I did it folks. I was able to add a long-awaited notch in the feather cap. I’m sure you’ve been hearing me talking lots of gah-gah about becoming a standup comedian, but Sunday night, I did just that.
I got on a stage for the first time in… four years?… and told some jokes to a room full of strangers.
(And 5 of my friends.)
Why had it taken me so long to do standup? Well, for one, there was always something else going on when the Irish bar down the street from me did their monthly open mics. My mom was in town, I was deathly hungover, whatever. And yes, there is a multitude of open mics happening in LA on any given night, and yes, I could have gone elsewhere. But when you don’t do something for years, it’s much much harder to make that initial effort to get back into it.
Sunday seemed like I would fall into that same trap that has plagued me for the last few months. I woke up that morning hung over (from drugs), and looked in the mirror at the reflection of a broken man. And then I asked that man, “Hey good-looking, can you really do this tonight? You don’t even have jokes written.”
No, I didn’t have jokes, and I certainly didn’t have five minutes of them. But I did have things to vent about. Things that had building up in me, to the point where I was seething like a snake; could the stage act as my therapy?
I winced again as I felt the effects of the night before beating at my head, wringing my brain out like a wet sponge. “You should wait, Darby. You’re not at your best. Wait for a Sunday where you wake up not hungover.”
But then I realized how uncommon those were. And how little time I had left in LA. Less than a year left here.
No more excuses, I told myself. I’m doing comedy tonight, and that’s that.
I spent the good part of that day with my eyes on the clock. Watching it tick towards 9 PM. The time when I would need to head to the bar and put my name on the list of that night’s participants.
Now, what you must know, is that the absolute worst part about doing an open mic is the wait. The wait between signing your name on the list, up until the point you actually get on stage. That’s the worst part for me, at least. I’ve always feel that way. Especially when you forgot about everything that standup entails, what makes an act funny, whether your material is good or not—and you spend all that time listening to other people’s names get called in front of you, second guessing yourself, thinking, “This may be a fucking trainwreck.”
I was the 9th person on that list.
I watched one by one as comedians took stage, did their bit, and then bowed out graciously.
These were people who were no strangers to comedy. They knew what they were doing. Did I?
Finally I was “on deck”. Which meant that I was going after the current comedian.
I finished my non-alcoholic beer and sat there patiently, rehearsing my act in my head. Would I remember it? Would I be able to wing it? Had my single rehearsal at home been sufficient?
“…a hand to Darby, ladies and gentlemen!”
That was me.
OH FUCK here we go.
I stood up, approached the stage, and before I said anything I moved this giant wooden chair that had been blocking the view of the stage and pissing me off. I wanted to full spotlight. I wanted to pass with flying colors, or I wanted to crash in a ball of flames. It was all or nothing.
And then I cleared my throat, opened my mouth, and I began to speak into the mic.
So how’d it go?
It went… much better than expected.
Trusting me memory turned out to be the right call. I didn’t want to use my phone or a notecard like lots of comedians do, and I hit most of the points I wanted to make. And I’m decent at improvising so I employed that skill a few times as well. Everything flowed cohesively, and the stories seemed like actual stories. I only overestimated the hilarity of one or two lines, but I just moved along quickly before anyone knew that they were supposed to be punchlines. And not only did I get the audience to laugh, I got them to REACT.
5 minutes in my act, when I was finishing up my tirade Colombian witches, I got the flashing light from the host, which is the universal on-stage signal for “time’s up”. Well, not like “get the fuck off stage you verbose biatch”, but more like “you got one minute left”.
I had two jokes in my arsenal, and I knew I would only have time for one of them.
The kama sutra joke? Or the soy joke? I had to choose one. Fast.
I went with the soy joke. Which isn’t even really a joke. It’s a serious question I’ve had for awhile that I was hoping that someone in the crowd that night would be able to answer for me.
And that question is simple:
Why is soy milk white, but soy sauce is black?
Here’s the moment when I asked the crowd that question. Listen for their reaction:
(I especially like the guy at the end who said “yo no soy.”)
I didn’t expect that question to send such strong ripples through the audience. Apparently they had never considered it either. Minds were blown.
I should have seen this coming. The soy question was something that I originally put out as a tweet. A throwaway tweet, one that I didn’t think would warrant a revisit to, to see if any wizards out there were able to answer the question.
Despite being years old, I’m pretty new to the whole Twitter train. I’ve been promoting my blog on there lately and am slowly discovering its greatness. For my money, Twitter completely shits on Instagram. Well, it shits on Instagram if you have something to say. If you are a total airhead and your brain is filled with rocks, then you can just stick to your IG:photosofpancakes and your dog ear filters and all of that hullahballoo.
Anyways, Twitter has this great feature that allows you to see how many people had interacted with your tweet, commented, seen it, shit like that. In all of my other tweets, the most eyes I had ever gotten on a single tweet hovered right around the 150 mark.
But the soy question?
Great Scott, Marty! We’ve broken the thousands!
So what’s the story here?
- Mankind needs to make greater strides in familiarizing itself with the enigmatic object known only as “soy”
- I’m going to keep doing comedy
I loved it up there so much that I’m debating whether I’ll do comedy again during a weeknight this week. I mean fuck it, let’s keep this momentum going. My flamboyance on stage has already been made into meme.
My friends coming to support me also gave me more of a push to keep it going. It was all positivity coming from them. They claimed I had a good “stage presence” and seemed confident up there. One of them (a future open mic’er) told me that the hardest part about it would have to be the material. Coming up with new stuff and such. My reaction was, is it? Is that what’s hard for most people? Because that’s not at all hard for me. The hardest part was already behind me: doing it once.
I’ve got oodles of stuff to talk/bitch/rant/complain about; I can’t ever see myself running out. I can afford to do this frequently. Until I do actually run out. But I can’t see that happening.
I want to make my name known. I want to make an splash on the comedy scene before I leave LA.
And with my first solo podcast behind me, and a couple of new ones coming out in the next weeks, I am primed to do exactly that.
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