I will tell jokes to people who came to see someone else.
Next week marks my return to stand-up. I have been meaning to get back into it, but these last 10 years have been—you know, we’ve been getting slammed at work.
I actually killed my first time on stage. One drunk unaffiliated with HBO told me he was totally going to put me on HBO. My second open mic didn’t go quite as well. I didn’t have same energy, and the audience seemed a little indifferent. I wouldn’t say I bombed, really, I was just sort of comedy roughage.
The third time, I simply went blank, and while any open-mic audience ought to have low standards, I’m sure they deserved better than to watch me dig my notes out of my pocket and scan the folded-in-eighths printout for a punch line I would’ve been better off dynamiting, anyway. They still applauded—loser applause, the kind that gets sprinkled upon people who walk the last 12 miles of a marathon. So, although my comedy experience spanned just three open mics, I convinced myself that I was in decline somehow—decline without, like, an initial ascent. This time around, I’ll try to not over-interpret. No matter how I do on Wednesday, I’m going to try to go up on Thursday.
Want a preview? Okay, one joke: “The Centers for Disease reports that intravenous drug users who share needles are at risk for contracting HIV. In my opinion, this is a public health problem, not a criminal one.”
Lots more where that came from.
Anyway, I’m moving to Greenpoint in a little more than a week. For those of you unfamiliar with this area in Brooklyn, it’s sort of a Polish/hipster/industrial neighborhood (yes, lots of people who look like Lech Walesa publishing zines when they get home from the glue factory). I can’t flee Astoria fast enough, which I think has much more to do with my particular circumstances than the neighborhood itself. I was never one of those people who valued sunlight in an apartment—I don’t fucking photosynthesize—but I think basement life has rewired me a little, made me a little hostile to daylight and all that attends it. The birds outside my apartment won’t stop tweeting, and I’m always, like, “Come on, predators. Where are you?”
Yeah, it’s good that I’m leaving.
Job update: None. I no longer make jokes about selling my body.