014 - Twenty Years of Standing Up
Contemplating a milestone anniversary in a comedy career spent mostly sitting down (but never out ;)
On Sunday night I watched the Chiefs beat the Bills over spicy crispy beef and crabmeat soup dumplings with my friend Sam on the big screen TV in his 3 bed, 2.5 bath, 16th floor Greenwich Village apartment, complete with indoor sauna, wraparound balcony, and postcard perfect views of the Empire State Building.
Sam can afford such an apartment — and such exquisite Chinese takeout — because he is one the most successful touring stand-up comedians working today. His crowd work clips and morning show pranks have likely popped up on your feeds over the last few years. Maybe you’ve seen his specials on Netflix or Amazon or caught his appearances on celebrity roasts. Maybe you listen to/watch his podcast, or drink his whiskey, or perhaps on a trip to New York you’ve been lucky enough to catch him in his unadulterated element, crushing late night at the Cellar.
When a comedian “blows up,” it can seem to an outside observer among the general, consuming public that this funny person came out of nowhere, arriving on the national scene and appearing on their screen in an instant, fully formed, an “overnight success.”
Can it happen that way? Sure, but it’s quite rare and usually ends poorly.
The more typical path to fame and fortune in the business of show has been the one taken by Sam (and Mark, and Nate, and Nikki). Their “overnight success” was achieved over thousands of nights, working out shaky material at open mics on dingy stages in half-full rooms for half-asleep audiences for the first year, slowly shaping a five-minute set that after another year draws the attention of a booker, that after another year gets them passed at a club, that after another year has grown into a feature-length “tight 20/loose 30,” that after another year coalesces into a 45 minute headlining act, that after another year gets them their first TV spot, tour dates and corporate gigs, that after another year or two becomes a TV special, that after another two or three years becomes another special, that after another year becomes the basis for a TV pilot (that doesn’t get picked up), that after another two or three years becomes a different TV pilot (that also doesn’t get picked up), that after another year becomes another special…
And then — and only if they’ve also been hosting a twice-weekly podcast and posting daily content on each of their three social media accounts for that entire time — voila, SUCCESS!
It’s January 2005. I’m a sexually frustrated, seasonally-affected college sophomore in Baltimore, unsure of how to spend what my school calls “Intersession” — a three-week period between semesters during which time students could opt in to a ‘fun,’ abbreviated course for nominal credit, or choose to simply dick around. Browsing the course catalog, I notice a title that would seem to allow me to do both: “The Stand-Up Comic in Society.” It’s taught by a molecular biology grad student who does open mics on the side and is being offered for the very first time. To pass the class and earn two coveted academic credits, students are expected to write and perform an original five-minute set of comedy in front of a live audience. I sign up.
There are 21 other kids in the class with me. None of us has backed up against the proverbial brick wall before, although I have what I consider “proto-stand-up” experience, having presided over several school assemblies as Student Body President in my senior year of high school that I injected with jokes n’ japes at every opportunity. I’m also a comedy-obsessed weirdo, always have been, steeped in everything from the Marx Brothers to the Smothers Brothers to the Sklar Brothers, Allan Sherman to Adam Sandler, Monty Python to Mr. Show. While the rest of campus is crowding into the auditorium and going ape for Pablo Francisco and Dane Cook, I’m in my room wearing out my Insomniac with Dave Attell and Larry Sanders DVDs.
I know what’s up. I got this.
After three weeks of studying Jerry Seinfeld’s Comedian, analyzing old episodes of An Evening at the Improv, and taking turns at the mic set up in front of the class to workshop our material, the time has come to flex our freshly pumped comedy muscles and present our finalized five-minutes. Flyers placed around the dorms must have done the trick, as dozens of antsy undergrads begin trickling into the school’s smallest, obscurest venue (so unfamiliar to the student population that the flyer included parenthetical directions). The trickle soon becomes a torrent, and this theater meant to hold 120 is now brimming with over 300 warm bodies on this cold midwinter night. There must be 70 kids sitting on the stage itself.
No pressure.
Our instructor Adam has organized the lineup. I’m going up second-to-last, the last “pure stand-up” on the bill before the guy who prepared a “comedy-magic” act (95% magic, 5% comedy) caps it off with sleight of hand or some shit. If I’m being honest, I hadn’t paid much attention to my classmates throughout the course. I was laser-focused on my set, tweaking, tagging, shaving, rearranging. Can I squeeze in a callback? Is this the right bit to close with? How should I literally stand up there — hands by my side? Hands in my pocket? One hand on the mic stand, the other in my pocket? On the mic? Should I take the mic OUT of the stand altogether and JUST GO NUTS WITH IT???
I watch as 20 classmates take the stage ahead of me and do their five. If you’ve never been to a comedy show before, you should know, this is not a typical amount of performers. But this is not a typical show. This is a show by students, for mostly drunk and/or high students, on the final Friday night after an extended winter break before classes resume, in a room nearly three times the legal limit for capacity. I’m not fully appreciating it in the moment, but this is a “bomb-proof” environment. It’s impossible to flop, and even the weakest attempts are getting guffaws from the keyed up congregation. An hour and a half of back-to-back acts and belly-to-belly laughs has turned an overflowing, underground black box in Baltimore into the hottest room this side of Hell.
Adam makes my introduction. I quit my backstage pacing, gather my shallow breathing, and stride into the spotlight, surrounded by the sweaty, ecstatically smiley faces of the surplus seating section at my feet…
“At what point does a ‘Richard’ become a ‘Dick’? That’s like a ‘Rachel’ waking up one morning and deciding, ‘Rachel’s no good. Call me… Vagina.’”
BOOM.
"I wonder if there were vintage trends in earlier generations… imagine hipster Revolutionary-era teens walking around the colonies in Pilgrim outfits. ‘You like my blouse? It’s a John Winthrop throwback. Check out my hat, it’s got a buckle on it!”
BANG.
“I think the term ‘friends with benefits’ is too narrowly defined. I’ve got a friend, she works at a bagel shop. At the end of the day, she gets to take home all the bagels that haven’t sold. I call that a benefit!”
Wait for it…
“Oh and when she gets home, we fuck.”
You’d think Dane Cook had suddenly appeared in the flash of a thunderbolt cast by Zeus himself.
Following that electrifying debut show twenty years ago today — helped along by what remains the best crowd I’ve ever worked in the two decades since — I had audience members coming up to me asking, “Have you ever done that before?” and not believing me when I said, seemingly to my own surprise, “No!” Total strangers were telling me, practically imploring me, “You should do this! Keep doing this!” For a cripplingly insecure 20 year-old desperate for external validation, it was all I needed to hear. I kept doing it.
That summer back home in suburbia, I connected with a comedian and producer based a couple towns over named Josh Filipowski. Josh had founded like2laugh.com a few years earlier and was running open mics and booked shows in Westchester, Fairfield, and was making forays into the city. Under his wing, I got my first taste of an NYC Open Mic — brutal — and earned my first paid gig, hosting at The Thirsty Turtle for a cool 20 bucks. If I didn’t need the cash so badly, I would have had the bill framed, for accepting that $20 in exchange for entertainment services meant I could forever call myself a professional comedian.
“Can you take me seriously wearing this hat?” might be the funniest thing I’ve ever said.
Returning to school for junior year, I put aside all such silly notions as “getting a proper education” and instead put the pedal to the metal on my burgeoning comedy career, starting a student stand-up club that met weekly to workshop, organizing shows whenever and wherever I could around campus (read: cafeteria), and bringing comics down from New York whom I had met and admired in my summer expeditions below 14th Street, where the ‘alt-comedy’ scene was happening.
Post graduation, I moved into a sketchy 2.5 bed 1 bath apartment deep in the heart of Bushwick (I paid $475/mo for the half bed) with Sean and Nick (pictured above). We were hungry young comics and we hit the ground running, mic after mic, multiple shows a night, multiple shows a week, bouncing from borough to borough as we chased stage time and made MySpace friends. It was around this time I met Sam, who was part of a collective of scrappy self-starters producing a weekly show in a shabby second-floor theatre across from The Olive Garden in Times Square. I joined the rag tag operation, barking in reluctant, often foreign audiences (“Do you guys like comedy? Te gusta… comedy?”), begging friends to fill seats, and rotating in and out as host.
But something wasn’t clicking for me. My sensitive, Ashkenazi constitution wasn’t cut out for the boozy, late night lifestyle that seemed de rigueur in this new milieu — not to mention, I wasn’t encountering many fellow worshippers of S.J. Perelman and George S. Kaufman who might delight in employing Gallicisms like ‘de rigueur’ and ‘milieu.’
I also didn’t think I was cut out for the craft of stand-up. I hated repeating jokes, something that simply had to be done if I was ever going to hone a headlining act. I hadn’t felt like I had “found my voice,” and I was starting to doubt I ever would. And three years in, I had yet to get truly comfortable with the physical sensation of standing alone on a stage with a microphone. I STILL didn’t know where to put my hands! Should I remove the mic from the stand and hold the stand with my other hand? Should I move the stand to the side of the stage? SHOULD I STOP OVERTHINKING THIS ENTIRE FUCKING MICROPHONE SITUATION???
By the fall of 2008, I had come to the conclusion that stand-up comedy is hard work; hard work I wasn’t willing to put in. The Sams, Marks, Nates, and Nikkis were booking three or four shows a night, six or seven nights a week. I couldn’t keep pace. Motivated equally by a fatal stabbing in the building next door and my desire to upgrade from a twin-sized mattress, I moved out of the Bushwick comedy clubhouse and into a bona fide 3 bed in Williamsburg with a full bedroom pour moi. I pivoted to pursuing work as a comedy writer, maintaining a foothold in the performance world by self-producing and hosting talk shows, and making lots of silly videos along the way. A dozen years after first catching the stand-up bug at that student show, I finally became my own shining example of an “overnight success.”
Today, as I reflect on my humble beginnings and the wild ride that brought me from Baltimore to Bushwick to reading fake books about farts to hosting the most-watched live-streamed game show in the history of the world to watching football on Sam’s couch, I am filled with gratitude for every single minute of it, and I wouldn’t wish to have any moment along the way break any other way.
Over these past twenty years, stand-up has most definitely fallen by the wayside. I made one appearance in all of 2024, at a very fun backyard show in Los Angeles. I think I took the entire year off in ‘23. Maybe I did a random spot or two in ‘22 or ‘21? Sam invited me to open for one of his brilliantly conceived rooftop shows in the COVID summer of 2020... my memory gets even fuzzier from there.
But the bug is biting again. I’m feeling the itch, and I’m finding myself powerless to stop from scratching it. So… this is happening:
I’ll be running back my original set in its entirety, we’ll be raising money for the LA Regional Food Bank, and you’ll be feeling like a drunk college student on the final Friday before the spring semester. See you there.