Spring Forward

It’s March 14, 2012. It’s been warm here in New York for the past week now. It appears that spring is here, and I don’t really remember it being all the way Winter yet. I think the city of New York got roughly 1 inch of snow this year. Like, for the year. For the whole winter so far.

Why am I writing this? I don’t know. Because I haven’t written anything in a week. Which is probably because I haven’t taken Adderall in a week. But I took it today. So maybe I’ll write something today. Other than this, I mean.

We’ll see. It’s funny. I do like myself. I really do. But sometimes, I really kind of hate myself. Why do I need a drug to be able to sit down and write something? Oh well.

Get out of your own way, Bryson. Just get to work. Don’t fight your own progress. Stop overthinking things.

Feeling bad about yourself does nothing. It doesn’t help you, and it doesn’t help anyone else. So get over yourself. Get out of your own way. Let other things stop you. Don’t do it yourself.

Please Remain Calm...

So it’s 2 p.m. on Thursday, February 16, and I’m seriously considering taking tonight off.

I guess it’s a pretty good sign that I’m writing a blog about possibly taking a night off. That means that going out has become the norm.

In fact, it’s become more than the norm. I’ve done at least one set - and more often, 3 or 4 - for the past 26 nights in a row. The last day I didn’t get onstage was January 20, when I took advantage of Free-Fridays at the Museum of Modern Art. I had told the girl I went with that I was going to leave early for a mic, but I was so inspired by everything, I decided to just shut up and enjoy an evening. I got over my I-guess-you-don’t-really-love-comedy neuroses, I had a good time, with some good conversation, and then we went to a bar and made out some. It was a really nice night off.

Since then, I’ve had 26 straight work nights. And the thing is, I didn’t plan it this way. There have been at least 3 or 4 nights during the past month where I’ve said “Tonight, I’m taking the night off. I’m going to be a human being today, not a comic.”

But then, as the clock pushes forward, I get antsy. And the fact is, even when I try not to go out, I just end up wanting to go do a set somewhere. I told myself I’d take Super Bowl Sunday off. But as I was watching the game, I was just bored. I didn’t know those guys...why should I care which color wins? So I just skipped the second half, and went to a mic.

Actually, in that case, I’m pretty happy I did. I would have been miserable just sitting there, watching other people follow their dreams. But I wouldn’t mind having more of those Museum-of-Modern-Art days, too. And I think there’s a happy medium in there, somewhere.

I think that’s the terrifying thing, as a comic. You don’t know where the medium is. I know people that go months at a time without taking a night off. Without being reminded of what it feels like to not perform. And I think there’s something healthy about being reminded of that. It’s like when you have a crush, and the person doesn’t like you back. It reminds you that on the rare occasions when that feeling is mutual, you should really enjoy it.

So I’m at least considering taking tonight off, if only to remember what unrequited love feels like. What if I love stand-up, but it doesn’t love me? What if I don’t get what I want in life? How much does my heart claw upward, scratching at my throat? How wrong does it feel for me to not do stand-up?

It’s funny to me that so much is made of comedians having vices. The greats of the past often struggled with addiction, whether it was alcohol, hard drugs, or in Mort Sahl’s case, The Warren Report (that’s the best joke that maybe literally no one will ever get).

What rarely gets brought up, though, is the idea that you can be addicted to stand-up comedy itself.

And honestly, I don’t know if that’s a good thing or a bad thing. Or if it’s just a thing.

Would you say that Joe Paterno was “addicted” to being the head coach at Penn State? I didn’t know the guy, but as far as I can tell, Joe Paterno tried to be a good person. He wanted to do good. But I’d say Paterno was addicted to being Penn State’s coach, and that’s what caused him to make such horrible, misguided decisions when he was confronted with the allegations of child abuse. He had gotten to a point where he couldn’t imagine living without that job, and so it made him live his life poorly. That’s what an addiction does - you do whatever you have to do, just to avoid having to live without something.

There are some stand-up addicts at the open-mics I go to every night. People who go to open-mics literally every night. People who wouldn’t know what to do with themselves if they had to go one day without them. People who you can literally imagine getting jittery, if they had to try to do something else with their time. Even for one night.

Like I said - there’s a happy medium. And I think it’s healthy to experiment with the limits on both sides. It’s healthy to go through stretches where you just hustle and hustle and hustle, until you’re just totally burnt out on comedy. But it’s also good to take a few nights off, and really feel yourself start to miss stand-up. It’s good to go without it sometimes, so that you remember why you loved doing it to begin with.

Here’s an analogy for you:

Life is a flight, and we’re all riding on a plane together. Now, as part of that life, we do stand-up comedy. So imagine that your “life” is sitting in the plane, and your stand-up is its kid, sitting next to it.

Now, what’s the one thing they hype up to passengers, when they’re going through that safety video at the beginning of the flight? If there’s any turbulence, and the oxygen masks come down, put yours on first. Put yours on first.

Put your mask on first.

There’s a reason they have to hammer that home. Because it goes against our instincts. We love our children more than we love ourselves. So we want to make sure they’re okay first. But that’s actually the worst thing we can do for them. The best thing we can do is make sure we’re still alive and breathing, first, to keep them alive and breathing.

To me, that’s how I see my stand-up, and my life. I love stand-up like a son or a daughter (which is part of the reason I’m trying to avoid having an actual son or daughter). I’d do anything for my stand-up. I want to do stand-up the rest of my life. I want to make my living from it. And I want to be great at it. Desperately.

But my stand-up can’t thrive, unless I’m around to support it. And I think that’s why I’m afraid of never taking a night off. Because sometimes, I have to make sure that my life’s mask is on, before I make sure my stand-up’s mask is on. Even if I’m only making sure my life is together so that my stand-up can be better.

Now, maybe I’m crazy. Or maybe this is just a forced analogy. I don’t know.

But that’s when I get most depressed I think, looking at other comics. Not when I see the people who don’t care that much about comedy. It’s when I see comics who care so much, and want to succeed so badly, that you can see their life suffocating, as they’re frantically trying to make sure their stand-up is going to be okay. When you watch a child die because their parent loves them too much...it’s pretty fucking intense, honestly. But I think that’s what happens to our stand-up, sometimes.

That’s a weakness of ours, as comics. An admirable weakness, honestly. But a weakness. I think our stand-up would be better - more informed, more relevant, more insightful, and more important than any of that, funnier - if we took a night off every now and then, and made sure our oxygen masks were securely on. If we made a genuine effort to be human beings, too, instead of just comics. Maybe putting our mask on takes a night. Or a week. Or a month. I don’t know. This past summer, I went three months without doing a set. Maybe I needed that long. Maybe I was lying to myself. I honestly don’t know.

I’m no all-time great, so you can feel free to think I’m an idiot who’s going to be a bitter software engineer or something in 3 years from now. But I want to be both a human being and a comic. I stubbornly insist I can be both.

Time will tell. The flight continues...

Montreal Advice 2.0, or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love That I’ll Never Make It

The weeks leading up to my 2011 and 2012 Montreal showcases have been vastly different. My 2011 showcase was in Austin, even though I had already moved to New York by then. I’d spent the past two years in Austin, and I was going to be down there for South by Southwest anyway, so both myself and the people running the Austin showcase agreed that I should just showcase there.

Unfortunately for me, that showcase was in early March. And after my career-goal-shifting Quarterlife Crisis Comedy Tour ended the previous November, I lost all my momentum. A “brief” trip home for Thanksgiving turned into a month-long stay with my family, and then I was so intimidated when I moved to New York that I barely got up at all. The result was that I went into my Montreal audition pretty damn rusty. A total of 10 or 12 sets in 3 months will do that.

I remember being torn at the time over whether or not I should remove myself from the showcase. I knew I was rusty, and I knew I wasn’t going to represent myself in the way I wanted to. I remember being tortured over which would be more insulting to the people that had helped get me onto the showcase: performing at less than 100 percent, or not bothering to perform at all.

In the end, I decided to go on. And the set itself went fine, in comedic terms. But in Montreal terms, it was an insult. Because it wasn’t a tight set. And a Montreal showcase is all about showing respect to the process by being prepared, and by being efficient. Dress well. Don’t lean on the mic stand. Be a cookie cutter - but be a fun-shaped cookie cutter. But: the industry sells cookies. So don’t disrespect them by deciding you’re going to be a loaf of bread out of the blue.

I think I came off like a comic trying to be a loaf of bread. And I know of at least a couple bridges that I burned because of it. I respect their decision, and it makes sense how they interpreted my actions. But I can also live with how I handled the situation. Sometimes, you put yourself in a crappy situation, and you have to deal with the consequences, one way or the other. I made my bed by losing the artistic momentum I had. And I deserved the results I got.

That was the story of my 2011 Montreal Showcase set, in a nutshell.

This is 2012. My showcase set is here, in New York City, and it’s this Tuesday, January 31.

Things are a lot different this year. For starters, by the time I perform on Tuesday, I’ll have gotten about 80 sets in this month. I’ll have done close to 30 in the week leading up to it. So say what you will - I won’t be rusty.

Though, in a way, I still don’t feel prepared. I haven’t performed in a club in almost a year. This was by design, because I wanted to go back to the drawing board, artistically and motivationally speaking. But now, I’m struggling to prepare a “disciplined” set-list for the showcase. I love connecting in the moment, which is not the goal of a Montreal New Faces set. We’re told specifically not to interact with the audience much, and not to bring up current events that won’t be relevant in 6 months.

That makes perfect sense, because the Festival is in July. And they can’t control the variables of a given room. So they aim to judge on you, as a comic, and not on you, in that room.

And that’s what gives me that nervous feeling in the pit of my stomach, as I try to prepare for Tuesday. I feel like I’ve been working hard to find myself, and to become better at being a comic, in that room, on that day, in this moment. I really have been working hard at that. I swear.

But I don’t know how good a comic I am, as a comic. I’ve never been great at tight sets. Maybe I was when I first started. But that’s always been my weakness. Pretty much since I got started, nine years ago.

Really, probably since about 6 years ago. Since I graduated from college and moved to DC. My years in DC were super-formative. And I just remember being so jealous of the comics that could just be funny. That weren’t tied down to their material.

I worked at the DC Improv as a host, a sound guy, and eventually as a (terrible) waiter. And I remember the first 3 months I worked there, it was great. Some of the best acts in the country would come and perform there. And for me, it was great to see them perform the same set 7 or 8 times. You got a rush of adrenaline when you knew they were about to tell a punchline that was going to crush. It felt like you could see into the future, in a way. It was a great rush. It made me feel powerful, in a way, because I felt like I knew something about everyone in the room that they didn’t know about themselves. One show Wednesday, one Thursday, two Friday...by the time Saturday rolled around, I knew the future, for 90 minutes at a time. It was great.

I started working in July. It was a great summer. I was 22. I spent every night at one of the best clubs in the country. I got to meet great comics. I got a free meal every shift! It was a dream job, for a kid fresh out of college.

Then in October, Bill Burr did a week. Then in November, Patrice did a week. And then everything was different. For a week at a time, I was on my toes. I didn’t know the future. Anything was possible, at every moment. Everything was in bounds.

We don’t have words for it, but what they were doing was a different art form. It was a different thing. What every other comic did, and what they did, were both called “stand-up comedy.” But, when you looked closely, it was something different. In one, you can predict the future. In the other, you can’t. Two things can’t be any more different than that.

In a way, I still haven’t recovered from those two weeks, during the fall of 2006. I haven’t figured out how to balance those two art forms. Bill Burr has figured it out, to a large extent. He does annual spots on Letterman now, and they’re usually quite good. But for someone who has seen him live, it remains frustrating to watch them. Because I know that not everything is possible. There’s a limit to what can happen. He’s willingly clipping his own wings.

What Bill has figured out, probably, is that since he’s putting on those chains, he can take them off, too. He can do a disciplined, limiting Letterman set on a Monday afternoon, and then go into a club that night and pour his absolute heart out, in whatever direction he wants it to go.

That’s what I haven’t figured out yet. I still stubbornly insist on not limiting any performance, ever. And that’s something I really struggle with. At what point is being stubborn “sticking to your guns” and “believing in yourself,” and at what point does it become “I guess he’s just never going to get on television.”

I don’t know. I don’t know. I guess all I know is that I definitely don’t know yet.

The past few days, I’ve been trying to go onstage and be efficient. I’ve been trying to run through the jokes I think I should do on Tuesday. And I just haven’t been able to. I just haven’t been able to mail in a set, and not be present in the room. It feels torturous to me. It feels like I’m being shackled.

haha man. This started as a blog about Montreal. Then it became a blog about my experiences the past year. Then it became about me working at the DC Improv five years ago. Then it became about Bill Burr and Patrice O’Neal, and stand-up philosophy. Then it became about Montreal again. And now it’s becoming a blog about how I probably have some serious emotional issues regarding discipline and freedom.

I gotta end this sometime, right? I can’t just keep pouring out my fears and doubts onto the screen, and expecting you to interpret it as something that’s mutually beneficial. Right?

Once again, I’m glad this helped both of us. You’re welcome.

When in Doubt, Blog

It’s 12:49 p.m. on a Friday afternoon. There are a lot of things I could - and probably should - be doing right now. Things that would be much more productive than writing this blog.

The reality, however, is that I wasn’t doing them today. I was just kind of filling my day with bullshit. I was on Twitter, and then Facebook, and watching The Daily Show, and then searching desperately for anything to distract me from getting actual work done.

I think that’s what screws me over in life, as much as anything else. It’s the idea that even if I’m doing something productive, it won’t be the right productive thing to do. And so I end up doing...well...nothing.

Should I be paying my internet bill, and my phone bill, right now? Yeah. Should I be going to get groceries, because I am about to eat hot cereal for lunch, right now? Yeah. On a larger scale, should I be updating my resume’ and applying for jobs right now? Yeah. Should I be trying to figure out how to pay off those creditors that seem so interested in how I’m doing? Yeah. Should I be writing jokes, or hashing out ideas, or finally starting that script I keep lying and saying that I’m working on? Yeah.

There are literally - literally - 100 things I should be doing right now that are higher on my priority list than writing this blog. This blog has no deadline. This blog isn’t collecting interest that I’m going to have to pay off later. I really shouldn’t be writing this right now.

But sometimes, you just have to do something. Sometimes, there are a million different things you could be doing. And so to pick the 100th most-important thing...that’s still pretty damn close to the top. And no matter where it is on the list, it lets you cross something off the list.

There’s another side to this argument, and I understand that. I can’t just put off my taxes forever. Eventually, there are realities that need to be faced. But I don’t know. If I never become a respected comic, and I go to jail for tax evasion, and I die alone, regretting that I wrote this blog instead of sucking it up and getting my shit together...I don’t know. Even then: at least I wrote this blog. I will always have written this blog. And that means something.

I’m not sure what, exactly. I wish I knew, and I wish I could tell you. Trust me, if I did, I’d feel better about having written it.

I don’t. But this exists now. That’s something.