by Aisha Tyler
So we wait, and we hesitate, and all the awesome shit we wanted to do—start a rock band, learn Mandarin, take up painting, become master of the Cat’s Cradle—have completely passed us by, and we can’t play an instrument, barely speak English, resent art, and fear lengths of string.
Don’t be someone who is afraid of string. Just pick up the fucking string.
When I decided to become a comedian, I just decided to do it. I didn’t take any classes, I didn’t read any books, I didn’t ask anyone their opinion or get anyone’s permission. I just did it. And as acknowledged previously, for a long, long while I wasn’t very good at it. But that didn’t keep me from approaching it like I had been doing it forever, like it was my lifelong passion and all I had ever been cut out for in this world. I didn’t worry about rules, or conventions, or how things were done. I just figured that shit out as I went along. Of course, I had doubts, and questions, and more than a few panic attacks, but once I decided to be a comedian, I was a comedian. I wasn’t trying to be a comedian. I didn’t hope to be a comedian. I was one.
This bold unbridled approach led, in turn, to a pretty intense crisis of faith about six years into my career. I had moved to Los Angeles, because I was sick of the breathable air and delightfully potable water of the San Francisco Bay Area.6 By this time, I had gotten relatively funny and pretty accustomed to doing well on stage. Don’t get me wrong; I was no comedic genius. My act was formalized, stilted, and more than a little gimmicky. But I had honed it into a pretty tight set, with a hook that people could relate to, and my punchlines were reliably effective. Plus, what I lacked in substance, I more than made up for in style, gesticulating wildly and mugging as if my facial contortions might earn me extra points in a clownery competition. My act was adequate and serviceable, and had been working for years, and I was feeling pretty damn confident about it.
And then, suddenly, I wasn’t.
I don’t know how this happened, and at the time, I had no idea why, either. It was abrupt and cataclysmic: all of a sudden, the same jokes that had killed the week before just stopped killing. No explanation. Nothing I could point to. I just started to suck.
I tried everything. Moving my jokes around. Talking louder. Talking more quietly. Making more eye contact. Being more drunk.7 Nothing was working. I was bombing repeatedly and consistently, and it was quickly eroding my now brittle self-confidence.
I started to freak the fuck out.
The stress of bombing, coupled with the lack of comprehension of why I was bombing or how to fix things, started to manifest physically: anxiety, lack of sleep, dry skin, hiccups. The most dramatic of these symptoms? I started to develop flop sweats. Up until this point, I had no idea what a “flop sweat” was, but let me tell you, when you experience one, that shit becomes immediately clear. Being “sweaty” is not a flop sweat. Leaving the gym drenched in perspiration is not a flop sweat. A flop sweat is when you go from delicate daffodil to dock worker in 3.5 seconds flat, with no warning and no explanation; when you can leave the house showered and fragrant with a triple application of antiperspirant, and arrive at the club twelve minutes later looking as if you just went three rounds in the octagon with Ronda Rousey. When the most strenuous thing you did in between was drive your car.
This is what I was experiencing. My body was in a constant state of fight or flight, but it had no idea who I was fighting or what I was fleeing. It got to be so that I would wear two or three tee shirts to the club at night, assembling them into a kind of bulked-up MacGyvered torso diaper, then bring a change of clothes along so I could whip off my soaked garments right before I went on stage, assemble a new chest diaper, and promptly Whitney Houston the shit out of the second set of tees during my set. I was an unholy mess.
I realized I would have to do something before I slowly dissolved into a puddle of sweat like the Wicked Witch of the West. I wasn’t about to abandon standup, but standup seemed to be pretty set on abandoning me. I would have to make some kind of fundamental change or watch everything I loved go flying out the window, or into the hamper, so to speak.
Finally, after one particularly punishing night of sweating it out on stage, both physically and psychologically, rivulets of liquid slithering uncomfortably down the sides of my rib cage and into the sodden waistband of my jeans, taking all hope with them, I realized this shit wasn’t working, and it wasn’t likely to magically start working again any time in the near future. I needed to do something massive. Something radical.
I had to destroy everything.8
I would have to throw out my whole set—every joke I had ever written, honed, and performed for the past six years, essentially my entire career—and start from scratch.
This initiated an entirely new and wholly more startling series of flop sweats that graduated from merely tragic to grandly operatic in nature. I was terrified.
In almost every job, you build on past successes. You learn, you grow, you fail and succeed, and you take what you have learned and apply it to your work going forward. But in comedy, you are only as good as your last set, and if your material isn’t working anymore, you are right back at square one. You can’t polish off the old turds and give them new coats of gold. You’ve got to come up with a whole pile of brand-new turds. It’s the only way.
I set about building an entirely new set. For a while I tried to have someone else do some writing for me, because I was so confused and unsure of myself that I figured having someone else write jokes for me couldn’t hurt me any more than I was already hurting myself. But what I quickly realized was that delivering someone else’s jokes and pretending they were my own felt like just that: pretending. I already felt unsure on stage and trying to find myself within someone else’s words felt foreign and odd. Plus, I wasn’t any funnier with someone else’s jokes than I had been with my own. If I was going to suck, I might as well suck on my own terms.
I threw that set out and started again.
This was painful. I cannot overstate how painful this was. It wasn’t like I had lived through a natural disaster or lost a loved one, but it really sucked. The thing I loved, that I had been good at, all of a sudden I wasn’t good at anymore. I felt like Michael Jordan during his MLB days—everything I had known or believed about myself was suddenly gone and I had to start over with the fundamentals, something I had never bothered to learn in the first place, because I had just started doing standup half-cocked, chock-full of enthusiasm but short on technique.
So I started over from scratch. I wrote, and wrote, and wrote some more, performed what I had written, threw most of it out, and started again. And again. I did beginner’s nights and open mikes, late-night lineups and coffeehouse shows on Sunday afternoons where people were too hungover or full of gas-inducing soy milk to laugh, late night bar shows when people were too busy drowning in lite beer and crushing despair to laugh. I trained like Rocky for a prizefight, minus the raw eggs and slightly pervy sweatsuit. And I tried, as best I could, to be optimistic and open-minded, to trust my instincts, listen to my heart, and relearn what I thought I already knew.
It didn’t go well at the beginning. I was paralyzed by fear and insecurity, not a healthy mental state to be in while yelling at a bunch of drunken bikers in a dive bar about interracial marriage and how Abercrombie and Fitch stores smell like sex with a college freshman. When things worked, I was relieved, but I didn’t always know why they worked. And when things went poorly, it reinforced every negative suspicion I ever had about the world and myself, which was that I should have been a lawyer like my parents wanted, that there was no such thing as Santa Claus, and that a cute golden retriever would just as soon shit on you as lick your face. My very faith was tested.
But I was determined to do the thing I loved, no matter how much, at that particular moment, I hated doing it.
And then, slowly, things started to get better. I started to have good sets again, and then awesome ones, and finally, I started to kill. Even the loud obnoxious open mikes in the back
of karaoke pool halls started to go well. Even better, I stopped dreading getting onstage, and started to feel eager to do it again. Excited about a new concept, or a new bit, new punchlines, new ways of saying something I felt confident would turn a joke from just okay to good, or from good to great. And with all of this returned my confidence. I again embraced the idea that I might not be the best comedian in the world, but I was damn good at this, and, even more importantly, it was something I enjoyed, and so if nothing else I would get up there and grin my ass off, be happy when people laughed, and when they didn’t laugh, write them off as a bunch of dim-witted idiots with poor taste.
That was almost a decade ago. Since then I have done a lot of comedy performances, in clubs, and concert halls, and late-night shows, and cable programs. I have written two books, and a bunch of articles—some good, some just okay. I have produced a comedy special, which quite a few people claim to like, and some others think isn’t funny at all. And I have reached a place where I love what I do, and I put my heart into it, and I am pretty confident that I do it well, and that no one else does it quite like me.
It took twenty long years and a lot of blood, sweat, and tears to get here,9 but I can finally say that I don’t just act as if I am a comedian. I am one.
Along the way I realized that to be really good at something, to truly excel, you have to love it even when it doesn’t love you. You have to be prepared to suck at it, and get good, and then suck again, and that may go on for a very long time, until you want to punch the thing you love in the face and get a job at Home Depot.
But if you really want something, you don’t punch it in the face. You stick with it until you stop wanting to hit it and start wanting to hug it, and then kiss it, and finally make sweet, sweet love to it that will leave you both in a shivering puddle of tears.10
Until then, it’s absolutely fine to fake it ’till you make it. Jump in with both feet. “Act as if.” Just remember you’ve got to actually put in the hours, and do the real, hard work of “becoming as if.”
Because eventually you will have to put your money, or your jokes, where your mouth is.
( 28 )
The Times I Spit on Someone from the Stage While Doing Standup
“Forgetting about our mistakes and our wounds isn’t enough to make them disappear.”—AI YAZAWA
“Let’s both pretend this never happened.”—AISHA TYLER
I have done this so many times it does not even warrant counting; literally more times than there are stars in the infinite galactic heavens. I have done this Sagans of times.
I have shared DNA with so many drunken strangers that if the government wanted to spread some kind of engineered virus aimed at thinning the world’s population so that they would be easier to subdue and control, I would be a perfect candidate for patient zero. I run around onstage like a rabid ferret, gesticulate as if I am trying to catch candy as it cascades from an imaginary piñata, and talk faster than a third grader off their Adderall. I could, without trying, without even looking in your direction, spit directly into your mouth as you are laughing at a joke.1 This is not a skill I am proud of. But it is a skill, nonetheless.
People do one of two things when they are talking and realize they have spit on another person midsentence. They ignore it completely, even though they know they spit and the other person knows they spit and they know the other person knows they spit; or, they make a grand gesture of saying, “Oh my god! I spit on you! I am disgusting! I am also perfectly healthy and impeccably meticulous, so you cannot be catching anything at all from me but my delicate fastidiousness and dedication to personal hygiene!” This, of course, convinces no one, but at least the spitter is off the hook and hasn’t completely ignored an occurrence that both parties are totally aware just happened, and are a little grossed out by.
When you are on stage, you are in a position of power. You are above everyone, illuminated by spotlight, wielding your microphone like a broadsword and striding the stage like Eddard Stark about to take a man’s head for fleeing the Wall. Showing weakness is the furthest thing from your mind, and in truth, would be a fatal mistake. You cannot show weakness, and you cannot bring the show to a halt so that you can apologize to a guy in the front row for hitting him in the face with bodily fluids. This would be exposing a chink in your armor that anyone, be they affectionate heckler or drunken asshole, could fully and fatally exploit. We cannot have that. People paid money to see you. The show must go on. There are many, many dick jokes left to tell.
When you play the game of microphones, you win or you die.
So you must always go for option number one, which is that not only will I not acknowledge that I spit on you, but I will act so oblivious to the possibility that I might have spit on you as to convince you, through my bright and smiling certitude, that it never actually happened. You will immediately cast about for the source of this new-landed moisture, checking first your table mates, then the ceiling sprinklers and your beer glass, and finally your own mouth, with a variety of Zapruder-like theories of how you might have been caught in the face with a droplet of watery substance. And then you will refocus on the show, and why you came, which is to laugh, and you will move on.
In comedy, as in life, fun must be had, my friend. Don’t let a little spit derail you.
( 29 )
The Time I Broke My Arm at Sundance, and the Ensuing Meltdown
“[N]obody likes having salt rubbed into their wounds, even if it is the salt of the earth.”—REBECCA WEST
“If I can’t have fun, damn it, no one can!”—AISHA TYLER
I will not do what you tell me to.
In fact, if you tell me not to do something, I will do exactly what you tell me not to do, even though I may have agreed, audibly and in your presence, not to do it.
For example, you may tell me not to eat the birthday cake. When it is gone, I will tell you I did not eat it. Technically, that would be true. Instead, I will have nibbled at it delicately and for an extended period, until it was no more.
You may tell me, after oral surgery, not to eat any solid food for twenty-four hours. I will then immediately order a double cheeseburger with bacon and spend the next four days scrubbing blood out of my pillowcases after chewing up the inside of my mouth.1
You may warn me not to put my finger into that highly charged light socket. Of course, that is exactly where you will find me, minutes later, right before I pass out and require resuscitation.
Sometimes I do not even do this consciously. I may not even want to do the thing you told me not to do. I may actually want to follow your heartfelt and well-intentioned instructions. I may just not be able to. I am powerfully and inexorably—often subconsciously—drawn to do the thing that I should absolutely avoid. I have always been this way.
It is a disease. Seriously. It is some kind of sickness.
It’s not that I’m not a team player, or can’t follow instructions, or that I don’t want things to go smoothly, or safely, or stay out of the hospital. It’s just that somehow, whatever I am supposed to stay away from, my brain will keep drawing me toward, again and again, like a mental event horizon, the pull of which I cannot escape. I do not do these things by choice. They just happen. I swear.
I am loyal. I am kind. I want nothing but the best for you and your family. But please do not leave a donut in front of me and say you’ll be right back. That donut and me will be long gone. While I am highly trustworthy, I am not a freaking statue.
When I was a kid, this manifested itself in many ways. If you told me I wasn’t athletic, I was on three teams by the next afternoon.2 If you told me I wasn’t good at science, I would have signed up for physics classes at the local college by Friday, even though I was only halfway through sophomore algebra in high school. And if you told me I didn’t know Kung Fu, I would have spent the weekend trying to break a board with my hand, and showed up at school on Monday with a very, very bruised hand and a very splintery, but unbroken, piece of wood.
I sent in my intent to enroll form that same day.
I really don’t like being told what to do. And even less being told what I am able to do.
The most dramatic occurrence of this in my young adult life (as I am refusing to fully enter adulthood, mainly because being a grownup sucks) was the year my first book, Swerve, came out. It was also the year I had a film in the Sundance Film Festival,3 which is a big deal, because I am rarely in a movie, let alone one that gets into Sundance, which is such an honor and a validation of your work and everything, and also they have lots of parties and you can drink for free and stuff. So, of course, I was very excited that my film was going to be screening there, and I planned a big trip to Utah to party and rage and snowboard and drink and walk around Park City. Oh, and support my film. Yeah. That too.
It was a very exciting time, because right afterwards I was scheduled to go on a tour to support my first book, and I was going to get to ride on a bunch of planes, and take pictures, and meet celebrities, and do karaoke, and sign copies of my book, and I felt very super extra fancy.
I invited my oldest friend to Utah to snowboard with me and get hooked up with all the free stuff I was sure to get there, as I had heard Sundance is all about free shit. We flew in to Park City on the same day. On the way in from the airport, I called my husband, who wished me luck and harmlessly spoke four portentous words: “Don’t break your arm.”
