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"All In?" A Case Study In Stand-Up Comedy

Suppose you're in your early thirties or older and want to give stand-up a try... First and foremost, hats off to you. Most people do not have the courage to ever try something like that. It is nerve-wracking at first. If you are naturally introverted, it can be downright brutal. Don't believe me? Cobble together five minutes, find an open-mic in your area, and get on the low-rise stage with the faux-brick backdrop.

It's warmer up there than you'd imagine, and the lights are a LOT brighter you'd imagine. You can kind of make out some faces in the audience, but not really. The rustle of limbs adjusting in their seats and the clink of pint glasses informs you that there are quite a few people in the room, but otherwise, they're quiet as hell because they're waiting for YOU to make them laugh. You hear an awkward, breaking, nervous voice coming out of a cheap PA system, shambling his or her way through a joke, and then you realize it's yours.

Suppose you bomb a couple times, but something masochistic and resilient in you says, "That was scary but fun, I want to try doing this some more and see if I get better!", and indeed, you put in work and keep at it. You find yourself improving  It's bringing out something new in you that you never quite imagined you'd see or experienced.

That fun and newness and electric feeling you're experiencing is gonna slam hard against the hull of a two big questions: "I'm in my thirties. Time is not on my wide like it used to be. How far do I want to go with this, and am I willing or capable of putting in what's needed to get there?"

There's less of an urgency to ask this question in your early or mid-twenties.  Not so in your thirties. Your sense of time and appreciation for time is a lot different. You understand that things have ticking clocks attached to them. Maybe you have other life goals with their own ticking clocks that are incompatible with this new thing. Maybe you have responsibilities in your life that take priority over this new thing.

All of this is pretty self-evident, but they kind of determine your answer to the two questions:

1. How Far Do I Want To Go With This Thing?

There are really two answers...."All In" or "Not All In"

If your answer is "Not All In", then that makes what you do a lot more flexible. Suppose you say to yourself, "Hey, I don't want to go pro, I just want to do an open-mic every once in a while and have fun and see if I get better...". If that is all you want to do and are content with that, then bravo. You have reasonable expectations and can probably adapt that to whatever is going on in your day to day life. The only trade-off is that there is a definite ceiling to how far you can go.

If your answer is "All In...", as in "This is going to be my main thing and I am going to seriously commit to this and go as far as I can!", then you have to ask yourself what is it going to take to get there.

2. Am I capable of putting in what's needed to get there?

There are more questions you'll have to ask yourself. I can't hit 'em all, but these are some big ones.

A. Am I Willing And/Or Able To Work 5 or 6 Nights A Week? Because you're going to have to. For practice, exposure and networking and becoming part of a community. You're probably going to have to zig-zag around to the the different rooms in your city. To do that, you may have to wait until 11:00 PM or later to get your time. And after you're done, hanging out and shooting the shit afterwards with your fellow comedians is par for the course. It's part of how you foster friendships as well as future working relationships. But someone who is twenty-three or twenty-four has different stamina than,say, someone ten years their senior.

Do you have a job that will allow you to keep this kind of schedule? Can you come into work the next day and still be able to do your job well? Do you have a partner or significant other? Do you have children? Do you have a dog? Can your body keep up with it?

B. Am I Willing To Go On The Road? If you're serious about, say making a living at standup, and want to break out of the three or four rooms you work around you're city, you're going to have to get out on the road at hit some farther-flung markets than you imagined. Are you, for instance, ready to have your East Coast metropolitan Jewish voice fall on deaf ears in Lynchburg, VA (seriously, don't go to Lynchburg)? Not only will you not make much money on the road while you pay your dues (which may take a few years), you will be very lucky if you break even and will, more likely than not, lose money out there. There is a documentary out there called "I Am Road Comic" that is worth watching if you have even the faintest aspirations of being a comedian. It's not that good a documentary, but it has a very informative cost breakdown portion of a week on the road. It's not that far off from living like a minor league ballplayer.

The smaller questions in Question A (significant other/job/children/dog) apply here as well. Assuming that the stars align and there's a window where you can take off, can you afford to be away for a week or two at a time and not bring any money home? Do you have pre-existing debt of any sort? By the way, you will take on debt as an aspiring comedian.

C. Am I Willing To Be Broke? Or Have A Roommate? With any serious endeavor comes sacrifice. One of these may be in the form of money lost to a time commitment. If your day job is incompatible with your new ambitions, you may need to find a new gig that can accommodate your comedy schedule. If you have already have a skill set that you can do on your own schedule and make decent money at, that's probably the most ideal. If you don't, you may have to take a service industry job or a temp job that will help you shore things up. If you're leaving behind a more stable lifestyle, you're most likely taking a pay cut.

Taking a pay cut to pursue a larger goal is a hard enough thing to do. The prospect of making just enough to scrape by on (especially if you live in an expensive real estate market, which you'll have to do) is a very, very hard prospect to go back to. Anyone who has been broke knows how terrible it makes you feel. In addition to the constant state of anxiety you live in, you have to deal with feelings of vulnerability and a tremendous amount of dings to your self-esteem. You feel like an utter loser when you have to ask people to borrow things.

I was broke for about four years in my early twenties. I said to myself, "Never again". I still stand by that answer today.

Ditto for having roommates.

D. Can I Deal With Being Around Twenty-Somethings All The Time? When I was a kid, I took karate lessons, and for the adults, they had an arrangement where they could skip a couple of belts provided they proved themselves in testing. The logic was that they can learn at a more advanced rate than a six-year-old, and should therefore have a different range of opportunities. Makes sense, right?

If you get a "late start" with stand-up, there is no skipping green belt through purple belt. There will be no one to come along and say, "Hey, you can come this way to the Thirty-And-Over Open Mic Room, we understand your situation." A comedian scrapping his or her way up is the same, regardless of age. You will be more like the lone "old guy" you may remember from classes in college, if you went to college. Except there may not be a "professor figure" closer to your age there whom you can relate to. So by default, your peers will probably be a lot younger than you. In a sense, you are peers: you are all new to something, you are all learning by trial and error and developing your own voice, you are going through the same highs and lows together and experiencing a sort of rite of passage together. 

In another way, you are not quite peers because you are in different stages of life. For instance, I am thirty-seven years old at the time of this writing. I can have one conversation with a 25-year-old who loves all the same music and books and movies as I do, and a second conversation with a 36-year-old who may not like any of the same movies/music/books, but is sort of in a similar stage of life as me and has the same attendant anxieties. Odds are, I am going to feel more of a kinship with the 36-year-old than I will the 25-year-old. It doesn't mean I can't have fun talking to the 25-year-old, but the truth is, I know there will be a little bit of an "old guy loneliness" on my end. I know I could try and talk about the things I worry about at my age, and they could empathize and maybe understand it in the abstract, but they couldn't truly "get it" because they just haven't been there yet. Are you ready to feel that "old guy loneliness" / out-of-place feeling at a diner at 11:30 PM on a Tuesday?

E. Is This My #1 Thing? As your twenties draw to an end, so will your life as a polymath (or a dilettante, perhaps). It becomes harder to be a musician / writer / filmmaker / comedian / photographer / artisanal dildo craftsman. Some people choose to stay on that road, and that's fine, but it becomes harder to excel at any one thing. Time is not on your side like it used to be. You have to narrow your focus and decide for yourself what Your Number One is. And you have to be okay with those other things taking a backseat to Your Number One. Is stand-up comedy Your Number One? Is it the one craft you're ready and willing to devote most of your energy to? If not, that's okay. 

I toyed around with open mics and had a blast, but chose not to continue with it because in my heart of hearts, I realized comedy was not my "Number One". Who knows, it’s possible that I’m merely just “office funny” and not “stage funny”. I also realized I could not answer many of the above questions in the affirmative. Maybe someday I will give open-mics another go, just to see how I do.

Many serious artistic pursuits besides comedy have a similar array of questions that have to be answered. Some of those answers you come up with may bum you out at first, but knowing which ones to ask early on enough will same you a LOT of unnecessary heartache.

-J

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You Won’t Be Remembered, And Neither Will Your Art

One of the reasons that humans create art is to address innate fears of their own mortality. They know they will die. Creating something that will ostensibly "outlive" us (whether its offspring, some tribal / societal or tribal contribution, legacy, renown, art, etc.) is something that we are socially conditioned for, if not hardwired.

The idea of dying is scary enough. The idea that we will no longer be thought of or remembered at some point, and that our graves will eventually become untended, grimy and forgotten, is supremely terrifying to our egos. To all of the criteria upon which we build a sense of identity and self-esteem in this world, this thought is a darkly-cloaked, red-eyed stranger on a horse. I think this instinct becomes more urgent as we start to get older, and the trajectory of our lives become easier to calculate. Self-help literature and friends' social media memes have propagated the life-as-movie analogy. "If your life were a movie, would anyone want to watch it?" "You're the star of the movie of your life." Etc. This analogy has inculcated people with the mistaken idea that others will see or experience this movie, and that our lives will be remembered as a riveting three-act-narrative. The truth is that your life and mine will not be remembered this way. We are the stars of the movie of our lives, but really the only person who will ever watch it. Our lives will be crystallized as a photo in someone's scrapbook somewhere, if we are lucky. Then that person will pass on as you did, and that scrapbook (and you) will be utterly forgotten. 

What is the upshot of this logic? The idea that we somehow made a difference in this world (even if it is someone fondly remembering an album we put out ten years ago and sharing it with others on a blog or something) is very attractive to our ego. It comforts us against the inevitable void of being forgotten and utterly insignificant. It's a valuable tool in our survival toolbox as human beings. More often than not, I think that it's a bad place to try to create art from. 

From the get go, it puts expectations on whatever we're creating. In a culture where value is calculated by the number of "likes" we receive, or our number of followers, or our "Klout score" as influencers, it places pressure on us. If no one likes it, or only three people listen to it in the past month, does it matter? By extension, do I matter?

If you can summon the peace of mind to begin with an understanding of "My art will not be remembered and neither will I", and still want to pursue your work, you are a stronger and more secure person than I am. It's a very attractive, very Eastern, very sexy embrace-the-emptiness-of-it-all ideal. It's also a difficult ideal to put into practice.

It's a tough point to begin from, but it's probably the truth. It will also take a lot of pressure off, and allow you to be a lot more honest with yourself.

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Introduction Thing!

Hey there! The purpose of this blog is to initiate mutually-beneficial conversations on staying creative, prolific, and happy into middle age and beyond. This will be an experiment for me. If it works out and finds a small audience and helps someone, then great. If not, then "Oh well, fuck it" and on to whatever the next thing ends up being... I'll be writing most of these entries in one take with minimal editing as my day-to-day life is extremely busy. Much of this will probably be written and published over my lunch break. I want the tone to be fast, conversational, and blunt. There will be typos, faulty grammar, poor syntax, half-formed thoughts, mixed metaphors, and malapropisms galore ("Dancing a flamingo"). I'm much more concerned with greasing the gears of self-realization and hopefully inspiring an “Aha! moment than impressing anyone with my questionable abilities as an essayist. More than anything else, I want it to be funny and honest. There will be an undercurrent of snarkiness, but I want anyone who reads this to understand that any and all behavior I make fun of is something that I have either done myself or continue to do. I try to keep things good-natured, and I'll always try to heap a greater amount of ridicule on myself than anyone else. My goal is not to discourage anyone or make them feel bad about what they are doing. My goal is to help others (and myself, let's be honest) cultivate healthy and reasonable expectations for their creative output and not unnecessarily set themselves up for disappointment. There are many resources on things like the science of success, motivation, etc. I'm probably not going to get into too much of that. It's an oversaturated market that doesn't need anything I would have to offer. Much of it is a conversation that doesn't acknowledge cynicism or the occasional flight of self-deprecation. While there definitely has to be a balance in terms of what kind of self-talk you allow into your head, I think denying that there is occasionally a place for those "negative" feelings can be harmful. Remember how I said there would be a lot of half-formed thoughts? I have no idea how to bookend this one. So, with that, awayyyyyyyyy we go...