Paul's Lament

In my opinion, THE most frustrating thing to deal with as a comic besides ..

- open mikes at a bar where you compete with television noise and bar chatter
- begging people to come out to see you at shows so the club will keep having you back
- drinking in excess because after your 3 minutes on Jager, EVERYONE wants to be the one to buy you a shot
- the loneliness on the road where at times, you actually consider calling your much-hated ex-girlfriend just to kill the time
- the shows where everyone else kills with their old material, but because you need to work on your new bit about TV shows in Ethiopia, the crowd response you get is terrible, so after the show the crowd wants to hang with them but doesn’t want to even be within 500 feet of you
- the fact that you can write and write and write and not one of the bits you wrote in an entire two week span is working
- hearing other comics bitch about this club being unfair and this comic being a douche rather than channeling that energy into something more productive, like Tuaca
- getting all excited that it’s your headlining night at a club and 20 people show up, and those 20 people don’t like you either
- the lack of consistent money
- the struggle it is to keep any kind of relationship going, whether friend/romance-wise because almost every night of your life is out at some club or bar pitching new material to problem drunks
- not having any kind of medical insurance
- constructing what you think is a brilliiant bit about the perks of dying young as opposed to dying old. You’re all excited to unleash said briilliance on the Big Buck Hunter-playing masses and not one of them. Not one. Laughs. But your stupid one-liner about getting drunk at the Waffle House absolutely slays ‘em
- changing up your material to accomodate the age/racial demographic of the crowd and struggling if you don’t and, alot of times, even struggling when you do
- sleeping in awful hotel rooms where it’s 10 degrees outside and the heater is merely a box that quit being a heater, 35 degrees ago
- getting out-heckled by a heckler because he’s on top of his game and you’re not, because you’re either too inebriated or not enough and plus you just found out earlier in the day that you have $500 worth of car damage you need to bang out.
- writing a bit that you’re convinced is brilliant, only to realize that another comic already does it
- trying to explain to your friends after a show that the reason they saw a very similar show to the one they saw a month ago is because it takes a long time to write new material that kills
- trying to convince yourself that one day, all this paying of dues will eventually be worth it
- getting emails from audience members the next day saying “You suck”
- hearing advice from comics you don’t respect about what’s wrong with your act
- hearing advice from audience members who have never stepped foot onstage but “watch alot of Comedy Central” tell you what’s wrong with your act
- having someone you date tell you what’s wrong with your act
- knowing what’s wrong with your act and then once you make steps to fix it, you realize there’s even more that’s wrong with your act

I’m sorry.

I might’ve gotten a wee bit carried away.

What was I talking about originally?

Oh yeah, THE absolute worst thing about stand-up comedy for me?

- Forgetting a new bit idea that came out of conversation.

It happened to me again last night.
And I have no excuse.
Okay, I have one.
Okay, well actually I had several.
In the form of Crown Royal shots.
But that’s blurriily beside the point. I have my iPhone for such situations. I can type in bit ideas as they come to me. And the best ones for me tend to occur in conversation, and at that point I need to type it into my phone instantly.
But last night, I didn’t.
And that’s when panic sets in.
It becomes this drunken “Law & Order” where my friend and I spend the next 30 minutes trying to remember what we had said just 5 minutes ago that was so damn hilarious. So damn hilarious that we both said, outloud, right after we talked about it,

“That’ll kill onstage.”

But after letting that moment fly by without documenting it, this 30 minute recap of the last 5 minutes not only never ends with us remembering what it was but rather becomes a really pathetic shopping list of conversation, where you realize how drunk/boring the conversation really was

“It was right after you were talking about how great it would be to have a gravy-flavored vodka and right before you asked if it would be cheaper to mummify yourself or have yourself gutted and stuffed”

So,frustratingly, in the end, the bit flies off into inspirational outerspace.
Where all good ideas float away to.
Endlessly drifting into the abyss of ideas that every person has had but never ever thought to write down.
Until it finally lands.

In an IHOP in Erie, Pennsylvania.

The thought that was once yours, 15 months ago in San Jose, California, has made a cross-country trek and landed into the head of an unsuspecting comic who ,just like you, is drunk after hours and drowning his sorrow/frustrations with the craft by eating chocolate chip smiley face pancakes to shake out the buzz of 7 Jack & Cokes and a writer’s block that just won’t go away. And right as that last bite of whipcreamy fried breakfast dessert hits his lips? He spits it out and yells to his drunken open-miker buddy

“If you meet somebody through online dating, and they look nothing like their picture. Can you call tech support?”

A joke is born.