at you. People are always looking.

  And the Internet, unfortunately, is forever.

  ( 25 )

  And Had That Awful Two-Toned Hair

  See chapter 24. What is going on with my hair? Did I not have a mirror?

  Again, I have no one to blame but myself. And perhaps a brief bout of colorblindness.

  Can you get that from drinking bourbon?

  ( 26 )

  All the Times I Did Those Terrible Corporate Standup Gigs

  “Satire should, like a polished razor keen, wound with a touch that’s scarcely felt or seen.”—LADY MARY WORTLEY MONTAGU

  “These people must be dead inside.”—AISHA TYLER

  There are a few rules when it comes to performing comedy.

  No matter how much you wish that things were different—that satyrs were real or that your teenagers loved chores and vegetables, and hated drinking keg beer in a strip mall parking lot—these rules are what they are. They have been in existence since time immemorial, and they hold, eternal and fast. The sky is up. The ground is down. Water is wet. Drunk people heckle. This is just the way it is.

  I do not make the rules. I just report them.

  If you want to succeed—if you want people to laugh—these rules cannot be broken or ignored. They are absolute and immutable, and any success outside their parameter is an abomination, an anomaly, an irreproducible aberrance.

  1. Comedy must be performed at night.

  2. People must be drunk or on their way toward being drunk.

  3. People must be indoors.

  4. People must be facing forward, toward the stage. Not at each other, where they will inevitably be distracted by whatever their drunk-ass tablemates are doing during the show.

  5. It must be nighttime. I cannot emphasize this enough.

  6. Under no circumstances can the show be organized, paid for or attended by employees of a corporation.

  No matter how many times people try to skirt these rules, no matter how many times some corporate booker insists that this show will be different—our crowds are great, they can’t wait to see you, they are your biggest fans, insert bullshit sycophantry here—the rules must be obeyed. Comedy must be performed in a nightclub, where people are drunk enough to laugh like hyenas at nearly everything that comes out of your mouth, but not so drunk that minimally complex ideas or adorably clever metaphors confound them. It must be a close space where laughs will become contagion as people flash the whites of their teeth at each other like monkeys and elbow their neighbors wildly in the ribs, and where the noises of mirth will bounce off the walls and compound into a sound wave of irrepressible joy. There must be just the right amount of food served to keep people from getting drunk too quickly and turning into an angry drunken mob, but not so much that gnawing a mountain of chicken wings distracts them from the show, or so little that their gnawing hunger turns them into an angry hungry mob. And while it is okay for people to come to a show with people they know from work, they can never, ever, come with their bosses, in front of whom they have never acted like a person or given a hint of being even remotely human, and so are highly unlikely to start now.

  Here’s the thing. Comedy, good comedy at least, is irreverent, and bawdy, and dirty, and outsized, and if done properly, will shock or offend a handful of people in the audience at the very least. If you plan it right, you will never offend more than a handful of people at any one time, and never the same handful of people over again, thus sending that little fist of anger moving around the audience throughout the show, so that at least ninety-five percent of the audience is laughing while that knot of prudishness purses their lips, looks around at all the happy people, feels suddenly uptight and out of touch for not laughing, and lets all that rage slip quietly into another part of the audience, allowing a different group of people to temporarily get their panties twisted into a hot and sweaty bunch. This rule of roving rage allows that there will always be a minimal number of people with a wad of underwear crammed between their posterior cheeks at any one time, but never enough to truly derail a show.

  This is the essence of how comedy works. It is inherently prickly, shocking, difficult, and incendiary. Underneath personal style, affect of delivery, physical comportment, subject matter, even whether you decide to curse or not, there is one essential truth: if you haven’t offended somebody, you probably didn’t say anything very interesting.

  This is why people must be in a place where they feel free to laugh at things that under other circumstances might be seen as highly inappropriate. A comedy club gives them that permission. Things are racy and broadstroke, and everyone is a little tipsy, with a tummy full of ranch dressing, chicken limbs, and rum. It’s okay. You smell like buffalo sauce. You can laugh. No one will judge.

  And this is why corporate gigs never, ever work. Never.

  NEVER!

  I don’t know why I keep forgetting this. Every time I do a corporate show, and it goes painfully, soul-scarringly wrong, I say to myself: self, never again.1 I will never again do comedy at nine in the morning for a bunch of convention-goers, many of whom drank too much last night, several of whom are severely hungover, some of whom slept with someone they shouldn’t have and are now undergoing an active existential crisis over bad hotel coffee and cheese Danishes, all of whom are sitting next to or within earshot of their boss, their boss’ boss, the CFO of the company, and/or pernicious roving moles from Human Resources. These people will never laugh. They are physically incapable of mirth. I might as well perform in a bathroom stall to a toilet paper dispenser; at least when I’m done I can stick my hands in that awesome Airblade dryer thing, and I won’t have to pee anymore. At a corporate gig, I spend twenty minutes staring down the gaping maw of disdain that is the sales force of a midsized big box store conglomerate, praying I’ll have a severe histamine reaction to hotel pastry and pass out so I won’t have to finish my show.

  And then I blink, and they are still there, staring up at me with their bloodshot eyes and their mouths full of transfats and their brains full of fabricated stories to explain to their spouses why they didn’t answer the phone at three a.m. last night—how they lost their wallets, their cell phones, and the phone in their hotel room was broken, and that’s why they didn’t call—and I look at the clock. I am two minutes into a forty-minute set.

  And I want to die.

  And I finish the set like a soliloquy, not an actual comedy set, more like a long-form poem with no breaks or moments of silence so that it will never be apparent I was trying to elicit laughs, so that when the laughs do not come no one will feel weird, at least no more weird than people already feel at having to suffer through what seems like a tonally inappropriate and very long motivational speech from a giant black girl. One who seems to be doing everything she can not to say fuck but really seems to want to say fuck and is spewing sexual innuendo and doesn’t seem
to realize that this is a work function and so by its nature joyless and devoid of any potential for fun.

  Then I sprint for the door, fast as I can, and I thank the person who has been assigned to be my contact or chaperon or monitor or jailer, and gratefully demur when they offer me coffee for the road, and make no eye contact with anyone, and rush back to my hotel room, to drown my sorrows in twenty ounces of coffee and four Starbucks muffins, because it isn’t even ten in the morning yet and I have already bombed.2

  Why do I keep taking these gigs when I know for a fact—I don’t suspect, I know—that they will be the worst forty minutes of my life since the last horrible forty minutes I spent trying to entertain people in suits holding corporate training materials and wishing they were somewhere else?

  Because of the money.

  I am admitting a bit of crass truth here. Corporate gigs always pay much better than club gigs. Corporations have money to spend, mostly because that is what they are in business for—because guys who don’t have boners really, really want boners, and they are going to spend money to get those boners, the devil and the details and the price tag be damned. And thanks to those bonerless guys, the corporation’s got a wad to drop on their annual training conference or brainstorming retreat or employee recognition dinner, and they are going to spend it on something fun just to make sure that their employees don’t think they are dead inside or plotting to slowly grind their workforce into emotional dust, and so they can point to the annual company event and go, “See? Wasn’t that fun?”3

  So they hire a comedian, because hiring John Legend or the Black Eyed Peas or Gwyneth Paltrow would blow their entertainment budget for the entire year, and because hiring a magician or a hypnotist is just ridiculous. A comedian is affordable, and a good time, and if you ask nicely and give the comedian a list of names, maybe they’ll make gentle, ribald fun of Bob in accounting and the head of Legal Affairs. “Hey, go for it! Jim’s super laid back. He loves jokes. He won’t mind at all.”4

  And the poor comedian, suckered in by the prospect of making this month’s rent and more in one night, says yes every time. After all, we are comedians because we love to make people laugh. But we also do it to make a living. If we wanted to make people laugh and not make any money we’d draw political cartoons. And, unfortunately, you do make great money doing corporate gigs. Also, unfortunately, you will not make anyone laugh.

  Well, except for one or two young, interesting (and probably gay, and so used to being on the edge) employees who just got to the company and so don’t yet know that laughing is absolutely not allowed under any circumstances, and especially not at some comedian’s risqué material about how she thinks there should be marriage equality because that way she could hire a husband-husband hair and makeup team.

  For the record, I have done many, many corporate gigs. I have always been gracious, and professional, and prompt and focused, and made jokes about Jim from Legal Affairs and how green the new sales force is, and yelled out a rallying cry about how everyone is going to break sales records this year, and so go out there and get ’em! And I have thanked the people who come up kindly afterwards and tell me how funny they thought I was, even though they didn’t actually laugh out loud, because their boss was at their table, and they didn’t want him to think they actually feel anything or have ideas or likes or dislikes or hopes or dreams or anything. And I walk out of the room with my money and my head held high.

  And then I go back to my hotel room, eat a bouquet of muffins off my chest, watch five episodes of Law and Order in a row, and pass out in a dreamscape of crumbs. And in the morning, I vow that I will never, ever, ever take a corporate gig ever again, as long as I live. Until the next one.

  Quality muffins ain’t cheap.

  ( 27 )

  The Day the Comedy Died

  “The deepest wounds aren’t the ones we get from other people . . . they are the wounds we give ourselves.”—ISOBELLE CARMODY

  “Those stains will never come out. Just burn it.”—AISHA TYLER

  Of all the skills and personality traits that my father passed on to me, the one I am most proud of, and the one I utilize most often, is “acting as if.” As in, “act as if you belong.”

  This is not the same as pretending you are someone you are not, or mimicking the behavior of others in an attempt to blend in. This is a bigger, more ambitious, and much more radically personal approach—acting as if you belong wherever it is you are, and behaving as if you are completely comfortable there, regardless of whether on the inside you are completely mystified by what is happening, and do not understand the language people are speaking, comprehend the signage on the walls, or recognize the food that has been set before you on your plate.

  My father has always been a guy who has been comfortable no matter where he goes: construction site, French restaurant, board meeting, slaughterhouse floor, underground fight club, afternoon tea klatch. My father can slide seamlessly into any context and immediately not just make people feel as if he belongs there, but that the entire thing may have been his idea, he is on the board of directors or perhaps an anonymous and powerful donor, and they are his esteemed guests. He is the kind of guy who looks you in the eye and claps you on the arm and laughs just loud enough to make you feel included but not self-conscious, and in minutes you have a lemonade in your hand, have invited him to dinner in your home, and agreed to meet him for an evening of vigorous salsa dancing sometime in the very near future. Later that evening, people will wonder who the incredibly funny and charming black man was and where he came from; they will compare stories and slowly realize that he was like a ghost—appearing magically from the mists, delighting and confounding all he encountered, and vanishing just as inexplicably into the night. He is like a full-grown, hilarious, very handsome, potty-mouthed elf.

  He is both truly wonderful and utterly nefarious.1

  This quality, the “acting as if,” is a talent both genetic and cultivated. Part of it is just the way he was born. My father is an insanely likeable guy, the kind of person who could sweep all the dishes and food from the table mid-dinner party—just as people were lifting the first bite of something delectable to their mouths—leap to his feet atop the vintage furniture, tell a story comprised of both shocking subject and salacious language, and leave at the end of the night with everyone sighing about how wonderful he is and how this was the best dinner party they had ever been to, even as their stomachs are growling from hunger because he punted their duck breast into the fireplace during an especially explosive punchline. The man is that good.

  The phrase “I just love your father” is one I have heard uttered so many times as to be able to smell it coming and mouth right along, keeping my irritated eye rolls to a barely detectable minimum. From the time I was very young, people have always thought he was delightful, drifted toward him, fallen into his gravitational pull, even as I was dying of embarrassment on the other side of the room.2 One of my most vivid memories is of my father swinging my very tiny and arguably brittle grandmother-in-law around the dance floor by her armpits (she weighed like sixty pounds) to some interpretive jazz song at my wedding, before gleefully dropping the f-bomb multiple times, then striding outside to illegally halt traffic in front of the reception hall with a pile of hazard cones he had obtained from only god knows where.

  Everybody at my wedding just loved him. This is the effect he has on people.

  I’m pretty sure I did not acquire this skill. Sure, I am loud and rude and love to curse, but the bulletproof likeability thing I’m not quite sure I received. I talk too much and too fast, am perilously clumsy, anxious, obsessive-compulsive, and quite possibly the most neurotic black woman on the planet. These factors seem to counterweight my more fun characteristics. However, the one thing I did get from my father, partially from genetics but mostly from ongoing and relentless drilling from him, is the ability to charge into a situation and “act as if” I know what I am doing when I have no freaking idea what is going
on, why we are all here, or even what day it is. The “act as if” philosophy has a slutty and unscrupulous bedmate—the “fake it ’till you make it” axiom, or “keep going through the motions as you learn what the hell you are doing those motions for and gradually develop the skills and knowledge required to really and truly belong.” In plainer language, I often have no fucking idea what I am doing.

  That has never, ever stopped me.

  I believe fully that if you want to do something, you just go do it. You can sit around, thinking about it, waiting until things are perfect, wringing your hands, dithering and hesitating and slowly twisting your panties into a perfect little fisherman’s knot. Or you can get up off your lazy fucking ass and do something. What’s the worst that can happen?3

  As I’m sure you’ve gleaned from these pages, this philosophy has not always served me well. I can attribute several broken bones, a dumpster full of ruined meals, a wrecked racecar, some second-degree burns, and a scrapped short film to this charge-ahead philosophy. However, I have just as often thrown myself into something, studied, watched others, cribbed a bit from the Internet, and come out just fine. And sometimes, much more than fine.

  There is something truly invigorating, and also terrifying, about deciding to do something, and then just doing it. Much like ripping off a bandage or touching your tongue to the tip of a battery,4 the dread of anticipation is usually much scarier than the actual event.5 But we have all had the experience of wanting to do something, and then dithering and planning and waiting and watching and revisiting and revamping our plan until the opportunity has passed and that unbelievably hot guy or girl has left the bar, never to return. And then we kick ourselves angrily, because we didn’t screw up our courage to just do some shit that probably wouldn’t have been that hard in the first place. So you get shot down. It’s not like you haven’t been shot down before. Seriously.