The Oubliette
Last year I quiet quitted doing stand up.
I had done it for 9 years.
Started in a small scene where two mics a week was the max, and ended in NYC. A humble grain in the city’s salt shaker of talent.
When people ask me if I still do comedy, I give them the worst answer possible:
a long honest one.
But I guess I feel tender about it.
One thing I’ve learned about artistic pursuits:
Everyone wants to make it
By law of averages almost all can’t
There’s no dignified way to stop
Some people crash out of comedy. They didn’t have the social know-how to make friends or read a room, they piss off the wrong person and get ostracized or leave.
Some people gracefully enter it as a hobby, then gracefully put it down like drums or Krav Maga.
I stopped because ultimately I didn’t find what I was looking for, or maybe it didn’t find what it was looking for in me.
What amazes me as I get old is the layers of desire.
No matter who you are reading this, the things to you that matter, if you drill deep enough down into them, you eventually get into a gaseous subconscious reservoir.
Somewhere in that cave is the answer to the riddle.
For me it went something like this
Why am I doing comedy/what am I looking g for?
Well it’s fun and always wanted to try it
Deeper
Well I think I always realized I had a few funny ideas and wanted to try it
Deeper
I feel like I bombed out of music and was kind of at the right place right time for a creative pivot, one in which words were more important than all the mechanics of music at which I was less skilled
Deeper
I needed a way to suck out the poison of my bizarre upbringing, zealous and at times toxic religious phase of life, failed marriage, family deaths, pick a tragedy
Deeper
The comedy helped me make sense of the pain and shrink it which was an invaluable thing to learn
Deeper
Even though I was 30 something, I liked to perform and making people laugh was a thrill
Deeper
Being busy with shows felt like success, and I made some true incredible 1 in a million friendships in it
Deeper
Maybe I could become skilled at this
Deeper
I am in the city of dreams having the least funny and least successful years of my life
Deeper
I am improving
Deeper
I have been changed for the better by my efforts and my environment, but I don’t think I have whatever this thing wants
Deeper
I think what I wanted at long last was to be in demand.
Deeper
I want to be taken serious
Deepest
I want to be desired.
Wow what an embarrassing thing to write.
I wish I could lock up the notes app on my phone like a little girls journal with heart shaped lock.
I guess every pursuit is this bizarre seven layer burrito.
One of the movie scenes I can’t stop thinking about lately is Forrest Gump in his running phase.
He runs across the country, he sees the sunrise over mountains and valleys and oceans, then one day, he just goes home. The thing that powered the running evaporated.
Post comedy, I feel a lot of things. Not all of them bummers.
When I stopped believing in Jesus, one of the things that surprised me the most was this:
I felt immense freedom from the pressure to read the Bible and pray.
That Christian inescapable guilt to have devotional or quiet time or whatever you call it.
It felt like getting out of eternal homework and I loved it.
I feel a similar way about comedy “grind”. Hitting the mics, writing my jokes, the ever present feelings of inadequacy and futility of effort.
It’s been fun to beat my swords into a plowshares so to speak,, then beat my microphone into a Chase Sapphire business reward credit card on which I will earn points for upcoming vacations.
But it has left some kind of void.
And if I’m honest, I grieved it in silence all year. My heart has felt like the Ladson fair ground in January long after the fair rolls out. It’s cleaner, quieter, purposeless.
Comedy in my home town I realize now was my golden era. It felt like pick up basket ball. It was amateur, it was physical, it was messy, it was a fucking blast.
Comedy in my time in NYC felt like working on the floor of the New York stock exchange but only if zero dollars were being traded for all the stress and yelling.
Anyone who doesn’t know comedy will think my time in standup was pretty successful. I got to open for some big names, I got booked at some clubs, I made people I admire laugh a few times.
People that know comedy know that opening for people is bullshit, many clubs are bullshit, and most niceties are also you guessed it.
From the ages of 23 to 28 I lived in Copenhagen, Denmark.
It’s a long story.
While there, I learned Danish. I’m 41 now, I still speak it.
In all my time in America and elsewhere, it has never once come in handy.
It’s like an elaborate sculpture carved out of butter.
It took ages to make, and it has no purpose.
I think that’s how I feel about comedy. IM still funny. I make my girlfriend laugh, I make my mom laugh, I make the guys in my gym laugh, every now and then I’ll make a complete stranger laugh.
But it’s a sculpture I built and I don’t know who I built it for.
For all the people that showed me love doing it, I feel that love forever. I almost feel a guilt there too. Like a crossfitter that doesn’t even kip their pullups.
For the people in my life who no matter what I achieved acted like what I was doing was morally wrong or embarrassing I feel a relief. Maybe they were right all along who fucking knows.
Trying is, in all pursuits, hilarious and humiliating.
It hurts to give a fuck.
My life in some ways is way better. I’m physically more healthy, I’m relationally more healthy, I’ve never been better at my job, and last year I paid off about 90k in various debts and taxes.
But if I am talking to myself, I know I miss it. I miss having a creative anything. Making money rules, i grew up in so much financial uncertainty and at times humiliating poverty that making money will always be a driving factor.
But I feel like I’ve lost something.
In more barbaric times, there was a torture/death sentence called the oubliette. It was the lowest point of a prison, sometimes a deep pit, sometimes a hole small enough to just stand but not sit. The only way out was rescue or death, usually standing on the remains of whatever unlucky soul died before you.
As edgey and sad as that sounds, I feel like this. Whoever I am now becoming is on the bones of who I was. Maybe this is always the way. The ground you are standing on is the past.
The term oubliette apparently comes the French word to forget. A forgotten room.
I hope I don’t forget.
I hope who I was can improve who I am now and will one day be.
I’m tired of being embarrassed for what I didn’t do perfect.
I think i will let the critic die in the dark
He never laughed once anyway