Self-Inflicted Wounds: Heartwarming Tales of Epic Humiliation (21 page)

Baby comedians are generally wallowing in talent. Dripping with it. An army of undiscovered
superstars sleeping in their cars and living on chicken wings, expecting that any
minute a dude in a suit is going to knock on the glass and ask them to roll it down
so he can whisper through the opening, “I’ve been looking for you everywhere. Follow
me! I’m going to make you a star.”
¹⁰

Grownups, comedians or not, realize that excellence requires not just early, but constant,
unrelenting work and sacrifice, and that reaching a peak does not mean you will stay
there. There will always be someone more talented than you, younger than you, hungrier
than you, better looking. This is an immutable truth that comes with living on a planet
where people are humping like rabbits and making more people as fast as they can,
hoping the next one down the chute is going to be Miss Toddler and Tiara 2027. Do
you think that girl who’s been greasing her teeth with Vaseline and holding a microphone
since she was three years old, who remembers what it was like to sleep in the back
of her parents’ pickup truck and live all day off the free breakfast buffet at the
Holiday Inn,
¹¹
is going to feel even a morsel of remorse when she passes you up like a rocket and
knocks your star out of the firmament with a satisfying
pop
? No. That creepily precocious little girl is not just headed your way. She is
gunning
for you.

So what are you going to do about it? Whining about how you are brilliant and no one
is giving you a chance ain’t gonna do shit. You better get to fucking work.

And yes, you may work your ass off, all blood and sweat and tears and sacrifice and
long nights and burned weekends and failed relationships and a transmission falling
out of your shitpile of a car, and you still may not get to where you wanted to go.
That is a reality of life. Shit happens, people are mean, puppies die, and things
don’t always go your way.

But even if you never quite accomplish your dreams, if you try your hardest, you’ll
never look back and think, “If only I had gotten up off my ass and given it my best.”
You’ll look back and think, “Man, I put my heart into that. It sucks that I didn’t
make it, but at least I know I really gave it my all. And it also really fucking sucks
that puppies die.”

Life is short, and no one gives a shit about your problems. Get up, get out there,
and as the kids say, get to grinding. Do that hundredth set, and then do the hundred-and-first.
And then do one hundred more. You’re just getting started.

Talent is what you’re born with. Success is what you do with it.

I’m gonna use mine to save puppies.

( 23 )

The Time My Worst Standup Nightmare Came True

“Fools, through false shame, conceal their open wounds.”
—
H
ORACE

“I would feel embarrassed, if I was capable of feeling anything at all.”
—
A
ISHA
T
YLER

Everyone
has a nightmare scenario about what they do for a living, a recurring bad dream they
have had about something going terribly wrong in their workplace.

For most, it is suddenly waking up at work naked, or oversleeping on the morning of
the biggest meeting of their careers, or being completely unprepared for a major presentation,
or having the boss walk in while you are banging his/her wife/husband/cousin/daughter/housekeeper/other
hot relative over their desk in mid-stroke.
¹
Everyone’s got a subliminal hell scenario—elaborate, humiliating, disturbing or just
plain terrifying—that crops up every once in a while in your subconscious to scare
the shit out of you. This is one of the realities of being human. We are afraid of
a
lot
of stuff.

For me, after the naked-in-class nightmare and the one where I can fly and it’s awesome
and then suddenly I can’t fly but am already in mid-flight and tumble end over end
screeching wildly down to earth, at first very disappointed, then after that very
dead, the main irrational fear I have is performing with my fly down. I don’t know
why I am so afraid of this happening. It’s not such a big deal. Unless you are rocking
it commando, most women with their fly down don’t risk exposure of any great magnitude.
Maybe people see your underwear, but I am so OCD (and was so drilled by my mom on
that whole hysterical “wear good underwear in case of a car accident” scenario) that
mine are always at least minimally presentable. And indeed, the times that my fly
has been down and I’ve noticed, it has usually only involved a bit of minor placket
exposure. Nothing to freak out about.

So why is this such a bugaboo?

I could throw out a bunch of theories around the “laughing at me versus laughing with
me” concept, and I suppose that might be part of it—the idea that you get up on stage
and you’re destroying, everyone laughing in merry and unbroken lengths, and then halfway
through your set you realize that the audience isn’t laughing at any of the right
parts of your act, or any of the right times. Instead, they are just tittering away
through the entire show, regardless of pause, pretense, or punchline, and you realize
with horror that none of the laughs you got count, because they weren’t earned by
your brilliant material, but because you look like an Abercrombie & Fitch ad gone
awry, your pants gaping like a just-caught marlin on a schooner deck.
²

But I can’t be sure that is all of it. I think this fly-down fear is irrational, like
a fear of clowns or ducks, or a love of lite country music. You can’t explain why
you feel this way, you just do.

For years, this was my number one fear when it came to performing, and I would check
my fly obsessively and repeatedly to make sure it didn’t happen. If I ever develop
an Asperger’s-like behavioral pattern, this would be it. I would check my fly repeatedly
in the bathroom. I would check my fly repeatedly in the back of the club. I would
tell myself it was zipped, then look down to make sure as I made my way to the stage.
And occasionally, I would surreptitiously try to check it while I was actually performing,
either by trying to look down without looking as if I was trying to look down, which
was insanely hard to do and made me look like I was trying to avoid the gaze of the
audience in a fit of snobbery, or as if I was in the throes of a grand mal seizure.
I would occasionally supplement this behavior by trying to work the fingers of my
left hand stealthily toward my fly to check that it was firmly secure without anyone
seeing, which is impossible to do discreetly when you are standing on a stage illuminated
by spotlights and keenly observed by hundreds of people. I’m sure it made me look
as if I had some kind of itching condition of the crotch, or was trying to masturbate
in public.

None of this was any good of any kind. Period.
³

This fear grew, slowly becoming more and more debilitating. If we lay this scenario
against the Hitchcock Axiom of Suspense—which holds that what is feared and anticipated
but unseen is most terrifying—then me striding on stage with my fly splayed open to
the world was slowly becoming more frightening than the shark in
Jaws
.
⁴
I could not stop thinking about it, and, much like the shark in
Jaws
, it made me never want to get in the water again. Only the water was comedy, and
I was a comedian. I was gonna need a bigger boat.

Things came to a head (ahem) one night when I was having a particularly thrilling
bout of OCD that peaked with me being afraid I would have to pee on stage (a lesser
paranoia, but just as fun-making). Any comic will tell you that they never have to
pee right before they go on stage, and then the minute they step up there and remove
the microphone from the stand, the Falls of Niagara begin raging behind the flimsy
muscular dam that is the gateway to their bladder, and all they can think of is running
faucets and Malaysian monsoons and the slow tinkle of pelvic release.
⁵
I had been going to the bathroom right before my set for weeks at this point, trying
to avoid the lower-quadrant discomfort that came with having to pee and realizing
you still had to stand before a room full of people for twenty more minutes without
crossing your legs like a whizzy third grader. I would work to time this perfectly
so that when I emerged from the bathroom, freshly evacuated, the show host would just
be in the midst of thanking the previous performer, right before terribly and inexplicably
mangling the shit out of my name.

This had been working beautifully, because peeing right before I went on stage meant
a) I didn’t physically have to pee when I went up there and b) I
knew
I didn’t have to pee, because I had just peed.
⁶
So when I would feel the urge to pee, I could say to myself, “Self, you
just
peed. Shut the hell up and get through this bit about how you love meatballs.” This
strategy had been foolproof, which was saying a lot in my case.

So on this particular night, I had worked my way to the bathroom with what I believed
to be plenty of time to pee, stare furtively one last time at my palm-sweaty piece
of notepaper with my list of jokes, and ascend the stage. Only, for some reason, on
this day, the pee gods conspired against me, and my complex plan came to naught. The
guy on stage before me cut his set short for some reason (I like to think he had been
paid to, or had some unspoken vendetta against me; I can’t be entirely sure), and
as I sat down on my carefully constructed little pillow of toilet paper assembled
atop the toilet seat
⁷
in this marginally sanitary club bathroom, I could hear my name being called—faintly
yes, but distinctly and unmistakably—from the stage.

And not in that “this is the first time I’ve said it” way, but in that “Bueller, Bueller,
I’ve been saying this shit for what feels like hours and I’m about to give up and
launch into one of my classic old people driving bits” way. If I didn’t get up there,
and pronto, I would lose my stage time, which is akin to allowing someone to take
your lunch at school when you know you won’t have access to food again until seven
p.m. at least, or nine p.m. if your dad worked late. I freaked.

I rinsed my hands cursorily (they definitely were not clean), sprinted to the stage,
and launched into my set, so breathless I didn’t even bother to correct the host’s
pronunciation of my name.
⁸
And miraculously, despite my harried start, things were going well.

Until, like Trinity in
The Matrix
, everything the Oracle told me started to come true. People were laughing more than
they had before, and longer, and in all the wrong spots. They weren’t making eye contact.
They were whispering to each other.

There was surreptitious pointing, and the startling tang of a mocking undercurrent.
I could
feel
it. I knew it well. Thinly veiled mock. It was like an old friend come home to roost.
It was third grade all over again.

I
knew
. I knew right away. As my hand worked its way toward my zipper in classic creepy
guy on a park bench fashion, I already knew it. My fly was down.

I touched it, I panicked, and I froze.

What do you do, when your wildest dream, or in my case, worst nightmare, comes true?
⁹
You adapt, or you die.

Okay, fine. You don’t die. You zip up your zipper. You tell the crowd you can’t believe
they didn’t tell you your fly was down—how could they let you hang like that, you
thought they were your friends—and you
keep going
. And that was what I did. I kept going. I was embarrassed, I was flustered, I was
completely thrown, but I kept going.

My set was fine. My pants were fine. I was fine. My underwear, as perfectly immaculate
as ever (god forbid that car accident), were fine (and entirely covering the precious
cargo within). And as I wrapped up my set and stepped off stage, I realized something:
the thing I had dreaded most had happened to me, and I had survived it. I felt a peculiar
strength in that. Nothing could shake me now. I was unflappable.

There were still plenty of things to fear irrationally. War, locusts, a zombie apocalypse,
or a Palin presidency might still give me a rattle. But being humiliated in front
of a room full of people no longer held the same power over me it once had. I had
been embarrassed, I had joked about it, and I had moved on.

Once you looked it in the face, that stupid mechanical shark wasn’t so scary after
all.

Although I still won’t get into a pool at night.

( 24 )

The Time I Wore That Awful See-Through Dress

“The optimist already sees the scar over the wound; the pessimist still sees the wound
underneath the scar.”
—
E
RNST
S
CHRODER

“Everyone can see what I’ve got going underneath this dress.”
—
A
ISHA
T
YLER

I blame
Jennifer Lopez.

I blame her for so many things—extreme hair extensions, tiny Fiat cars, my deep feelings
of inadequacy about the size of my ass—but mostly I blame her for this.

See, there was a time in our nation, not so long ago, when all you could see, all
you could think about, all you knew, unless you were living in some kind of government-funded
biodome deep inside the Earth’s crust, was J. Lo.

She was in every video, every movie, on every red carpet, the cover of both
Vanity Fair
and
People en Español
(so greedy!). She was Jenny from the block, dating first a black luminary (P. Diddy)
and then a Caucasian one (B. Diddy) and generally making people from every ethnic
group wild with jealousy. She was killing it for a long run there, and whether you
were a fan of her music or not, you couldn’t help but root for her when she used what
she learned in her Tae-Bo classes to beat the shit out of her abusive ex-husband in
functional yet flattering stretch pants and that ridiculous short wig in the Oscar-worthy
film
Enough
.