I wasn’t afraid of bombing onstage because I felt like I was bombing in life.
A decade ago, depressed, confused about whether or not I wanted kids, and completely out of ideas on how to fix the mess of my career, I walked out of my apartment and started doing stand-up comedy.
I was 37 and at my lowest point. My journalism career had stalled out. I had always wanted to be a writer but I wasn’t at all suited to the relentless onslaught of breaking news. Three years on the overnight desk has wreaked havoc on my sleep. The late 2000s election coverage, the deadly earthquake in Haiti, and the collapse of the housing market had all been too much for me.
Later, I had to face the fact that I had no appetite for celebrity gossip and the viral content necessary to sustain a career as a lifestyle editor. I hadn’t written anything I was proud of in years. My colleague at the New York Daily News, the legendary columnist Joanna Molloy, had told me that “I had to fight to write.” But I didn’t have the fight in me at all and I wondered if I ever did. The thing was, I never wanted to be a journalist. I wanted to write novels, yes, but also, secretly I wanted to be a stand-up comedian.
The cable television boom of the 1980s and ’90s brought a huge wave of stand-up comedy to the masses. Instead of doing my homework, I’d stay up late watching Saturday Night Live and comedians at the Improv, Caroline’s, the Apollo, and Dangerfield’s. From 1989 to 1992, HBO ran a half-hour comedy special called One Night Stand, which showcased up-and-coming comics who would go on to become legends, such as Bill Hicks, Martin Lawrence, Gilbert Gottfried, and Norm McDonald. But it was the women I became obsessed with; the women who would go on to shape my sense of humor for the rest of my life.
For every woman, there were at least 20 male comedians, so when comics like Paula Poundstone, Rita Rudner, and Diane Ford came onstage, it felt like an extra special event. Female comedians didn’t have to be traditionally beautiful, thin, or even that likeable. You were rewarded for making jokes about feeling like a loser. As an awkward teenager, this appealed to me on a visceral level. There didn’t seem to be many options for women who hated authority other than joining a punk band. I couldn’t play an instrument but deep down I thought maybe I could be a funny person.
When I was in journalism school, my professor asked us to choose a beat to report on for a semester. I chose live comedy. I went to open mics all over the city, in dingy basements, dank theaters, and hotel bars and threw my name in the hat to try my three minutes of comedy. My jokes about growing up on Long Island, my Jewish family, and dating were barely half-formed but the seeds were there. But I told myself I wasn’t doing it for real—it was just for school—so I didn’t allow myself to take it seriously. When the semester ended, I stopped. But I never forgot how it all felt: getting up in front of a crowd, unearthing a bit I’d been working on in my head, and getting that warm wave of love from the audience—a laugh.
By my late 30s, the majority of my friends had become moms and I was well, waiting for that longing. Yet my biological clock remained on snooze. I worried that if I didn’t have kids, I’d regret it. But I was already full of regret! I hated myself for giving up stand-up, for convincing myself that I enjoyed working in the newsroom, and for sublimating so much of who I wanted to be when I was younger.
The problem was, I didn’t know what that person looked like anymore. I’d started my 20s as a crazy adventurer who stayed out late, went to sex parties (well, just one and didn’t have sex with anyone), and made short films with friends. A decade and a half later, I was a writer with writer’s block, a party girl who was too tired and lazy to go out, and a wife who felt adrift in her marriage.
One night in 2015, I was up late, dreading work the next day, when Amy Schumer came on Comedy Central. Maybe it was the Ambien, maybe it was realizing I had to wake up in four hours to go to a job that I hated, but I suddenly thought to myself, if she can do this, I can at least try it. The worst that could happen was nothing at all. And my life felt very full of nothing.
The next day, I went to an open mic in the basement of the now-closed comedy club in Long Island City, the Creek and the Cave. There were only three other comics at the mic, all dudes in their early 20s who sat in the audience looking at their phones. I can’t remember the jokes I told—they weren’t even jokes—but no one booed or told me to get the hell off the stage. Once my three minutes were up, everyone just filed out of the room to get a beer. I’d survived. Then I got on my phone and found another open mic.
I decided to leave my full-time job and go freelance, giving me plenty of time to stay out all night. For two years, I performed in bar shows, tiny comedy festivals, and little venues all over the five boroughs, New Jersey, and Connecticut. I did my eight minutes in dank rooms that violated every kind of fire code, fetid basements that smelled like raw sewage, theaters with broken seats, and comedy clubs with crumbling ceilings. I performed every week at a hookah bar in the East Village that was so filthy that touching the toilet seat risked exposure to hepatitis. I followed drunk hosts whose only crowd work bit was to point to two people in the audience and say “you guys fuckin’?” I met shady bookers who cheated the comics out of money and sent dick pics to the female comics. A guy in the front row at Caroline’s put his hands over his ears and yelled at me to “just stop.” I once watched another guy take a running leap to get to the mic, trip, and smash his front teeth. More than once, I saw someone throw up on stage.
When one of my freelance jobs sent me to Stockholm, I stopped at an international open mic. It was there that I learned that everyone, whether they live in Russia, Colombia, Turkey, or Ireland, has a joke about swiping Tinder while on the toilet. I learned that lawyers can be actually pretty funny. Retired cops are not. There was this one drunk lady who showed up every week at an open mic and pretended to take a shit on the stage. She’d say that she’d named her baby Hitler and then took off her top. “At least she’s got a bit,” one comic grumbled. At a roast battle, a guy said that I was so old my daddy issues were stories about the Great Depression. I loved it all. I reveled in the squalor, the solidarity, the gallows humor, and the jokes, so many good ones.
I’d kill it in Fort Greene, get on the subway, do the same set in the East Village and eat shit. I learned that bombing was part of the game, everyone bombed. Bombing meant you stepped out on a limb and tried new things. Only hacks told the same jokes over and over. You had to bomb until you worked the joke out. I wasn’t afraid of bombing onstage because I felt like I was bombing in life. I had nowhere to go but up.
Comedians are cruel but honest. One comic came up to me after the show and asked me why I “held the mic like a tulip.” Another told me that he initially avoided me because “I dressed like a teacher.” Guys loved to mansplain timing and how to deal with crowds. But I actually didn’t mind that because staying up all night talking about jokes was better than talking about anything else. For the first time since my early 20s, I felt a loosening in my chest.
I loved the other female comics the most. We didn’t have to smile and pretend we were doing fine. We could be gross, we could be honest, we could show our gnarliest selves. The laughs came from a different place, someplace nasty and forbidden. I learned that men are intimidated by funny women. They worry that if a woman can tell a joke, then they will make fun of them. “When a man says he wants to date a woman with a good sense of humor,” I remember my friend saying, “they mean they want a girlfriend who laughs at their jokes.”
But who would want to book a white woman who was always nearly a decade older than everyone else on the lineup and told jokes about LinkedIn and the horrors of professional networking? It turned out a lot of people. An audience can only handle so many comics talking about being single, jerking off, and having no money. I had a joke about going to a work event and having to wear a “Hello, My Name Is” sticker and wishing I’d written “Full of Regret.“ I had a joke about how my husband and I had nothing in common but our marriage worked because we hated the same things. “We both hate whimsical things,” I said. “Getting angry at wind chimes and dream catchers keeps our flame alive.”
I put younger audiences to sleep but I was often a hit with teachers, drunk brunch moms, and exhausted professionals. I showed up on time, was happy with any slot I was given, and gave pep talks to my friends after bad sets. I was once brought on stage as “the nicest person in comedy.” Most comics would have been mortally offended but not me.
Comedy friendships are strange. You find yourself laughing and drinking with people that in your former life, you’d cross the street to avoid. I met my best friend in comedy at an open mic in the East Village. He was a 25-year-old convicted juvenile felon who told me that he’d tried to burn his tattoos off to get into the army. He was often drunk and belligerent but, when you got to know him, a gentleman and an intent listener. Early in our friendship, I told him that I’d been so depressed that getting into comedy made me feel better. “Yo,” he said, aghast. “That’s the darkest shit I ever heard.”
Some of the worst people I met in comedy gave the best advice. If your material does well 80 percent of the time, don’t change it because you didn’t get laughs at the other 20 percent. “Have faith in your material,” one guy told me. “Don’t let a few shit crowds undermine your confidence in jokes that have been proven over time to kill.” I once bombed so hard that even my fellow comics couldn’t meet my eyes or mutter “nice set” as I walked off the stage. I considered walking out the door and into the street and into traffic. A female comic saw my face and said, “Did you eat shit?” I nodded. “I mean this in the nicest way: Nobody cares. Get up and do it again.” And an hour later, somewhere in Chelsea, I did. And it went fine.
Meanwhile, I was leaving my husband at home while I did three and four shows a week, sometimes two or three in one night. At first I was upset that he didn’t want to come out and see me but then I was relieved. I didn’t want to worry whether or not he was having a good time. The one time he came out, I bombed so badly that I felt him having an anxiety attack in the audience. Most of the time, I was glad for the freedom to run around Brooklyn and Manhattan all night and not have to worry about anyone else but me. But he also missed some of the most important moments of my life. He couldn’t relate to the rush of it all, the highs and lows. I’d come home buzzing and he’d be asleep. We started to drift apart. I worried that I’d gone too far off the rails.
I also wasn’t making enough as a freelancer and needed to get another full-time job. My first week in the new office, I felt like my technicolor world had gone back to black and white. There was no time for open mics to hone jokes for 7, 9, and 11 p.m. shows. I felt like I was at my own funeral. I had gotten close to finding something within myself, something dark and nasty, but deeply essential. I could have been, well, not a star, but something more magical than just an ordinary person; more magical than a person who filled out Excel spreadsheets or participated in team building exercises. I was back where I was two years ago but worse now because I’d tasted what it was like to be free. I did realize comedy wasn’t worth busting up my marriage for, but it seemed so unfair that I couldn’t have it all.
One night, a few months after I’d quit doing comedy, I met up with my friend, the recovering juvenile felon. We sat in a bar and had a few beers. I cried and cried. All the loss, the regret, and despair poured out of me. I had blown it, I said. “I’m just a nothing. How can I go back to regular life when I don’t want a regular life?”
He listened, and finally, he said, “You and me, it doesn’t matter what we do. We’re artists. If I thought of myself as just a guy who moves furniture, I’d kill myself.”
OK, OK. The way forward for me was to commit to living a funnier life and I’ve done that. But I miss stand-up every day. Comedy is like a parasitic infection, it attaches to your spirit and the longings come in flare-ups. I am comforted by the fact that I can always go back and do it again. There will always be another dirty basement with another mic and three minutes to try and get some laughs.
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