A Land Before Time
Doing stand-up comedy challenges your emotional homeostasis. It allows you to cut your teeth, okay sometimes on your own skin, but, it’s also given me more laughter and memories than I could ever imagine. I’m sure most comedians can say the same. Each has his/her stories. To give readers a taste of stand-up from the inside, I share one of my most memorable comedy shows.
AJ’s Comedy Tavern, Las Vegas, 2009: Kenny Chesney wails from the juke box in a place where secondhand smoke goes to die (along with broken dreams, and battle-weary livers). There is no audience. Just a line of aged men, bereft of a future or even plans…like…say, tomorrow? Ashtray and drink are in place as they sink their gaze into a vortex of spinning fruit.
Okay, I’m nervous. Out of my element. The show’s producer turns off the music. The comics assemble into a faux audience. There is no flicker of acknowledgement from the patrons. I realize that, other than one employee, I’m the only woman in this bar. I’m also the only person in the history of AJ’s Tavern to ask for a Pinot Blanc. There is no Pinot Blanc.
We begin. The comics are filthy. Some are funny. Every six minutes, a drunken patron staggers across the room and plugs in the jukebox. Reba fills the air. The MC stomps across the floor and yanks out the cord in a fit of fury. This in/out dance proceeds during the entire evening. After the show, this patron will be beaten up by a large, heavily tattooed bartender. This bartender is six-months pregnant.
I do my comedy set as another inebriated man dance/fondles himself in the front row. Fellow comics laugh, applaud (at my jokes). I close on a decently solid punchline after a twelve-minute set. Trepidation has turned into giddy satisfaction. It’s not about the set. It’s about feeling wildly uncomfortable, being so out of my element…and, yet, staying with it. Doing my best…when every minute seemed like an eternity. This is what I did.
Post-set, I knock back five whiskeys, shoot some pool, break a cue over an extreme fighter’s head and leave … okay, this is what I felt like doing (hey, a gal’s gotta fit in).
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This explains the laughs every morning on the show! Keep up the humour it makes the morning commute enjoyable. Thank you. I enjoyed your blog.