Alright, I’m going to level with you: I’m not doing stand-up comedy anymore.
This has been a long time coming and obvious to many of you. I don’t feel comfortable making public displays but it occurred to me that I need to just combine my book’s website with this one. Doing so without discussing it would be a little odd. Posting in two blogs at the same time is just getting ridiculous. If my trading card has a weakness on the back it would read: ” splits attention in too many directions, does bad job with all of them”. In retrospect, building a website for a book probably works best for those who don’t already have one. Or people who have the focus to post regularly throughout the week while interacting with other websites on a level that I don’t. My website is mostly a journal, a method for keeping track and posting things I find interesting, but not a lot of interaction with other websites.
This brings me back to what has happened and why I haven’t posted here in a few months.
After performing at Bridgetown I had a hard setback in my comedy goals: achieving them. My supreme goal was perform at Bridgetown. But as soon as I stepped off that stage the desire to do comedy vanished with it. Some switch flipped off in me. I felt no interest in working new venues, no interest in traveling to Seattle to make more progress in a career. The thrill of audience applause didn’t balance out the feeling I got when I visualized lonely nights in hotels.
When the urge to perform never returned in the weeks that followed I had to ask myself a lot of questions. What happened? My friends told me that I was burnt out after a long year of organizing a monthly show. Would it ever come back after a break? What if I just do this, switching my focus to a new career path, over and over again but never actually get anywhere? Years of working a day job and then working again at night has already been hell on my mind and body, and I’d made no progress in changing my situation or decreasing my stress. Finally the big one: what do I do now?
Taking my friend’s advice, I spent a lot of time alone, reflecting on where I stood. I started with Favorite Show. My freshest memory is the June show I hosted. When I looked out into the crowd I saw the entire audience was people I already knew, friends of mine or friends of other performers. Something inside me told me this was wrong in some way. I understood that every show is started with the support of your friends, but after a year I really had to ask myself if I had the will to take it to the next level in order to attract people outside my friend circle. I honestly wasn’t. So instead drowning the show in my backyard I handed everything over to Whitney Streed, who I hope gets everything and more out of Favorite Show. I admired her performing skills the first time I saw her work at Legacy Lounge and continue to do so. I’m unendingly grateful for the chance she’s given me to sit, breath, and reflect.
Then I decided on what to do next: Scrap, the book project I started back in 2007 but gave up before doing comedy shows. I dabbled with it on and off after Bridgetown but there came a moment where I thought back to what made me start doing comedy. The talk Duncan Trussel had with me during 2008 Bridgetown that inspired me to go up on stage. Favorite Show started as a space to play in, to write short stories and perform them in front of audiences while also dabbling in stand up. After a time, stand up (and promoting/organizing the show) became my everything and the short stories faded away. Now I wanted to try going back to writing and see where it would lead me. I committed to finishing a complete, full draft of my book. And I achieved it.
When I dug deep into the writing process and started building a book, not just pieces of a draft, I found myself at peace. More focused than I ever did when I performed. Performing was always a sort of slow boil anxiety, capturing my full attention because it took singlehandedly organizing an entire show to take my focus. The buildup kept me occupied, every joke had been labored over, but when I went up I performed like a bullet. My friend’s main complaint about my performances always centered on my speed: you go too fast. With time I became more fluid and loose but then I caught myself not being there in the moment. Sometimes I felt like I had been floating above my head, looking down. Writing is different. Of course I still chew on everything, obsessing on every sentence because I’m at least a half-lunatic, but my anxieties never hit the levels they did before a show. But the anxiety driven adrenaline never fully sets in when I’m writing. I used to think this was boredom or a bad work ethic but now I think that’s a good thing.
One night while completing my latest draft I had been working on a scene involving three characters in the midst of an emotional argument. It took me a while before I realized my breath had gotten heavier and I had been sweating. And when I completed the scene I remember sitting back in my chair and wanting to cry. Not because I was sad or hurt, but because I just felt so overwhelmingly good. I had been there, in the moment, and it felt like nothing else.
So now I’m committed to finishing my book, sending it out to publishers, and working on this career. The one I had originally started with. My year in stand-up comedy is something I’m proud of. I’ve met very talented people in Portland, completed a lot of work, and learned so many things. Perhaps next year I will be eating these words, crawling back to stand-up, trying to re-friend it on Facebook. But I doubt it. Right now the experiment feels over. Comedy is an important part of my life and is a major part of my book. But it’s not my entire life, and not what I want to build a career on.
Expect this blog to change a little bit. I’m going to move my posts from the Scrap website over to here, rename some of my tags, and be a bit more honest with everyone, especially myself.




