Improvement Depends on Your Point of View
In 2019 I had already done my first acting role as the lead of a web series(that has hopefully been lost to the shitpile that is the internet) and was trying to figure out how to get an acting career moving. I found a workshop being offered through the Trans Lounge, an extracurricular organization run out of the Trans Wellness Center for trans people to do fun stuff. This being L.A., there were offerings in performance related things like a play at the LGBT Center or a vocal workshop with a voice coach who claimed to have worked with Ariana Grande. It also offered a 6 week stand up course with Adam Barnhardt, a sober alcoholic comedian who ran a Sunday night show in The Belly Room at The Comedy Store.
At the time, I didn’t know a lot about stand up comedy but I did know that being able to say I’d performed at The Comedy Store was a credit to add to the resume(I’ve since learned that comedians don’t have resumes).
In the past five years, I’ve divested from all organized trans anything for many reasons, mostly political, particularly the egregious expansion of the term “trans,” which showed itself especially with who was allowed to sign up for a comedy course for trans people.
It met in Adam’s circus clown-themed arts studio in DTLA around the corner from the last street in South Park to allow free street parking. I work in parking, because, yes it is an industry, so I note things like that. We learned how to clear or introduce ourselves to a group and get random crap off our chests so we could get to the jokey part. I don’t remember learning much about joke writing or structure but I did enjoy the opportunity to be on stage with the mic and figure out what about me met what the audience wanted to hear and how to make it funny. Essentially, the workshop was about how to write a three minute one sided conversation to introduce myself to a crowd. I know now that it takes far less than three minutes to do this–-and no one cares anyway. Comics might fluff up their first special with lots of autobiographical detail but I’ve tortured enough people with facts about Maine this year to have decided to steer clear of that hopefully forever.
Anyway, the other people in the group were some random trans women I’d met on the set of the first movie I worked on, some people who would more so be classified as feminine gay men and this one guy who claimed to be trans when he found out that generic freshman-year-of-college definition of “redefining gender roles.” He got a big laugh at the ultimate show joking about wishing Drake had a pussy so he could fuck him. Some wires got crossed for sure(fucking freeloader getting free shit without all the suffering). I dedicated my three minute introduction to my departure from trans world with a long joke about how I’d recently come out of the closet as a straight man:
“So many people think I’m gay that I had to come out of the closet. What they were picking up on is that I don’t hate women. So now I’m getting to know my community, the straight community—exploring straight interests like (still) watching Survivor, straight dating. I wanted to do some research on straight sex so I googled ‘straight porn.’ Turns out, you don’t even need to type ‘straight,’ if you just type ‘porn’ in the search bar you’ll find it!”
Etc.
I was uncomfortable on stage and the show was on March 1, 2020 so my comedy career came to an abrupt halt along with everything else on the entire planet days later. While I had been prepping for the show I went around to the open mics I could find on The Comedy Bureau(great site) and one of them was at the Edendale Public Library in Echo Park where George Chen—a comedian married to a librarian—ran a popular free mic there in the auxiliary room. I loved that the performers were so varied: pros working out, random people who moved to L.A. on a whim, homeless men, old men, lots of men and the one girl from my improv class who(did that thing women do sometimes when I say I’m going to do something as if it is an open invitation and)followed me there one night. I took note of the idea and for years while we waited for life to go back to normal I waited for the chance to go to the library nearest my house and start my own library open mic.
Last spring, I emailed the Mar Vista branch and pitched the idea. They hadn’t gotten back to me by the time I needed to pick up an interlibrary loan and I went up to them at their little librarian superstation. I introduced myself to the purple-haired, rainbow-lanyard-wearing librarian, Eloise, and got the go-ahead. I started the mic on Tuesday once a month to feel it out. The first day had more elderly library patrons awaiting a show than comics but Dov Rudnick, my first library comedian, held it down and did thirty minutes of material while hesitating to follow through on the full pronunciation of the the word “pussy” because Eloise was sitting arms crossed waiting for a punchline to justify the lewdness.
Fast forward, I’ve been running the now-Wednesday open mic successfully for 12-20 comics weekly for approaching two years, added another mic at a bar for a happy hour crowd and have ventured out into the greater comedy area to test my jokes.
In June, I had a big don’t-make-me-do-this feeling before the library mic. I’d been slacking on writing jokes and defaulted to just introducing the comedians. I remembered that this whole open mic thing was my attempt to get more stage time to get comfortable in front of audiences and after a little more than a year something had clicked. I was no longer timid in front of a crowd and could hold down the stage while I thought into the next set up. Now I needed to write more set ups and it was time to stop wasting my opportunity. So I went on The Comedy Bureau one night and found that a new comedy club had opened a few blocks from my house behind the hipster dive bar I had never had any reason to go into. I started to work out at the short lived Vicky’s on Venice, met some other comedians who were around the same level as me and took notes from the guys with the more experience. Suffice to say, the ball had begun rolling. This continued all through the summer, driving around town looking for spots, sniffing out the free mics vs the item min mics, going to the comedy clubs and hoping to have my name pulled to essentially audition before realizing that hating auditioning was part of what made me move into doing stand up in the first place. I settled into a bit of a routine and saw the same comedians around working on stuff. I did a few shows with bits I’d worked out that were competent writing but not entirely what I wanted to say or how I wanted to present myself. And on and on as many nights a week as possible, if possible.
Then last night my bar mic was a little dead and I went to the other mics on the westside that have been staples since I started making the rounds in June. The same crowd of comics more or less were at both and I watched them do their four minutes then switch it up at the next venue and do three minutes of different or adjacent material, aware that the audience was mostly made up of the guys from the mic earlier. I used both to my advantage, to work out two bits I’m writing more tags for and noticed something that made me proud to be doing exactly what I’d set out to do: get better at performing, better at writing jokes and to help develop the westside stand up scene. I had seen a lot of these guys at other mics around L.A. or at my own mics over the course of the year and as much as I felt it for myself I noticed it in them too: we were all getting better! It was like something clicked when the seasons changed. The guys who were always going to be the ones who gave up have given up, the ones who were going to stagnate, had stagnated and the ones who’ve kept working out the extra tags, weird thoughts and honed a comedic persona have all improved. Last night that all sank in.
Right now there’s a French actress visiting Los Angeles whom I met in the spring before my stand up revelations. We talked on the phone before she flew here and she told me about a movie she’s producing that still needs money after six years of development. She said something funny that reminded me of a lesson I taught myself after four years meditating on it. She said, “I’m tired of waiting to make the movie! I just want to make the movie! It’s been six years. They say, ‘Be patient.’ I’ve been patient!” The irony of someone demanding a reward for patience is the evidence that it hasn’t clicked for her yet. Maybe it never will.
The reward for your patience is patience.
I’d been wondering over the past few months of writing, performing, traveling all over the city, recording my sets to listen back to, abandoning material, trying new things, running two mics and producing a show, what the whole point of it all was, what exactly I was trying to “get” out of it not realizing that the process that was going to “get” something out of me. Last night it clicked that developing as a stand up comedian is like moving the beach one grain of sand at a time. Honing a distinct point of view is the whole craft. And as it turns out, I’d only noticed my point of view with a change of perspective.
