“Don’t worry if you bomb.”
The driving ethos behind Trial & Error is this: try new things, especially if they scare you. That’s why I do this. Not just for myself, but also to encourage my readers to do the same. Sometimes, that looks like testing out a product that involves me overcoming my fear of needles. Sometimes it involves convincing my body that it’s freezing to death. And sometimes, it finally pushes me to do something I’ve been avoiding for more than a decade.
Try new things, especially if they scare you.
I’ve been obsessed with stand up comedy since I was a teenager. I spent countless late nights watching Conan and Craig Ferguson in high school and college. Before Netflix made it easy to watch comedy specials, I’d buy albums on iTunes from people like Mitch Hedberg or Aziz Ansari and listen to them over and over again on long drives. I love comedy because I love to laugh and I love to make people laugh. But I’m also drawn to it because in many ways it’s the most honest form of art. Comedy is a way of saying the things that should be said in ways that people accept it. And I have always wanted to give it a shot.
But there’s one problem: I’m terrified of it. Sure, I was voted Funniest in my high school class. That was out of 52 people. And sure I can be pretty funny in my writing. But most of the time the people I’m making laugh are laughing because it’s a circumstance where they weren’t expecting a joke, like the time a few weeks ago I made a joke in the middle of a very uncomfortable company-wide Zoom meeting about our vaccination policy. I thrive in those situations. I love being able to cut the tension with a spur-of-the-moment joke. But I have always been absolutely terrified of the idea of having to write a joke that a discerning comedy audience would appreciate. The thought of crafting a beginning, middle, and ending with a killer punchline just doesn’t sound like something I could do.
Plus, with my Christian moral ethic constantly placing a governor in my mind on everything I say and do I wonder how I could make jokes that were both clean and edgy enough to impress the liquored-up audience of a dingy comedy club on a weeknight.
When I started brainstorming ideas for Trial & Error, stand up comedy was at the top of my list. It was also at the bottom of the list because I did not want to actually do it. The more I thought about it, the more I realized I had to do it. If T&E is about overcoming fears, I have to do the thing that scared me the most.1
In Through the Backdoor
So I called Backdoor Comedy Club in Richardson, TX and got myself on the list for Open Mic night. They do it every Thursday. The lady on the phone gave me a list of the rules and made me repeat them back to her. I’d get three minutes, it must be all original material (obviously), and it’s a clean club so no sexual innuendo, four-letter words, and no bathroom humor.
Easy enough. I had been working on some jokes in my head and none of them involved that stuff anyway. In fact, these rules made me more comfortable. The thing that worried me the most was the three minutes. That is not a lot of time.2 And most of the jokes I was working on were more like stories with funny lines throughout.
So every shower, every car ride, every moment I had alone I started running through my routine. At first I was going to combine three different stories. That was way too long. Then it was two. Then I realized I need to only stick with one and make it good.
A few weeks later, the night arrived. I told no one, not even my wife. I didn’t want a friendly audience who might laugh at everything I said. I wanted to earn the laughter. As I pulled into the parking lot and realized I was only a few minutes from my friend’s houses I had second thoughts.
Why the heck wouldn’t I want people there who would laugh at my jokes??
I stuck with the original game plan. I was going to experience all the ups and downs of this myself.
I wanted to earn the laughter
The only thing that had deviated from the original plan was…well…I had scrapped all my other jokes. I was going with a new one based on an experience that happened to me the night before: I valet parked my car (not to brag) and when I got in the car I realized that the valet driver had farted in my car. It was horrendous. I legitimately thought a skunk had died inside the car. I turned the overhead light on to check the floorboard in case that really had happened. And then I started thinking about the implications of this. Could I get my tip money back? I didn’t even know what the valet driver looked like because instead of hanging around until I got in he bolted around the back of my car. Obviously I’m going to report the man to the police for this crime against humanity, but I won’t be able to describe what he looks like the sketch artist. All I can do is describe the smell and then we could figure out which valet driver in the greater Dallas area likes to eat fermented possum and arrest him.
So you can see how this joke would have killed. Ok, maybe not but I thought it was funny enough to get some laughs and fill up three minutes. I figured even if none of the rest of the joke was funny, just the idea of someone doing that to me would get enough laughs to get me through three minutes.
When I walked into Backdoor to sign in at 7:15, the gloomy man behind the host stand checked me in and told me to repeat the rules of the club back to him. “No four-letter words or sex jokes,” I said.
“Or bathroom humor,” he reminded me.
Oh no.
I hadn’t even considered that this new joke was bathroom humor. I mean, it took place inside my car but it very much involved a man going, as local radio legend George Dunham calls it, “air bathroom.”
I asked him how strict those rules were and the answer was essentially, if you’re a known comedian around here you can get away with it a little. If you’re a nobody you will get kicked off the stage.
Fortunately I had three hours to figure it out because I the second-to-last person on the list of about 50 people performing that night. Newbies always go last.
For the next 30 minutes or so the rest of the comedians started filing in and then hanging out outside the club. As extroverted as I am, I absolutely hate going up to groups of people I don’t know and introducing myself. I hate the “what do you do for a living” small talk. It’s just not my thing. This is where my night really turned from a terrifying experience to one of the most positive experiences I’ve had in years. One of the more experienced comedians noticed me standing a little off to the side and came over and introduced himself and brought me closer to the group. He told me how it was going to work and gave me some words of encouragement. He suggested other places that were great to play if I wanted to keep going after tonight. And he introduced me to some other comedians who were all super happy for me and encouraging.
Then it was back to the larger discourse, where comedians were testing out joke ideas, telling stories of bombing, or of a joke they took too far. And the general nature of the conversation was incredible, no one took offense to anything. It was men, women, young, old, black, white, Asian, Middle-Eastern, Indian, Pakistani, and more. Everyone could make fun of someone, no matter how personal or offensive, and get a laugh from them. It was like we were all old friends. I can honestly say it was the most fun and welcoming group of people I’ve been a part of in a long time.
At the same time, it was super intimidating. They all had notebooks. They talked about jokes and punchlines like they were math problems (in a good way). They had a good idea of what worked and what didn’t and were perfectly willing to write a joke on the fly and try it out on stage a few minutes later. I felt glad to be at the very end because most of them would be long gone by the time I started making my little jokes. Some of them gave me great advice, but almost all of it centered around the central tenet, “Don’t worry if you bomb.”
Once the show started I realized exactly why they said this. Most of them use the Open Mic night as a way to try out new material and stay sharp in front of the audience. Some of the comedians who had just been talking about doing paid gigs went up on the stage and for three full minutes absolutely bombed.
Like, zero laughs.
Well they got some laughs, but it was from their buddies who were laughing at the lack of laughs these new jokes were getting. And then they’d walk off the stage just as happy as when they went up there. For them it wasn’t about pleasing the audience of 20-25 people who’d wandered into this club in Richardson on a Thursday night. Once I saw that, and saw how the audience didn’t jeer or get upset, I completely relaxed. Showtime at the Apollo this was not.
There were also so many people performing in a row that unless you were extra good or extra bad, no one would remember you. I knew I wouldn’t be either one so this was perfect. I ditched the fart joke and stuck with the one that I knew had the best opening line.3
All About Timing
Frankly, that line killed. It helped that the person before me had rambled about how no one reads the newspaper and talked about the Catholic church molesting kids (but, like, there wasn’t a joke at the end) for his entire set. So my joke was the first actual joke the audience had heard in at least three minutes. Once I got a real, actual laugh I relaxed a little. And then…I realized this one story wasn’t going to make it the whole three minutes. I thought I had at least two more minutes to kill. I’d seen several comedians drop an accidental F bomb, I’d seen many make sex jokes, and none of them got kicked off the stage. So, I thought, I’m going for the fart joke.
Just the pure premise of the joke had people laughing. I was feeling good, I’m going to end it with the fermented possum line and walk out of here a comedy legend. Right as I start building to the finisher, the flashlight indicating that my time was up started shining right in my eyes. And let me tell you, it was made very very very clear to me that you do not go past this. I froze. I couldn’t just end in the middle of a sentence. I had to find a way to finish this joke in three seconds. I let out an awkward laugh and said, “well anyway when I describe it to the police sketch artist I’ll only be able to describe the smell.” Or something nonsensical like that. Whatever I said it was completely without context. It would have been better to just stop in the middle of a sentence and walk off. Now that would have been funny.
But the host of the night saved it with a funny quip right as he jumped on stage, getting the crowd back laughing and clapping for me. It was over. I had done it. Now I never had to do it again. Except, I kind of loved it. I even loved that I failed at the end because it didn’t matter. None of the comics who were still there mentioned the ending. They all complimented me and said they were surprised that was my first time to ever do it. I’m not bragging about my performance, it was overall very forgettable. Even now a few weeks later I am absolutely certain none of them remember me. I bring that up to say further emphasize that the comedian community is such a great group of people because they all are completely accepting of failure. They don’t care if you get up there and aren’t funny. They just care that you got up there and tried it. They do it night after night and fail so often. But the times they kill it, the times the get laugh after laugh, it makes all those tough times worth it.
Comedy is like baseball. Even the best ones don’t succeed every time. In fact, they don’t even succeed half the time. Failure is part of it. When you watch a comedy special by someone like Nate Bargatze who is at the absolute top of his game right now, you assume that’s just how he is, that he goes out every night with a flawless hour-long set. In truth, the special you see on Netflix is the result of him going out night after night in smaller clubs with versions of that material until he’s got it perfectly honed in. And the special also doesn’t involve any of the jokes that he tried over and over again in smaller venues that bombed. Watching a Netflix special is like watching the year-end highlight film of Mike Trout. You’re only seeing home runs. They don’t include the 70% of Mike Trout’s at bats where he got out. For years I psyched myself out as if I was going to have to start in the World Series when really this was like going to the batting cages.
Now, as for whether I’ll ever do it again? I think so. The one thing I would do next time is tell people about it. Now that I know I can get real laughs from strangers, I’d like those to be amplified by the fake laughs of my friends. To be really good at it and get to the point of being paid or being asked to host a Bingo night (apparently a pretty high honor), you’ve got to put in the work. You’ve got to be at a club multiple nights a week. You’ve got to constantly be writing new material and figuring out what audiences like. In sum: it takes a ton of time. I don’t have that. You know when I did have that? When I was 22. That’s when I should have started doing this, but I let my fear get in the way. That’s the lesson I’ve learned from this experience and many of the others so far in Trial & Error. Most things aren’t as scary as they appear.
The sooner you overcome that fear the better.
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Well technically the thing that scares me the most is hot air ballooning which they do right by my house all the time but I’m not trying to actually die for this newsletter.
Unless you’re in a cryotherapy chamber, in which case it’s an eternity.
If you want to hear that you’re going to have to come to my next show