Yukking it up

I'm taking some classes in standup comedy and will perform in a couple of weeks. Pray for me.

I love standup comedy. I wish I was good at it. I also wish I was the starting goaltender for the New York Islanders. We can’t always get what we want.

But I am undaunted. A couple of weeks ago, in the midst of something of an emotional funk, I thought I would challenge myself and try something different: I signed up for a group of standup classes at Helium Comedy Club downtown. Sometimes you have to make yourself uncomfortable. And believe me when I tell you this: This is uncomfortable.

First, you have to write material. I can hammer out a column in an hour-and-change – I used to be among the fastest writers in the country – but two one-minute bits (on relationships and food this week) take me an entire week to produce and edit and massage. Every night, I go to bed with my phone in hand and tweak lines. It’s painstaking and difficult and headed into tonight’s class downtown, I feel like I didn’t write a single funny line.

Funny is a bitch.

I occasionally try to inject humor into my columns, but being intentionally funny is a herculean task. You’ve really got to dig deep to find the humor in various situations. I can be amusing in a social situation (I think), but to just stand there and tell stories and try to keep people engaged and laughing, that’s an immense challenge. Every night, I sit in bed with my phone, watching standup comedy clips – from my favorites like Bill Burr and John Mulaney to several comics I’d not yet seen, like Tom Segura and Nate Bargatze. Last night I went old school and watched some Richard Pryor and George Carlin (before Carlin got old and preachy).

It seems so easy for them. Their sets are so coherent, the writing so tight and precise. They are flawless in their execution, so comfortable onstage.

They piss me off.

Which brings me to the truly problematic aspect of this class: I’ve got to perform as part of our “graduation” ceremony. This is an issue because I’m uncomfortable with public speaking. I’m not shy and reserved, by any stretch of the imagination, but when I stand in front of crowds, large or small, I suffer mini-panic attacks. And remembering 5-to-7 minutes of material? Forget about it. I’ve sacrificed a lot of brain cells along the way to age 64. I Googled “ways to memorize material” last night and forgot it all the next morning. Our instructor, comic Alex Price, tells me I can use a cheat sheet of sorts, place it gently on the stool next to the microphone, but those will just be bullet points.

I’m screwed.

Luckily, we’ll be working a very small room and it will be populated by family and friends. I don’t expect to be heckled, even by my own wife.

This really shouldn’t be a major issue because I’ve done this once before. Several years back when I was still at the Indianapolis Star, my friend, local comic Scott Long, told me he wanted to put together a celebrity standup show featuring local media. I volunteered immediately.

What was I thinking?

I was literally shaking when I got to Cracker’s in Broad Ripple that summer night, and when Scott introduced me, I somehow made it onstage without feeling my legs. Honest to God, it was the most bizarre sensation. I was standing there in front of a packed house for the first of two shows, and I had no idea how I was staying upright. To Scott’s great credit, he had a fabulous idea. He knew how nervous I was and, as a gag of sorts, he gave me a brown paper bag, lest I start hyperventilating. That brown paper bag was a useful prop: I wrote bullet points on it and was able to do my set without seriously messing up.

I think this time I’ll come out with one of those oversized Andy Reid play sheets he uses on the sidelines.

Anyway, things went reasonably well, although the two shows were very different. First show, we had friends and family who cackled at every forced punchline. That was nice. But the second show was filled with a much younger, late-night Broad Ripple crowd and a lot of my humor got lost in translation. Jewish mother jokes don’t fly with 20-something Gentiles, or so I discovered. Plus, they’d all been pre-gaming, so they weren’t quite as, well, attentive as you might have liked.

I also found the lighting situation off-putting. When you stand on-stage at a comedy club, you can see the front row but you can’t see the audience beyond that. You tell your jokes while looking off into an inky abyss. It’s very disconcerting.

When it was over, I told my wife, “I’ll never do that again.” Glad I did it, glad I put myself out there, but…never again.

Until recently.

Last week, we performed two one-minute bits, one on relationships and one on pets. I didn’t get a laugh from the instructor and the five classmates in the room. It was mortifying. The only thing that helped is, nobody else got a laugh either. It was just very…uncomfortable. And then we broke it all down, our instructor trying to be as supportive as he possibly could.

I’d share some of my material here and now but, well, it’s not very good. And I tend to work a little bit blue, so it probably wouldn’t be terribly appropriate for this forum.

When I do the actual performance, I’ll post the video — if it’s any good. If it sucks, it’ll never see the light of day. Artist’s prerogative.