Where Have I Gone?

Hello.

I've set up a new blog with an overhauled website! Please check it out.

http://www.standupjoe.com

Cheers =)

The Three O'Clock Call

In the 90's, if you were a stand-up comic in San Francisco, this is how you got on the much coveted Monday night showcase at Cobb's. At 3PM, where ever you were and whatever you were doing, you stopped, got to a phone and dialed the number to Cobb's comedy club. Almost instantly you would hear a busy signal. You knew that all over town, every one of your friends who was a comic was doing the same thing. If you had a day job and worked in a office, you took advantage of the numerous lines you could dial out on at once. If you had roommates who were comics and there was a house phone you all shared, you flipped a coin to see who would go first. If it was close to 3 and you saw a phone booth, you got to it, dialed popcorn to make sure you weren't dialing too soon, and then waited with your quarters to start dialing. I left the end of movies early to make the call. I got into fights with girlfriends over stopping everything, and I mean everything, to make the call. I got in trouble at day jobs, yelled at by strangers who wanted the phone booth and looked at me like I was mad if I was at someone else's house and asked to you the phone. This was right before cellphones started showing up in everyones hand, too. The ideal situation was to use a land line while you were using your cellphone as one of your friends also dialed on their phone. Everyone, and I mean everyone who was anyone in San Francisco comedy at the time, did this.

You would dial, get a busy signal, hang up and repeat the process till you got through. If you did get through, you would get Tom. He didn't so much answer the phone as much as he spit the name of the club into your ear, "Cobb's!" Then you would say something like, "Hi Tom. It's Joe Klocek. Can I get on tonight?" 

Thats when you heard the familiar sentence, "Try me next week." That was that until next Monday.

By 3:03 it was all over. The 12 spots had been filled. My class, the group of friends and comics I came up with, checked in with each other after the call. Around 3:05, Tony Dijamco's phone would start ringing. "Did you get on tonight?" He would breathlessly answer the phone.

"Nope. You?" went the usual refrain.

Tony became the clearinghouse for information about who got on and who didn't for that night. But we also discussed what Tom had said. Ok, sure, he told most everyone the same thing, try me next week, but how did he say it to you? Was there a lengthy pause where he seemed like he thought about putting you on? There were countless discussions about the way Tom turned you down the way conspiracy nuts debate the merits of the single bullet theory in the JFK assassination. 

"But when he said it, how did he say it?" was a pretty common question over the phone at 3:05 in San Francisco back then. 

Tony would field everyone calling in with the same question "Who got on?" If One of us had, Tony would tell. "Rodney and Dan got sets! Thats my other line. See you down there?"

And then, one day, for no particular reason Tom might say, "OK." and you were on! That got you on the showcase but one set does not get anyone in. Once you got on, you still called every week and hoped to get back on. Once you were getting on regularly, you hoped to move up the list. The other part of this is the list. It created status. It worked like this. If you were a new comic, you got 5 minutes in the first hour of the show, maybe a 7 minute set. The second hour of the show was made up of more experienced comics getting 10 to maybe 15 min sets and then the last hour of this three hour showcase would be heavy hitters, maybe two people splitting the hour among themselves with the headliner being the comic Tom thought had something special. If you were on that night, you would show up and the list would be taped to the podium by the door. You would find your name, look at the time you were suppose to go up at and how much time you had. The numbers were all printed clearly by your name; your order and amount of time, so no one could say they didn't know and if you went over your time, heaven save you from Toms wrath! 

Everyone noticed where everyone was on the list and how much time you were given. If one week you were ahead of someone and the next week that person was now before you, it could mean you were moving up or, it meant Tom was fucking with both of your heads. There was as much discussion about where you were on that list as there was about what Tom said when you called. You knew someone was in if they were getting 15 mins somewhere in the last half of the show. There was also a clear way of moving up. Every once in a while Tom would pull one of the comics out of the whole thing and make them the house M.C. That meant they got to host one week a month for six months and at the end of that you were bounced up to feature status. For a local stand-up, the next big goal after you get in at a club is to move up from opener to feature. To be told you would be the next house M.C. at Cobb's meant you would be featuring at both clubs in town by the end of a year. I can't emphasize enough how big a deal this is for a comic.

Everyone wanted on at Cobb's because the thing it had going for it was Tom. There are as many opinions about Tom as there are stories. I can only tell you this. Tom insisted you push yourself to be creative. Tom demanded you do more than just make a room full of people laugh. Its not a revelation to realize there is more to comedy than making a room full of people laugh, but it was a revelation to find a club owner who was willing to risk profit so we could find our voices. If you were good at crowd work, he made you work on your material. If you were playing the hits constantly he would make you do your "b" stuff so you could find a way to be stronger with it. If you were a comic who was generic and didn't push the envelope in anyway, you didn't last. These were paid crowds, too. Not some random open mic in the back of a bar with a shitty sound system, this was a beautiful looking, pro comedy club down in the Wharf. They got lots of tourists just walking in and some of the biggest names in comedy worked that small room based on the reputation of it. Tom grew his regular audience as much as he pushed the comics. You could come any weekend not knowing who was working and be blown away. If the Punch Line was considered going to comedy high school, back then, Cobbs was comedy college and if you wanted in you made that 3PM call till you didn't have to anymore. 

Once I got on and then in at Cobb's, the 3PM call got easier. I would call, say hey Tom and he would say, you're on. Then, I would use my phone to help get a friend on. I was getting up at the Punch Line on Sunday nights and even opening at both clubs when one night, everything changed.

My best friend in comedy, Dan and I, were down at Cobbs. Tom was in a peculiar mood and was pulling comics aside after their sets and handing out the benefit of his knowledge. The only more terrifying than fearing this man didn't know you existed as a comic was enduring his advice as a comic. Word spread fast and one by one people went up knowing Tom was paying attention to everyone that night. Standing outside the showroom, Dan and I were talking about a joke, a girl in my life or are dreams of world dominion based on our comedy. You know, the usual stuff. Tom walked up to Dan and said, "Follow me to my office."

As soon as Tom said it, he was already moving toward the office door rapidly as Dan and I traded looks. Just a few moments later Dan emerged without Tom in sight and told me, "Tom made me the house MC!"

I was happy for my friend but I felt the first of many poison twinges of resentment for getting something I wanted. Thats when Tom "appeared" at my side, turned to me and said, "Follow me to my office." Just like with Dan, he took off almost as soon as he said the words to me and just like before Dan and I looked at each other with anxious eyes. Toms office was tiny. It had a desk with a computer, no window and a calendar with the names of the headliners written on each week. Tom pointed to a week on calendar "Are you available this week?" He asked. "Yes" I answered without really knowing. "OK. Thats your feature week. You're a feature. You're ready."

And just like that I went from one of the funny guys in town to the guy people watched. It was the start of a three year period in my life where I was at the top of the local comedy food chain. I loved it. I truly truly did. When I look back now I see all the reasons I peaked when I did and all the reasons I am still here writing this. it was my season of magic and the happiest I have ever been as an adult. I was broke, had bad teeth and owned two pairs of jeans but I've never been happier or felt more creative in my life. 

Bleeding out loud, louder...

Originally posted on Facebook 

Bleeding out loud, louder...
This has been my luck for the past year. When my battery died a friend offered to drive over and jump it for me. When she arrived she thought I had jumper cables. Nope. So we went to the local auto supply place. It was about a fifteen minute trip from home to purchase and back to my car. When we returned, my car had a boot on it. Its one of the last Scarlet Letter sort of public shamings we still allow. People see a bright yellow "kick stand of shame" attached to your car and they know you're broke, irresponsible, down on your luck or some varying combination of all three. The point is my battery died and in the time it took to spend more money to take care of the problem of being able to get to paying gigs, San Francisco put my car into the poverty stocks making a big problem bigger and more embarrassing. I just imagined people in smart cars driving by after going to an organic farmers market and saying "ha ha" in the most condescending accent you can think of.
I wonder what percentage of people who jump off the Golden Gate Bridge had SF parking ticket woes?
The friend I was with finally understood what I meant when I said, I'm having a bad luck year, because her face went blank and she uttered a barely audible "oh my god" when she saw the boot.
So THAT has been my luck this year.
The flip side of all this has been the amount of support both financial and emotional friends have given. Another friend arrived and with her triple a card took care of the battery situation. It was incredibly sweet but the car was still stuck to that spot till I maxed out a credit card to take care of the boot. Being able to connect with people over the phone or via the internet has saved me more than once during all this change.

As I write this now I am sitting inside my car with my laptop on my lap top. Its finally fulfilling its intended purpose I guess. I am writing because its a comfort and at this point its all I can do. You see, Saint Vincent DePaul is scheduled to pick up some of my furniture today between 11 and 1. They will call when they're close by. Problem is my phone, the replacement phone I finally got from Verizon, isn't working. Yup. And its not one of the old familiar problems the phone use to have where I could still get calls and sort of make out what was texted to me through the cracked screen, nope. Its completely new issues that render it a paperweight. All it says is the modem did not turn on and then it gives some cryptic number and letter combination that I am sure would tell me something about the problem if I was R2D2 or could go on line but I've already saved money by cutting the internet to my place and by the time anyone read this perhaps I will have had a chance to sit at a cafe and reflect on how stressful but how nicely everything worked out in the end. Yeah, fuck that. Do I wait here for 1 to come and go and hope the truck comes even though they are getting god knows what sort of message from my phone at their end? Do I drive to a cafe and attempt to get on line and contact them some how? If I don't get this stuff out of here I'm going to be in real trouble. At this point plan b is just to drag it out to the beach after midnight. Didn't Burning Man originally start down at Ocean Beach? I think the guy wanted to make his brake up with his lady permanent enough in his mind that he could cleanly move on. I don't know the exact story but he ended up hauling all her stuff out to the beach and invited a bunch of friends to watch him burn it. It was such a success they reenacted it again the following year. Eventually San Francisco stepped in and said, we see way too much spiritual healing & expression here and something unique to the culture we like to tell ourselves we have so it has to go! And out it went into the desert to become whatever it has become in your view.

I turned the phone off for a while and turned it back on. Thats what we've become as a generation of tech users whose first instinct is to just turn something off and then turn it back on; we apply it to other places in our world where it doesn't work. Why do you think the Republicans keep talking about shutting down the government? They somehow think it will reboot to 2000 or something. I also love the word reboot. You're turning it off and then on. You do that all the time. Only when something doesn't work do we use the overly grand and wishful sounding, reboot. Anyway, the reboot hasn't changed anything. It does feel warm. I think its a problem with the Droid x model. The Phone company wouldn't upgrade it even though the operator said my model is so outdated that in most cases the phone company just sends an updated model. Not in my case. In my case someone made the extra effort to search the warehouse for what really is not just a piece of shit but a firmly established frayed cord to my life line because you see I have to be moved out by Tuesday afternoon and this is putting a huge fucking blast of anxiety into my calm!

All it says is, starting RSD protocol support. Great. I'd like to start some support at this moment too, phone!
Someone once told me that you can directly measure a persons mental healthy by the number of objects they yell at in a day and how they yell at them. I won't lie. I've been very verbally abusive to my phone and our relationship is to the point where I yell at her in public all the time now. "You worthless piece of shit! I need you to do one thing right for me today and when the time comes you can't even fucking do that could you?"

Right now, just now, in this moment typing away to keep an anxiety attack from full on forming in the center of my chest, I realize how cut off you can feel in this world when your smartphone goes belly up. In an instant I feel like a refuge from my own life and no one can reach me. Not because I don't want to be reached but because my fucking piece of shit communication tool has failed during some of the most trying times in my adult life. Here is a serious idea. Why don't we pass a law telling the phone companies they can only release a new model phone every 5 years? Its not like this whole cellphone concept has even been fully worked out yet. We all wanted it to work because we were all poisoned by how cool the idea would be from sic-fi movies. Its marketing that told us these things are great not experience. And marketing continues to tell us how amazing these things are despite how many times they utterly let us down. You know, when the phone was a large plastic brick that was forever tethered to the wall by a braided cord that always tangled no matter what you tried, calls didn't "drop."
I understand we are now bouncing signals off of towers and satellites 22 miles up in space so we can send naked photos of ourselves to interested and uninterested parties and that is a miracle of science indeed but what is it about the DNA of cellphones that makes them work everywhere but in your own damn home? I once complained to customer service about this. The guy went through a check list of things that might be blocking my signal. I told him I live on the top floor and the second I walk out my front door into the hall I get a signal but the second I walk inside my place, I loose all bars on the phone. He actually asked me if I knew the lead content in my roof. Dude, I'm not renting from Lex Luther. Who they hell would build a lead roof in San Francisco? I don't know what his answer was because you know what? The call dropped.

Just now when I touched the phone it felt as if it was about to explode. For some reason the battery heats up sometimes. Nothing is running on the phone. No updates are coming through and I'm not on a call. I just suddenly feel a pleasant warm sensation in my pocket. The first time it happened I thought I was having a stroke. I was driving and had left the phone in my pant pocket. Cruising down 80 from a gig in Sacramento I felt something warm against my leg. I wondered if I had peed for a second there. As it got warmer an arm tingled for a second. I think that was the hand in warm water pee response happening but I interpreted as a stroke. I pulled over and as the heat turned from mild to, did I shove a nuclear rod into my pocket at that gig and not realize it, I remembered my phone was in my pocket. I took it out. Very hot to the touch, I tuned it off. When I, "rebooted" it later and called Verizon there response was that this was a known problem of the model and I should be cautious with its use. WTF? Its a known problem? I should be cautious? See here is the problem, America. Citizens have rights. Consumers have help lines.
If a battery warming up to such a temp that caution must be exercised when using the device, maybe the device shouldn't be out on the market yet? But this is how America works now. The blame and responsibility gets shifted to us, not the manufactures or companies that bill us. It happens everywhere and for some reason we let it. Take flying for instance. If you have a seat in the emergency exit row, you know the speech you get from the flight attendant, right? They ask you if you are willing to help with the door in the event of an evacuation and if you don't think you are up for the task, you are free to be moved to another seat. So let me get this straight, OK? A multi billion dollar screening and security system put in place after Americas worst terrorist attack in history in which some of our civil liberties have been taken away to prevent future disasters could fail and if it does fail on this plane at this moment the entire system comes down to me being deputized to man the emergency exit door because I bought my ticket late on Priceline and thats where they always stick you?
Bull fucking shit!

Basically all these companies are selling us this marketing dream that communication is fun and easy when in reality nobody has really worked any of this shit out yet. Thats why every year they release a new iPhone; to work out the shit that didn't work and take the stuff from competitors that did work and charge us more for what they have the nerve to call new. Its not new. You just did a recall to fix the problem only we've all been trained so well as consumers that the recall part never happens. We just line up to buy the better version of the thing that still doesn't exactly worked as promised. Hell, Taco Bell took shitty late night cheap Taco's, wrapped it in even worse junk food and sells it to late night drunks and stoners at a record profit. We are now literally eating marketing.

Its 1240. They said they would be here between 11 and 1. How long do I wait after 1 for a truck that might not come? How soon before I can get back to the communal campfire of Facebook and bleed out loud a little more? I've taken the battery out of the phone and laid it on my front seat out of direct sunlight. I wonder how many pony express messages didn't make it? It wasn't like you could message customer service and then rage at them because an indian tribe killed the messenger trespassing on their lands.

A giant truck just went by me. For a second I thought this might be it but no such luck.

I've got emails out to people. A few pretty important messages I'm waiting to hear back on and travel plans I need to hear back on. Instead, I am sitting in my car writing my way out of an anxiety attack hoping a truck arrives shortly to remove a desk and bed that is going to be on fire in the avenues if it doesn't work out and all of this would be so much easier to deal with if my phone functioned liked it was suppose to function properly on the days I am in crisis mode. And it sounds ridiculous to my ear. I feel like the guy who always has an excuse for why something doesn't work out. Only, there real excuses! My phone will not turn on because its dual cores are arguing with each other is whats happening. I'm a digital refuge camped outside my own place sitting in my car like a private eye.

Water cooler van went by. People still use those in residential areas?

I'm considering putting the battery back in. Im considering going to a cafe now and rethink this over more coffee and something melted. Thats where the anxious mans appetite seems to go to naturally, anything warm and melty otherwise, I really haven't ate much lately and unfairly this has had no impact on my mid section.

Its now 1:01. If they have called I wouldn't know. If they drove by me it wasn't a large truck with the words St. Vincent DePaul on the side. If this is a test I fucking want to climb into a ball and "reboot" the fuck out of this day.

Its 1:20.

Eventually I decide to go to the Verizon store at the mall. Once there the guy makes all the same facial expressions I made. He tries everything he can think of and then suggests a factory reset. Its a word guys in slacks who work in Kiosks use instead of reboot because it seems smarter. Fine, I say. Do it. Oh, but you will lose your contacts, he tells me. Its better to be able to get in contact than to have them I figure so go ahead. After 10 anxious moments, that doesn't work. THIS IS THE REPLACEMENT PHONE I JUST GOT! So now I am waiting to have another new phone delivered to my address tomorrow only I won't be there because, wait for it, I have a funeral to attend. The guy tells me sorry and then says, its OK because the warehouse is open till Midnight! Awesome. So after not being able to deal with my furniture today, contact anyone for help in the moment or get support from my shitty shitty phone company, I will drive to a warehouse outside San Francisco tomorrow night after a funeral and pick up another model of phone that has let me down again and again and again?
The poor guy. He's been nice. My breath has to be shit for all the coffee I've been drinking and he's been patient with all my questions but now the guy blinks a few times in rapid succession looking for the customer training tool to deal with this moment. I can almost see his hard drive sputter behind his eyes. He smiles, sighs and in a human moment just tells me if he could give me his phone he would but that wouldn't really help me. True enough. So here I am a little after 2 and my breakdown, as it turns out, will occur in a mall once again.

Forgive me if I bleed out loud a little to loud...

I originally posted this on Facebook. 

Forgive me if I bleed out loud a little to loud...
My Landlord did me a great kindness. Many months ago when he saw I was still struggling with the theft of my bank accounts he came to me and actually said, "I think there is more I can do to help." He is a friend and has been my Landlord for 5 years. To lower my rent but to stay by the sea, he asked if I wanted to move into the adorable in-law behind the garage that he was using as a gym. Yes, I said! The energy felt right, too. Even though I had already lived up stairs and made it my own, it wasn't until four months went by that I decided it was finally time to put things on the walls.

I have intimacy issues like you wouldn't believe compounded with some abandonment shit. What it means is I don't want to signal that some place is my home by putting a nail in a wall and hanging a poster up because that would mean I live there and if I live there then it could be taken away from me. Its a mess. Some of it stems from being adopted. Apparently its all too common for adults who were adopted children to have trouble forming lasting bonds with people. It could be that or it could be the years my mom dragged my little brother and I all over California looking for "out new home." Or maybe it is this lifestyle I lead where I see the country at ground level getting from shitty point a to shitty point b. All I know is, I decided it was time to claim my creative energy space, man cave by the sea, guitar haven as mine. I put posters up. I unpacked my lovely Star Wars vehicles and ships collection to set them up. I gave into San Francisco's sweet tacky charm and bought 2 strings of white Christmas lights to run around the length of my room. I had a friend come over and help clean it up with me. This was my space! I was going to have guitar jams, comedy writing sessions and awesome sex with long legged skinny girls!

Two days later my Landlord and friend let me know that he was giving me notice. I cannot imagine ever wanting to put a fucking picture on the wall ever again. And the thing is, its not evil. Its not against the law. He gave me notice because thats what a good Landlord friend does. What he didn't know is that I had to fly out of town and start my month long tour ending in China on the 15th. Yup, it gets better and better, doesn't it? As soon as gay marriage became legal in California his boy friend popped the question. You see? You see what happened? They promised us that gay marriage wouldn't effect straight people and now I am the first causality of gay marriage. I kid because I hurt.

Now I have to face the box. The box is a small card board thing that has moved with me on every move I've made over the last 15 years. It has black & white photos from my childhood in it. Comedy Clubs calendars with my name on it, girlfriends photos, old set lists and objects of every sort capable of fitting into a small box. All of them have some memory connecting them to someone or someplace. Its part time capsule, part ark of joe and part poor mans idea of a emotional hard drive.
You can't reach in and pull at any just one thing. Each are connected to others so pulling on one string of memory brings on a spiders webs worth of connections.

At times in my life that simple box has been to painful to open. It sat in the back of a closet till the next move forced me to contemplate its contents. And this is how it goes. On average I must confront my little traveling tomb about once a year. The last few years I didn't really touch it, just out it on a shelf and forgot about it. Then, there it is today. And this time when I opened it, i started throwing away some of "her" stuff. I can't tell you her name because if you know it she will be soooo angry with me. But so what? Its done. Its been done for awhile, really. The problem is I am holding Tibetan prayer flags she gave me fully prepared to toss them into the first world death that a black plastic garbage bag is when I start to wonder about the karmic implications of doing such a thing. In the end I simply bunch it up and scrunch it down in-between newspaper clippings and the remains of what once was a whoopee cushion commissioned specially for the Punch Line San Francisco's 25th anniversary.
That stays but I throw out the comedy central hat we all got when I taped Live at Gotham. Fuck it. and fuck that channel, too. You know they once sent me a check for doing the show again in the form of royalties check only, I wasn't suppose to get it. Two months later they asked for it back and I said, I am willing to work it off but I can't honestly give you a few grand back. So, any royalty I get from Last Comic Standing or the episode I was on of, Live at Gotham goes straight to them. That means I get a statement from Comedy Central every once in a while letting me know how much my pitful royalties have paid off their accounting mistake. It hasn't made a dent. I keep them as a reminder of the business I so wanted to break into for so long.
There is a long slim rock from Zion national park that a woman purchased for me so I would remember our time there together. At one time there was a small wooden box with a tiny gold ring in it that was to be Samantha's engagement ring. After holding onto that for more than 7 years I finally only sold that last year.

I don't want to move again.
I don't know what to do with the contents of the box.
I don't know if holding most of the items is doing some sort of penance for some real or imagined sin or I simply cannot let go.
I don't know if just throwing it away means I've let go or I've thrown shit that only matter to me from a tattered old box into the street.
There is a real sadness that hits me hard when I think about just throwing it away. Why am I holding on to "stuff?" that mostly just hurts anyway?
Here is what the answer is and I think it is hopeful. Someday, I want to look through it with smiles and friends recalling adventures, broken hearts and triumphs reached. Someday. Someday turns out to be an impossible place to reach unless your willing to make someplace a home.
Wish me luck 

The Usual

Bookers love to complain about the flaky nature of the stand ups they book. It is a reputation most comics need to realize we earned. Well, at some point some comic did something really stupid and now bookers judge all of comics based on this. Again, its a reputation that is usually well earned by comics. But what about the bookers? What about when they mess up? Most of the time no one wants to say it at a public level because they want to be booked again by this person. Why? Why do we bend over backwards to be polite when the gig they are offering us really isn't worth worrying about either finical or artistically? Before I go farther with this rant let me say that the bookers I deal with regularly are bookers who are pro's. I wish all comedy bookers were like this.

I just had a situation play out over the week that I know all comics will identify with. I got a call from an agency I've never dealt with. The assistant asked for my email. They were under the impression I had received their emails. I would of too if the email they thought was mine was mine. I guess spelling Joe with an "e" at the end of it never occurred to them. I don't know who standupjo is but she's got some mail of mine. 

I suppose they could of Googled my name, gone to my website or asked anyone how to spell the name Joe, but why bother? The assistant asks me how I spell my name. "Really? OK, J-O-E." She seems genuinely surprised this is how it is spelled. Whatever. They get my email and a few days later I call back because I haven't heard anything. "Oh,"  the assistant says, "Didn't he send you an email?"

Here we go again.

"can you tell me the pay and what position I would be on in the show?" I ask.

"You should of been emailed that information already?" she replies.

This is where I want to reach through the phone and smack her but before I say anything she seems to realize the problem. Why can't you simply speak that information out loud into the phone?

A another day goes by. I send am email asking again for the info. No reply.

Today I sent an email explaining that I have no confirmation for the gig, I have no idea what the pay is and after checking my spam folder I cannot find a single email close to what this guys name is or the name of the agency. For once I get a quick reply and the reply via email is, "…June is now booked. We can try again for a later date and here is the guys email. Please send a photo and bio for future gigs…" Wow. So if I am reading this entire situation correctly I lost out on a gig because someone can't spell my name?

I am drawing the line here. Being in this business means paying your dues and swallowing a lot of shit when you know you're right. We all put up with it. But when an agency contacts me for gigs and then can't even spell my name correctly enough to get my email right and I am punished for it by losing a much needed well paying gig, its them. Not me.

Ah yes, indignation! I hope it pays the rent!

Joe K.

And now for something a little different…

Sometime in the mid 90's I was inside the Ben & Jerry's on Haight St. There was a stunningly beautiful girl in line a head of me that everyone was looking at. She could of been a model for mid-90's waif angst. I'm sure that was a blog at the time. In the style of the day she had on low rise jeans and a T-shirt two sizes too small for her. When she turned around everyone in the store looked at her. She looked right at me. My eyes instantly dropped to just above her waist. There, rising from beneath her impossibly tight jeans, was a vivid tattoo of an eagle. She gave me a tentative smile that went flat when she noticed my eyes in the vicinity of her "eagle" and then another guy behind me said, "Cool tat!" That inspired me to ask, "Is it a bald eagle?"

Why do I tell you this embarrassing story? Because almost a decade latter I was contacted by this girl who is now a 35 year old woman who saw me perform recently and suddenly realized where she knew me from. She works with high risk girls and told me that the day I first saw her was the first day she showed her tattoo off. She told me she felt so uncomfortable the way all men looked at her that she never wore low rise jeans again. I asked her if my comment made her feel awful. She said that it was the funniest comment anyone made that day but it was still creepy. Ugh.

There is a story here about the pressure society puts on young women and girls to dress in a provocative way  but its not mine to tell. Sadly, my part was to be the creepy guy whose comment lingered on years later her head. You never know what affect you will have on another person. You never really understand what we leave with them in our chance encounters. Today I got a rare experience. Today I was shown exactly how I impacted someone else. Its a cool thing to see that and even a more cool thing to feel like there has been growth since then.

Memes!

Hello friends, fans and possible stalkers,
For better or worse the Internet has become our new town square. As a stand-up comic who likes to think he dabbles in social commentary there is no better way to get my message out there than with memes. Yes, memes. They are all over the web. Sometimes annoying, sometimes cute, sometimes unfunny more and more stand-ups are using them. Turns out that some of what I say on stage works better when read. Weird, eh?
Anyway, I am posting the latest bunch of memes I've come up with. Please, spread them across the Interwebs, email them to family members to start a fight early or just collect and trade them all!
Cheers.
Joe K.

Thanks

Dear everyone who donated money to me via PayPal this week,

Thank you! I am immensely grateful for your donation. I put a request out on my blog and Facebook for cash after my bank account was hacked and drained. People came through. I thought I might get a couple hundred dollars that would help get me through till the bank restored my previous balance before the fraud. Instead my two day requested earned me a total of just over $2,000. People gave in the hundreds of dollars! People gave fifty bucks who I know are broke! A guy gave me $25 from Germany! People helped out. I feel a little like George in, Its a Wonderful Life. After I pay back all the loans to people, settle up on rent, credit card bills and stock up on groceries, I will actually survive this finical crisis with a renewed faith in humanity. That would not have been possible without everyones generosity. 

This whole adventure has been extremely strange. One second I am walking into a 7-11 and the next I am standing in the parking lot calling my bank after my debt card was declined only to find that my balance for all the moment I've managed to save in the world is gone. Then starts the red tape, investigations, evening anxiety attacks, everyone telling me I have rights and the money will be returned but also everyone saying it may take time. Somewhere during all of this the San Francisco weather was incredible! Yesterday I strolled around Golden Gate Park in the sunny afternoon and found a little peace with it all. 

As of today my funds have been restored. Everyones donations has given me the hoped for breathing room to not get stuck in a circle of borrowing and repaying people. Gigs are booked and my mood is better. Again, thank you to everyone who gave something. Please know you made a difference in my life. I have one last favor to ask; how should I pay this forward? People were extraordinary. I want to be able to pay my "Karmic debt" so to speak. if you have any ideas please post them.

Thank You

Joe K.

A Little Help?

A quick recap of whats been going on:
Two weeks ago when I went to use my ATM card at a local 7-11 it was declined. Long story short, standing there in the 7-11 parking lot squinting at my phones screen was the first I realized I had zero balance in my checking or savings. What is scary to learn now is how common this problem is. There is also the surreal anxiety of suddenly being stranded in the middle of a society that is run on how much money you have with nothing. I am not exaggerating
here. I mean zero balance.
Here is whats happening today. I am told that my bank account will be returned in full at the end of this week. That is good news. Wait, that is great news! Here is my problem. To cover living expenses, credit cards and bills I borrowed money from people. Also, January turned out to be one of those months comics dread. A lucrative private gig rescheduled for March and I got bumped from a profitable week at a club. Ugh! Now I am in a situation where it looks like I won't be able to catch my "financial" breath. Long story short; I'm in a bit of trouble here, folks.
So here is what I am asking. I have a PayPal account you can donate whatever amount of cash you can. Honestly, anything will help. If you have used PayPal you know that all you need is my email to send funds.
Here it is- standupjoe68@gmail.com.
I feel weird about doing this but if I can make it out of this I swear I will find a Karmic way to pay it forward. So please, share this post or pass it on to anyone you think might be generous to take a second and help a dude out whose only goal for the last 20 years has been to make people laugh. Too much? OK. You got the point.
Thank You.
Joe K.

 

P.S.

Trust me. When this is all over and I am "out of the woods" there will be a long blog about this strange adventure.

Radio Land

Somewhere in Nebraska I turned on my car radio. 

Static, farm reports, sports, local talk or some FOX News affiliate. Those were my choices. I went with the local talk show only to find out it was a religious station. The topic dealt with the way the media portrayed the ongoing abuse scandal in the Catholic church. What the guy was saying was a little difficult to hear. He was complaining that there was a case involving a pedophile, found to have abused more than 40 boys over three decades, but the media wasn't interested in covering that because it didn't make the Catholic church look bad, so they ignored it. Wow. If your whole argument boils down to: "Look, other people do it too," you've lost whatever moral high ground you thought you once had. Molesting a child is bad. Period. But when its done by someone who is supposed to be an example of higher morals its going to attract attention. That and the church authorities hiding, covering it up and treating it like any multinational corporation would treat a scandal doesn't help either.

I ended up turning it off after only a few minutes. Who thinks this way? Who thinks that proclaiming over the air that other people also commit horrible disgusting destructions of souls is the way to rally people to your defense? What kind of minor league moron believes this is the way to deal with a problem eating away at the church like a cancer? It wouldn't be the last time I heard such things on the radio.

In two months, I traveled the heart land of America: the upper Midwest is comprised by states like Minnesota, Michigan, Wisconsin, Illinois, Indiana, Ohio and Missouri. If I wasn't performing comedy in them, I was driving across them. It doesn't matter how much music you have on your iPod; at a certain point the best way to stay awake or be free of the voices in your head while crunching the miles is to switch on the old dashboard radio and listen to what people who live here listen to everyday. 

Somewhere in the middle of Kansas I found another local talk show. Apparently, the Iranians had beat the Americans in a soccer match. The female host was trying to explain to the male host that this was a big deal because soccer is huge all over the planet. His response, "…so what. Let the rag heads have one." That's just really bad racism. I don't mean bad in the sense that racism is bad, and it is, its bad because Iranians are muslim and people who wear turbans, as I am assuming he is referring to when he says "rag head," are Sikhs. They are from India. His racism was off by an entire continent. 

I ended up become an avid listener to right wing talk radio while driving out there. Fascinated, disgusted, amazed and stunned could also be adjectives to describe how I felt listening to what I found out there too. I'm not talking about Hannity, Rush and the usual loudmouths with a studio full of verbal gasoline, I'm talking about the regional, lesser-known guys who have to be even more spiteful and hate-filled to capture an audience. What I can tell you is that by far the most scary thing about these shows weren't the hosts. The callers had almost universally the same demeanor. When talking about Obama they could barely contain a hatred they would spit out in long, overly-stressed vowels and at times even the hosts had to tell them to take a breath. 

There is a lot of rage out there. A lot.

The last gig I had before turning my car westward and home was in Dayton, OH. The news will tell you that Ohio is a "battleground" state this election year. From the looks of most of Ohio the battle has been going on for a long time and most of the people are living among the rubble. I lost track of how many towns I drove through where almost everything on the main street was shut down. "For sale," "Closed," and "For lease" signs were plentiful. The front of buildings were crumbling and unpainted. More often that not the only place that was open was the bar. In the window of the bar would be a giant brand new Romney for President sign. Each time I wanted to stop my car and walk into the bar and ask people if they really thought a guy like Romney, who wanted Detroit not to be bailed out and made his fortune by closing down factories in little towns just like this, would care if they went under? But each time I also thought: "I don't want my ass kicked." 

To promote my appearance at the club in Dayton, OH friends pulled strings and got me on Bob & Tom. Bob & Tom is a radio show that is broadcast out of Indianapolis, IN. It goes national and is the preferred morning radio show to people who are blue collar. I'm not trying to be insulting with that. Its how they describe themselves as well. The morning I was on required me to wake up at 5:00 a.m., and drive for two hours to get to the studio where I would be sitting in with them for two hours. That's incredible. These guys have made many comics' careers by giving them this kind of exposure. Before I was ushered into the studio the place was abuzz because redneck comedian Jeff Foxworthy had called in. Apparently, he was on the cover of Turkey Nation. It's not a magazine about the nation of Turkey, as I first thought, but a magazine dedicated to the sport of turkey hunting. Delightful. The producer explained to me that Bob will go to me from time to time, but that I should feel free to chime in with comments. Being on this show is a tremendous opportunity. You are being heard by millions of people. Somewhere in the second hour, when I had only done two minutes of jokes and I was listening to them debate the different merits of turkey shooting compared to squirrel shooting, it dawned on me; I don't want these fans. Maybe it was me. Maybe it started weird. When Bob asked me where I was from, I told him San Francisco, right by the beach. His response back to me, thats by the ocean? OK - you don't have to know that San Francisco has a long colorful history as a port city. You don't have to know that the map of America has San Francisco on the west coast. You don't have to know that but it seems a little strange not to know that. Then he asked me whether the now-dead actor, Sherman Hemsley was gay. Not that I know of, I told him. Why did he want to know? Apparently his body was being kept on ice until his estate could be figured out. The estate was left to his partner. Ah, I got it now. Because the term "partner" can only be used to politely describe a gay mans "friend," he must have been gay. Not only is San Francisco famous for its bay, but the term partner is often used in legal documents like a will, and not just used to describe boyfriends of homosexuals. I didn't say any of that, but in my head I was already thinking that I was far, far from home. That's when the whole turkey and squirrel shooting thing got started. This lead to stories about bears. This lead Bob to playing some recorded bits of other comedians who had been there talking about bears. So there I am, having driven two hours to be on the radio at 7:00 a.m., having done a total of three of my jokes, while I now listened to recordings of other comics. For a brief moment I seriously thought about just excusing myself. Clearly they didn't want me here. They ignored me while I was on the air. Any comment I tossed in was talked over with the usual back and forth from the usual crew with the usual inside jokes. When the two hours were up Bob said to me this "If I was Jewish, and I'm not, but if I was, I could do those jokes and it would be OK. Just like if I was gay I could say those jokes and it would be fine but since I'm not I can't do those jokes." I'm not sure exactly what prompted him to give me this lecture. All I can think of is that before I went on, the producer asked me for a list of jokes Bob could go to me with. In his haste some of my jokes were abbreviated down to "Gay Stuff." Frankly, I don't know why I would take comedy lessons from someone who spent almost the entire two hours ignoring me and talking about shooting small animals, but there you go. What it tells me is that their view of stand-up is incredibly limited. If you think something can only be made fun of to get laughs then your world is small. As I drove away from the studio I thought, that's it. I have to find a way off the road. I can't deal with this mentality out here.

Intellectually Dishonest Argument

It's Friday afternoon. I'm coming down with the flu as I sit here in St. Paul, Minnesota wondering how the shows are going to be tonight. My Facebook page is ablaze with debate and commentary about the shooting at a Batman movie in Colorado.  It's comics, fan of comics and people who support the right to own guns. They're all missing my point when I tweeted: “If you're a comic making jokes about the Batman shooting you're an idiot. You're not making fans, you're loosing them.” People make the usual points about gun violence in America, stand up comics’ right to free speech, different senses of humor and how joking about tragedies is a release. 

Frankly, I'm a little disgusted with stand up comedy lately. We just had the debate about rape jokes thanks to the Daniel Tosh incident, and now comics want to whine about their right to make gun jokes how they want, when they want, however they want. That is absolutely true. Everyone has the First Amendment right to say what they like. However, people do not come to a comedy club to see comics exercise their First Amendment right. They come to laugh. You make people laugh when you make them feel good. 

I consider myself a social commentary-style stand up. That means I want my audience to think when I make them laugh. Comedy doesn’t have to be dumbed down. That means my jokes have to be constructed like a mathematical formula: 1+1=2, or premise + setup= punch line. You don't have to share the same opinion the joke is written from to laugh if it's written well. Most importantly, I never forget what my first job is: it is to make people laugh; and if I am very good and a little lucky, I can make them think second. Saying you're an artist and then arguing for the right to make a stupid and tasteless joke that doesn't shine light on any of the more important social reasons why this happens, but just about the incident itself, is an intellectually dishonest argument to make. 

An artist struggles to make sense of things, not point at them and say, I think this is funny. This never seemed more true to me when the rape joke debate overwhelmed the Internet last week. Over and over I read comics saying: “I have the artistic right to joke about whatever I find funny.” Wow! That's what you're going to hang your hat on to be an artist, your First Amendment right to make rape jokes?  Some art. Also, enough with the First Amendment argument! Let's save the right to free speech for civil rights leaders, oppressed minorities and those telling us unpleasant truths we need to hear. I know, I know, comics will say: “That's exactly what I am doing! I am expressing unpleasant truths that need to be heard.” 

No. You aren't. You aren't making a wise and thoughtful joke about society’s ills, you are making a sick joke at the expense of people who were murdered by a deranged man. If that's your style of stand up, good luck getting booked with that shit. 

Last night, I told one of my favorite stories as my closer. It's about doing a gig in a bar with a Confederate flag. After the show a guy who laughed during the show came up to me and said he has a Confederate flag in his home because it represents states rights. Here we go. It does represent states rights; states that wanted the right to keep other humans as slaves with no rights. He explained that you have to look past that. Bull shit. It's another intellectually dishonest argument. It's a symbol of racism and the flag of the side that lost. Period. Maybe it does represent states rights but when those rights are about denying other people’s rights, it's a symbol of denying rights. You can't be ignorant to the fact that the vast majority see the Confederate flag that way. It's like the Nazi swastika. It started as a spiritual Tibetian symbol but when a government bent on committing genocide adopts it as their symbol you can't use the swastika as anything else. Charles Manson didn't carve it into his forehead because it represented magic and luck, he did it because it represents evil and fear. To me, claiming the Confederate battle flag can be used as a modern symbol for individual states to proclaim their sovereign right over the federal government, is the same bullshit argument comics make for tasteless jokes about a tragedy and then claim they are artists with a First Amendment right. Give me a break. 

Stand up comics have the right to tell any jokes about any subject they want but few have the skill. 

That's the point. When the audience is in a comedy club and they hear something wildly offensive they don't stop and think to themselves, well that comic has the right to express himself no matter how disgusting and inappropriate I think it is to poke fun at the tragedy on the same day it happened rather than attempt a smart and thoughtful joke that makes me think and gives me comfort. No! What they're thinking is: “What an asshole! That's not even funny.” That's what the audience is thinking. I don't know when stand up comedy became dislodged from empathy. Many times you hear comics complain that society has become too sensitive. In fact, I think we have become too jaded. Speaking as a comic that has gotten into trouble with audiences, bookers and club owners about my content for various reasons -  too dirty, too smart, too political, too whatever - I can tell you that finding the balance between what I want to say, making audiences laugh and getting paid has never been more tricky. The political climate in this country is the social climate of America. We are divided and shouting over each other. 

Stand up comics taking to the Internet to explain why they can make rape jokes is something else. It's stupid. If you want to make jokes about tragedy then you need to ask yourself why you want to be a comic, because those jokes should be seen not as a effort to make people laugh but as a warning sign from you. 

Then again, what do I know? I've just been a comic for 20 years.

Opening For a Comedy Central Special

Comedy Central filmed four, one-hour specials at the Fillmore in San Francisco, California. I got to open for three of them. Kyle Kinane, Kristen Schaal and Eugene Mirman. It was fun, exciting, frustrating, depressing and profitable. Fun, because I got to open in front of 500 people at a beautiful venue. Exciting, because I got to open in front of 500 people at a beautiful venue. Frustrating, because I was opening. Depressing, because for those three days I got to feel exactly how small I was in show biz. Profitable, because it paid really well.

I showed up at the theatre on-time at 5:30 p.m. Why I had to be there at 5:30 p.m. for a show that didn't start till 7:00 was never explained to me, but when showbiz calls you show up when it asks you to. I went to the security gate and gave the guy with the clipboard my name. Anytime I'm in this situation I completely expect to not get in. He flipped a page and then looked at me and said: "You're the warm up act!" I smiled and said yes, and just like that I'm past the gate and walking up the stairs to a side entrance of the Fillmore. 

I'm nervous going up the stairs because my head is full of mostly unfunny stuff. Mostly, it's about a woman. The same woman who has been in and out of my life for more than two years has taken up residence in my head. Every day I have many conversations with her, without her being there. It's the same thing every time: I finally get to explain to her why her view of relationships is wrong, and how that has hurt me. Allow me to impart some advice to anyone reading this: if you're having conversations with someone who isn't there, stop. 

That's thing about being a stand up, you take all of this up on stage with you whether you want to or not. But the thing is, most of the time, as soon as I hit the stage all that is gone. Right before? Yes. Afterwards? Yes indeed. But that brief amount of time on stage is a relief from all that crap that ultimately creates everything that the crowds laugh at. It's weird. So that's what's going on in my head as I open the worn wooden doors at the top of the stairs and like Dorothy walking into a Technicolor world, I step into showbiz. There are 100 people, most of them with headsets on, moving around inside. The Fillmore has been transformed into a giant sound stage. At the back, on their own stage, are two massive cameras. Along one entire side of the theatre a camera on a crane, attached to a four-wheeled platform, quietly revolves around the heads of people pretending to be audience so the director can test the shots. On stage, Kyle is running through his set. A bunch of people almost bump into me. I seem to be the only one standing still. I call the number of the woman I've been trading e-mails with and she pretty much appears at my side. She shakes my hand and takes me upstairs to get credentials, the all important piece of plastic I will wear around my neck for the next three days that grants me access to this chunk of showbiz. There are special LED lights set up all over the place giving the aging Fillmore a dream-like, fuzzy quality, complete with artificial smoke drifting down from special tubes they've installed to create this illusion on TV. Cables run along walls and across the floor everywhere. I notice there is another camera in the other corner of the room, and later I will meet the two person team that run the roving camera. After I get my plastic I am taken back downstairs to meet the directors and the Comedy Central people. There are three or four guys who seem to be in charge but I can't figure out who THE guy is. We make small talk, they tell me to have fun and then give me some stage advice. I smile and nod my head, taking it all in. One of them also tells me: when you get a big laugh, try to let it completely fade before starting your next joke, so that if we want to we can use that audio somewhere else in the show. Wow. He just told me that some of the laughter my jokes might generate could end up being used for the other comics. Why do people become jaded in this business? But I just smile, nod and say: “Okay.” What would you do? 

Then I meet the executives from Comedy Central. They are two young, beautiful women; the exact demographic I have a hard time talking to in person, let alone attempting to network my way into my own special. One is impossibly tall and one is impossibly petite. They thank me profusely for doing this. In my head I'm thinking: “Of course I would do this - why are you thanking me like I just returned your lost dog?” Again, smile and nod. They also present me with a very expensive bottle of wine complete with a thank you card. The impossibly petite one then tells me that I should allow it to breathe for at least half an hour. Yeah. That's going to happen. The producers, the Comedy Central executives and the floor director were all warm and friendly, and that was the last time any of them made eye contact with me. Ah, showbiz. For fifteen minutes each show I was super-important. After that, I couldn't find a place to stand to get out of the way. That's how it went twice a night for three nights: be back stage ready to go on when they told me, do ten minutes and then get off, get out of the way and wait to do it again. 

Kyle Kinane was great, a true comic in every sense of the word. He was also cool to me. Considering that this was an hour long special for Comedy Central, he seemed very calm. He also had his manager, road manager, entertainment lawyer and a friend with him, not to mention the constant buzzing of assistants, producers and production assistants. He dealt with all of them like a regular guy. In fact, in between shows he offered me some of the sushi they brought for him. Me being me, as hungry as I was, I said no. Not just because I didn't want to risk having food fall out of my mouth but his manager shot me a dirty, “don't even think about having any of Kyle’s sushi” look.

Before the second show there was a big discussion about where the towel Kyle uses to whipe his forehead with when he comes off stage should be placed. Keep in mind, there is a two-person camera crew, the floor director, his manager, Kyle, me and a production assistant all crammed into a small space just off the side of the stage as the discussion unfolds. Finally Kyle puts the thing on a mic stand and says that's fine. The floor director then informs anyone else listening in on a headset: "Kyle has placed the towel on the mic stand just off-stage. No one is to touch it." I can imagine a hundred heads around the theatre responding with an affirmative nod. Two minutes later, when I am the only one standing there, one of the suits comes by and moves it. When I look at him he just looks through me like everyone else who seems to be in charge. It's not hurting my self esteem because frankly, it's weird. I am virtually invisible. I see the Comedy Central executives, floor director and producers many times over the next few days and each time it's not like we make eye contact and then they look away, they just don't see me. Then, each night, when it's about five minutes before I am to go on, the call goes out over the headsets: "Anyone have eyes on the warm up act?" and suddenly I am visible! 

My sets are the sets you dream of when you're a young comic. The audience is already super hyped to be there. A production assistant goes out and essentially scares the hell out of them by telling them don't eat, drink or go to the bathroom. Yup: if you get up to go to the bathroom, you won't be allowed back in. We are making T.V. here people, not giving you an exciting night out. After a five minute break I go up and get an applause break just for saying I live here in town. 

That's how it goes. The crowd is mine for ten minutes.  While I am up there I work hard to make them remember me, and then it's done. The last show goes as good as the first and five minutes after I was on stage getting laughter from 500 people, I am walking down Geary Street, in the drizzle, in the quiet, headed to my car and alone again. It's a weird sensation. I am high from the set but so completely alone that the silence rings in my ears more than the applause. 

The comedy life. I will do it again and again, whenever I get the chance.

Becoming Viral

Cracked.com wrote an article titled “The 10 Most Satisfying Cases of Hecklers Getting Destroyed”. I was ranked number 5. Patton Oswalt, Jamie Kennedy and Bill Burr were also included in the list. Needless to say, I was in some very good company. I found out about the article the way anyone finds out about anything these days: on Facebook. I woke up to multiple postings of the link on my page. People congratulated me. There were 50 new subscribers to my YouTube page, along with a few dozen new comments on the clip.

The clip is a time capsule in many ways. It’s from around 2008. There are plenty of Bush jokes, and comments on the stupidity of the Iraq war. I’m skinny, have long hair, and was probably at the height of my abilities as a ‘comic who riffs’. I posted the clip five years ago, and it slowly accumulated about 300,000 views over the years. (Thanks mostly to hard-core comedy fans and insomniacs.) The clip also brought in a little bit of money, thanks to Google's AdSense program. It also got me offers for some gigs, but those were mostly in England. It would be cool if I could do those, but traveling to England for a one-night gig probably wouldn't be too wise. There the clip sat, and that was that. 

On the first day Cracked.com included me in that article, almost 25,000 new people saw the clip for the first time. OK, that’s impressive. I went to sleep that night pleasantly surprised, and sure it meant nothing more. When I woke up, I had hundreds of messages waiting for me from Facebook, email, and of course, YouTube. Overnight, another 25,000 people had watched the clip. One hundred new people became subscribers to my YouTube channel, and new fans popped up on Facebook. I had to turn my phone alerts off that day; it was beeping every time a comment came in from the digital ether. 

The clip was recorded at The Punch Line in San Francisco, at a Sunday night showcase. It wasn't a particularly memorable night. No one had grabbed the crowd yet; it was getting late, and was thinking the thoughts of every comic who’s had to close a show, in front of a tired audience: Shit. 

Seriously, I know I’m good, but so many times before I go on stage, my thoughts run something like: “This crowd is done; but I'm really good, so I’ll grab them; this is the night I fail completely; I've handled worse crowds on quieter nights; I’m not funny”. And so it goes, until the first real laugh comes. Luckily, that laugh usually does come. That laugh is why I’ve earned the right to close most of the Punch Line’s showcases. I'm not bragging. Not by any means. It’s work. Going up at the end of a two-hour show, when everyone else has brought their A game can be daunting. But here’s the thing: it’s made me a really good comic. Landing in front of an audience that thinks they've seen it all, and are just waiting to leave, means I have the potential to amaze. 

So, the Cracked.com article comes out, and by the end of that week, I had almost 200,000 new people view the clip. The number of subscribers and comments doubled. Stand-up comedy is still a very individual thing. I watched the views climb past 500,000, sitting in a $30 hotel room in Winnemucca, NV. That was an empty feeling. Here I am on my way to a gig I have little confidence will be fun, worried about paying the rent (like I am any month), and yet 500,000 people have seen me do my thing via this five-year-old, seven-and-a-half minute clip. Some of this is just the comic’s mentality of attacking anything good; but some of this is the never talked-about-truth of living in the digital age. No one said it better than in 1968, when Andy Warhol predicted, "In the future, everyone will be world-famous for 15 minutes." If everyone who viewed the clip sent me one dollar that might make a difference. If the comics on that list had decided to tour together, that would make a difference. It’s a hollow feeling to see the number 500,000 next to your name. I didn't feel any difference. 

I don't remember the circumstances of how the heckler and I started talking. People don't believe me, but a lot of times when I’m riffing, I’m not thinking. That’s the secret to riffing; if you think, you’re done. There’s just some Zen part of my mind that takes over. There’s no filter or pause, I just say what I say and keep moving no matter what. I think the secret is the same thing you learn in any improv class; you never say ‘no’ to a suggestion, and anything the crowd is saying is a suggestion. At some point this skinny kid, drunk and trying to be a little menacing said, “I'd like to talk about you for a while.” The audience awwwed like we were in a coliseum and a challenger had just thrown down an insult. There’s no way I would ever hand over my microphone to a member of the audience. No way. But then I remembered: the Punch Line always kept a backup mic on stage, ready to go. I grabbed it, brought it forward and said, “OK”. What followed next was beautiful. Honestly, if I’d scripted this, it couldn’t have turned out any better than it did. All my powers were in full effect, and the audience was so completely on my side, I would have had to TRY to lose them. With all the other comics on the Cracked.com list, you’ll notice they pretty much attack the heckler with insults, anger, and force of attitude. What I’m most proud of in this clip is how my style remains clearly different from that. I let the kid hang himself. I stay likable and never yell at him. I think of it as verbal Jiu Jitsu; you use your opponent’s words against him, without really seeming to attack him. It’s not always how I deal with it, but that night, with a drunk, unpredictable kid on stage with me, it worked. 

Part of what feels weird about watching the clip now, is remembering where I was emotionally at that time in my life. I had pretty much just returned from a disaster in L.A. a few months prior. In the six months I lived there, the girl I moved in with cheated on me, I went flat-broke, and realized no matter how big a fish I was in the small pond that still is San Francisco, I was just another guy telling jokes, waiting for stage time at shitty open mics in Hollywood; where dreams are indeed made, but the effort required means a lot of compromises, if you ever dream of being seen by wider audiences. When I got back to San Francisco I was hollowed-out inside, in a way few other things had ever done to me. When Molly, all around amazing person behind the San Francisco comedy scene, and Punch Line Booker, started putting me back up on stage we were both a little worried about how it would go. But the first time back on that stage I remembered who I am. I am a stand-up comic. It’s the one thing I do better than anything else I've tried in life. I’m better than a lot of other comics, and the fact that almost no one knows my name doesn't matter when I'm up there. I’m in the moment. I’m free in a way few people will ever be. And on that night, on that stage, with an adoring crowd realizing just how awesome this was - I got it on tape. I wish I was still that good. The last six years since my return from L.A. have been a mixed bag of soul-searching, other women confusing my relationship issues, and near-misses at a wider career in this crazy, stupid business called entertainment. 

As of right now the clip has passed 636,000 views on YouTube. I've made a little money, and have tons of new fans on the Internet. And that has to be enough.

Bananas

When people think of standup, I doubt they think of cafes. In San Francisco, you can't have one without the other. A lot of open mics are held in tiny cafes. What that means is a lot of people sitting down to have conversation over coffee, or people staring at their laptops get interrupted by people just starting out in standup. The mix can be unintentionally hilarious if awkward social interaction is your thing (and really, who doesn't enjoy a good train wreck?)

I've been hitting open mics again. Taking a slip of paper up in my hand and just throwing ideas into the wind can be exhilarating, in a way headlining sold-out shows in a dedicated comedy club can’t. There’s also the "San Francisco factor" that makes these shows something different. This is my latest adventure in “Cafe open Mics”.

While waiting to go up, I’m standing in the corner watching it all. The guy up right now is doing his best. I've seen him before. He’s putting everything he has into it, but the small group feels more confused than anything else. The audience consists of 10 or so people, sitting at square cafe tables that have been placed in a semi-circle. He stands in

front of them as the host politely spaces-out on a stool behind them. What I’m watching is the action over his shoulder outside. This cafe has a huge glass window that looks out on the front parking spaces. The first space is taken up by a low dumpster. Two elderly Asian women, right out of central casting, are methodically going through the dumpster. Occasionally, they toss a box or plastic bag into their wire cart. The scene looks like something from Bladerunner. What makes it all surreal is that while these two women demonstrate just how bad the economy is, a guy inside is trying to make people laugh with jokes about nothing. Then it takes the first of many odd turns that make this night wonderfully strange. The show has reached that point where people start to zone out. It's not going to be any better than this, folks. The guy "on stage" starts repeating the host’s name (his glassy-eyed stare seems fixed on a point above all our heads.) The comic repeats his name several times. Finally the host answers with a plaintive “yes?”, and the comic asks, "can I do a dirty joke?" Apparently the host has told everyone that this is a PG-13 show. When a comic asks if he can do a dirty joke you know the mood is about to change. Sure enough, the host gives his permission, and within five seconds we hear the words ‘cock’, ‘pussy’ and ‘rape’. Delightful. It's such a rapid change. The comic commits to a rape joke, where seconds before the jokes were harmless puns. It causes a few of us in back to laugh at the sheer absurdity of the situation. Unfortunately, we laugh right as he delivers the punch line, stepping on it. This upsets him. So, he repeats the punch line. This makes me suppress another laugh because the dichotomy of watching two elderly women pulling stuff out of the trash while a comic gets upset that we spoiled his rape joke is too bizarre not to laugh!

Then I hear my name. I'm up! I've always been an ‘in the moment’ type of comic, so of course I call attention to the two women acting out some modern Charles Dickens poverty tale, as a guy gets angry that people messed up his rape joke. To my surprise, even though the window is clear, people just realize there are two women digging through a trash bin as we all sit in the comfortable warmth of a café, scratching our collective balls and wondering what’s going on. As we all turn to look out the window, one of the women smiles a big toothless grin and holds up a bunch of bananas she's pulled from the dumpster. A woman sitting at one of the tables says in a 1970's stereotypical Russian spy accent "that is the landlord." Since most of the people here are familiar with the café, they laugh in that way that tells an outsider, like me, that this is the truth. That really is the café’s landlord! I look at the woman and simply ask "really?" She sheepishly nods her head and I say "I don't know how much you're paying in rent but clearly it's not enough." 

That's when I notice a guy behind the counter sprint outside and get the bananas. When he comes back in. I ask what I hope is on everyone's mind, "you’re not going to use those are you?" In typical San Francisco fashion, he tells me that bananas have "...this excellent organic packaging that renders them safe." Wait, I'm still not done processing the fact that your landlord is rummaging through the trash for food, and now I also have to handle the information that bananas fished out of a dumpster in front of the café, as a comedy show is happening, are going to be resold to people in smoothies! At this point any jokes I wanted to try out are pretty much useless. As I voice that realization, the little group of audience laughs and points out the window again. The woman is smiling and holding another bunch of bananas up. This time she’s gesturing that they’re for me. What can I say? I smile back, and politely refuse as I mouth the words, "No thanks. I'm trying to cut down on my botulism." San Francisco. Why do I continue to live here? The jokes write themselves.