Comedy Can Suck My Dick

This week has been one of extreme highs and extreme lows for me comedy wise. It started with a high on Saturday night when I performed on a show in my home town of New Rochelle. I was so sure I was going to bomb when I saw the crowd of mostly middle-aged upper class money types, but I ended up killing and the adrenaline was unbelievable. I never thought I would be able to get through to a crowd like this, but I did and I felt like I had really achieved something. Even if it was a small victory, it felt great and I remembered why I love doing this for a moment.

The next night was my audition for the Montreal Just for Laughs festival at Broadway Comedy Club. This was the first time I had ever auditioned for anything other than late-night club spots, and to say I had a lot of anxiety would be a tremendous understatement. I actually threw up four times before I left the house. I used to be petrified at the thought of having to perform anything longer than a ten minute set. This time I had five minutes, and narrowing my set down to my “best” five minutes seemed impossible. I knew I had to establish my character right away, and I definitely failed at doing that. I think the audience could feel my discomfort and nervousness and it did not go over well. I was so embarrassed that I had not done well in front of the other comedians, a few of whom I already know have said nasty things about me behind my back, and that I had let down the people who referred me to get me into the audition. I left the club feeling sick and upset and questioning again why I do this, and why I give a fuck about it at all.

The next night I took the bullet spot at a show at a hookah lounge in Queens. I had decided that I was sick of my set and sick of hearing myself tell the same jokes so I would try to go off the cuff. It didn’t work. They hated me, I got heckled and a couple of people even talked loudly on their phones in a foreign language straight through my set. I still had fun though and it didn’t upset me much, because the other comics on the show were old friends who I respect and like a great deal, and I knew it didn’t change their opinion of me that I didn’t do well. After what I had been through the night before it was very comforting to be around genuine friends who wouldn’t judge me, and I remembered what it was like to just be a comic among comics and a friend among friends.

I spent most of Monday drinking brandy and crying.

Tuesday was my birthday and another small victory came in the form of Lisa Lampanelli’s discontent. My mom, who has been a loyal Howard Stern listener since the early 80’s, heard Lisa on Howard talking about how disappointed she was that one of her favorite jokes was edited out of her Comedy Central special. The joke was the one about the chimp in Connecticut, and it’s a joke that I know all too well, because I wrote it and it was stolen from me and given to her, and she had told me I couldn’t use it anymore around this time last year. I was thrilled to hear that she was upset and that the joke was cut. It was all I could have asked for in a birthday present, and I remembered how silly I was to have gotten so upset over one joke that didn’t even end up making the cut.

What happened next is pretty ironic. Just as I was reeling with glee over the defeat of a joke thief, I received a message from Patrick at Cringe Humor asking me to call him. When I got him on the phone, he reluctantly told me that one of my jokes was actually an old Roseanne Barr joke, and a fellow female comic had alerted him to it that day. The joke is not only an integral part of my act because it powerfully establishes my character early on in my set, but it was also a joke that was prominently featured in the video Patrick had recently released of me as part of the Cringe Humor Comics to Watch series. I felt like I had been punched in the cunt.

There are so many things about this that bother me. First, the joke for me is not just a joke, it’s something that actually happened to me. The joke in question goes like this when I say it: “I asked a good male friend of mine, ‘what’s wrong with me? Why can’t I just get a man?’ He told me it’s because I’m masculine and aggressive. I was like ‘SUCK MY DICK! That’s not the reason’!” The male friend was Slava Yaryshkin, and the conversation that inspired that joke went almost exactly like that, but Roseanne’s joke also goes almost exactly like that – “People say to me, ‘You’re not feminine.’ Well, they can just suck my dick.”

I have read many articles and blogs about linear thought in comedy and I thought I had really done my homework when it came to avoiding something like this. Every time I write a joke, I google every word and combination of words contained within the joke to make sure it hasn’t been done before (which by the way is why I try not to blame myself too much for not being a more prolific writer – pretty much everything has been said before in some way at this point). I thought I had made sure I would never be in a position where I would have to defend an accusation of joke theivery. Now I find myself in a position where I’m asking myself, how many people recognized this as a Roseanne bit and never bothered to say anything to me, choosing instead to simply write me off as a theif? Have I lost bookings because of this joke? Can I reword the joke sufficiently to make it my own again while still keeping the character establishing punch in it or should I just drop it altogether? Could I be any more fucking humiliated by the fact that Patrick now had to edit that joke out of my Cringe Humor video and repost a new video hoping no one notices?

I only know the answer to the last question. I could not be any more fucking humiliated. The humiliation at the Montreal audition, at the hookah lounge, and every single day in middle school when all the other girls had bras and I didn’t cannot compare to the humiliation I feel right now. I’m sure eventually I will move on and let the joke go, just like I did with the one that was stolen from me this time last year, and this too shall pass, but as I lay my drunken and defeated head on my pillow tonight I will not think one more second about comedy. For tonight, and I’m sure for many more nights to come, comedy can suck my dick.