Who's Funny These Days

Who's Funny These Days

My first entry into the world of open mic stand up comedy started potentially predictably with a bad day, which itself was the culmination of months of bad days. Living at my mom’s house in the suburbs having recently returned from two years of Peace Corps service with grandiose ideas of being an artist which now clashed with life's many realities, I started off on my bike into the city to clear my mind. Leaving, I had assumed I was going for just a little ride but an hour and half later I was getting sausage from a polish grocery store in Logan Square and deciding today would be a true day off from my worries as well as my soul sucking job as a Five Guys burger flipper. I was just minutes from The Lincoln Lodge, a comedy club whose open mic I had always been curious to see. I am and have been for most my life a pretty big comedy fan. I remember in middle school finding Aziz Ansari’s Dangerously Delicious netflix special and rolling on the floor laughing. It was a revelation to me coming from a family where so much of the intimacies of life were left unspoken. My sex talk was a minute long monologue from my mom about how sex was just not that fun or worth it. I grew up so embarrassed of my own body that when I started the first inklings of facial hair I snuck out to buy a razor and shaving cream, hiding them under my bed and teaching myself to shave from youtube videos, lest anyone discover I was human. 

Stand-ups showed me that our base human desires and failures were something to laugh at and bond over not hide (a lesson that unfortunately started with Aziz who would go on to become a flash point in the peak of the metoo era). Throughout high school I watched just about every netflix special I could stomach and when I went to college at the University of Wisconsin I discovered the town of Madison was an unexpected haven for comedy. Comedy on State being one of the comedy clubs cool comedians talk about as their hot take for best clubs in the country. Big names would swing through town multiple times a semester and the club would sell cheap tickets to university kids on Thursdays. My senior year I was seeing a waitress at the club who would let me sit at the bar after close where I would listen in awe as real life comedians hung out in the booths after their sets oozing charisma. This situation only lasted a couple of weeks until a comedian complained that there were too many normies hanging out there and I was barred access. After college when I was spending two years in the peace corps in rural Peru, a combination of comedy podcasts and macrodoses of dramamine got me through hellish 30 hour bus trips through the Andes. In many of these podcasts now famous comedians talked with great nostalgia and reverence for their humble and degenerate beginnings in the world of open mic comedy. 

And now there I was a couple of minutes away from that storied underbelly of professional comedy. 

The Lincoln Lodge is cleaner than my fantasies would have imagined. Its exterior is a mildly corporate tinted glass and steel with colorful flyers for shows like “Trauma Dumping: A Hilarious Comedy Show!”, “Hammered History: A buzzed-comedy-storytelling-show”, and “My Best Friend is Black: An All Black Comedy Show That Celebrates Blackness!” On the inside it’s swank and clean with red velvet carpet, and various half lit oil paintings lining the halls. Behind the bar are tastefully ironic light up 80’s beer signs (and a large wooden sign saying “No Bits at The Bar”). They have some cheap-ish beers, a large selection of non alcoholic options, a couple thc-drinks, and a selection of 15 dollar cocktails.

“You can sign up right here,” a very tired looking 30 something with a scraggly beard says to me after I buy an Old Style tall boy. 

“Oh no I’m just here to watch” I say. 

“An audience member!” he says with a chuckle. 

The lodge has multiple theaters, each little, dim lit rooms with a handful of tables and well padded but simple chairs. The stage is barely elevated with maroon and gold art deco leafs painted to the wall behind the mic which is glaringly well lit by multiple flood lights. 

When the mic starts I watch in disappointment as one by one comedians stumble through awkward rambling sets which struggle to find punchlines. Many of the comedians talk about how much they hate their corporate jobs. I could do better than that I think. I wave over the host and put my name down and for the rest of the mic try not to think too hard about what to say so I don’t psych myself out of going up. I have a couple thoughts about working flipping burgers and an observation about the pop ups on illegal streaming websites. 

I panic the second I am onstage. I had not realized how blindingly bright the lights are. My heart beats hard enough to knock the wind out my lungs. I stumble to blurt out a couple sentences and respond to the couple sympathy laughs I get back with an audible “thank you”. When I was a teen I had taken ballet classes and even performed in front of the community, so I assumed having pranced and pirouetted as a teenage boy in ballet slippers and too tight v-necks in front of a crowd that included other teenage boys, I was immune to stage fright, but I was very wrong. I am grateful when I am told my time is up. Even more grateful when after the show the host Christy says there are a lot of new faces and anybody interested in learning more about doing comedy could find her at the bar.

“Don’t make me regret saying that,” she adds to the room.

Christy is in her 30’s, recently trying to have a kid with her husband, she has a put together intentionally casual look that fits her subtle vocal fry and frequent comedic jabs at anyone within listening distance. She rolls her eyes at me being another white guy trying to get into comedy herself being a Filipina woman, but she answers my questions earnestly. She says she started in a stand up class years ago. 

“As much as I joke, finding comedy made my life what it is today.” She says. And on making it in the comedy scene as a woman she adds, “You just gotta get one older guy to think you’re funny.”

The bartender occasionally dips into our conversation. He’s from Florida, in his early 30’s or late 20’s but giggles after every time he chimes in. He’s a comedian too. In-fact he runs the stand up-classes and is also featured on the cover of the “My Friend is Black” all black comedy show. I find out that he actually opened for a favorite comedian of mine, Stavros Halkias, when he was in Chicago way back before Stavros really blew up, and I feel a genuine awe that is a little embarrassing. Mike also tells me about his own endeavors on the app Feeld designed specifically for people looking for casual kinky sex. 

I stay chatting with Christy and the bartender Mike till close at 10, it is Wednesday after all although all three of us certainly weren't stopped from getting well and buzzed. When a tourist comes up and asks if we are comics they answer yes and when the tourist turns to me the real comics say sure. It’s a joke maybe but also feels invigorating. All I had to do was have a panic attack in front of 10 or so strangers in front of a blinding light and I'm part of the club. Even if just for a night, as a joke to a tourist. 

The next week seeking redemption, I go to an open mic at the back of the decidedly hipster Logan Theatre. This room is well lit with just a couple of benches in front of a mic. For some reason this makes me more nervous than the easy darkness of the Lincoln Lodge. I almost leave before it starts. I should be less nervous this time. I have written out jokes beforehand and even practiced them for the better part of an hour alone in a cemetery where nobody could hear me. 

It’s in that room I learn to distinguish a comic, grungy, with deep eye bags, hunched over a little notebook, and an audience member, a decidedly prettier character. There are real life audience members here. When my name is called I keep my jean jacket buttoned so they can’t see my heart beat shake my t-shirt. Despite the nerves, I crush. Or maybe I just do okay but it feels like I crush, which is most important because if it had gone as bad as the first round I would likely never have gone up again.   

It’s the memory of that success that carries me to becoming a bonafide regular open mic comic for the following weeks. I learn that getting to the Lincoln Lodge on time is vital. Arriviving anything less than nearly an hour early will land you a spot near the very end, after all the early goers and comedian friends of whoever runs the mic have already performed. Many comics leave immediately after performing their 4 minute sets. After the first hour and half or so the room becomes 5 or so comics who are tired and anxious to just finally get their 4 minutes over with. They are in no mood to laugh, many of them by that point are unabashedly scrolling on their phones. 

I am told to show up early as a tip from Connor, a kind of shorter, slight 25 year old who when performing giddily tells inflammatory one liners with a big impish grin. I meet Conner after the mic as he orders an NA beer explaining he is recently sober. Sobriety is a perennial topic of conversation for comics. Comics seem to generally fall into two camps, the ones who are sober, and the ones who should probably be sober. At one mic a comic asked the crowd, have y’all ever been kicked out of a bar? Of the 15 or so watching the vast majority called out yes in unison. At another, a comic asked the crowd if they thought AA was judgy and received an enthusiastic, “they are extremely judgy!”. 

The next week I find Connor in line securing an early-ish spot in the lineup for The Lodge. The line is perhaps the most embarrassing thing to me so far. The lodge doesn’t even open the doors till 45 minutes before the mic, so aspiring comedians desperate for a chance to say their jokes wait in the street in a line that at times reaches a good quarter of a block. There is no pretending to be cool to passerby pedestrians while waiting in this line. 

After the mic me and Connor get tacos and chat a little. He tried college, but it wasn't his thing. He worked a little bit in the Jewellery industry. He got out of a long relationship a bit ago. I did too. He’s got a tattoo on his forearm that says “I regret this tattoo”. He’s been in comedy off and on for two years, but he’s trying to take it a little more seriously. When I ask if he wants to try another open mic at a bar on Thursday night he says he can’t. He has an appointment to laser off another tattoo on his wrist where a watch would be which once read “Show Time”. 

The more I go to open mics the more it becomes glaringly obvious to me that in order to become an open mic comedian, you have to watch a ton of open mic comedy. Some of it if not most of it is bad. For me there are two kinds of bad stand up. The first is just objectively bad. These are people who just haven’t got anything together. It’s all nerves. It lacks any punchlines and becomes one 4 minute long setup to nowhere. I remember clearly one guy just simply stating that people need to live in the moment more since they can’t even eat without taking a photo. This kind of bad I will chalk up largely to inexperience. Stand up exists in our minds for whatever reason as an ability or god given gift rather than a craft that is perfected over hours and hours of failure. Being funny is a characteristic of someone as much as being blonde or short. Watching enough people at the very start of their careers though and you realize this simply must not be true. When I told Christy that I thought there was something artistically interesting about someone's first time performing she strongly disagreed. According to her it’s always bad. The real good stuff she says is when they really relax into the stage after a while. That’s when you see who they really are.

A comic finding their own voice seems to be the last piece of the puzzle. Even if they write interesting stuff, they are comfortable on stage, and they know how a joke works, they may still be an exact copy of another comedian’s cadence, delivery, body language, etc. I learn that there is a term for comedians who hunch over the mic with both hands, Shane Gillis disease (After world famous comedian Shane Gillis who made his career off that delivery). Upon learning the name of the affliction I spot it everywhere, my own act included. Even now-famous comedians admit that they struggled with the same problem when they were starting. Mark Normand, whose mildly anxious self flagellating delivery I find creeping into my own act, talked recently on a podcast about how when he started his act was an exact copy of Jerry Seinfeld’s act. Normand said he was only able to break out of it years into stand-up when an audience member sang the Seinfeld intro song as Normand stepped up to the mic. 

The second kind of bad stand up is simply stand up that I don’t like. It might be done by a seasoned performer with a good delivery, but I simply don’t like it. There is one comedian whose old dependable act is a couple minutes about how much he loves cuming in his wife. Another guy does a seven-levels-of-irony, purposefully hack (a comedy term meaning tired and over done) trump impression but in fluent Italian. Both of these acts actually get a lot of laughs, but they feel like nails on a chalk board to me. It’s because they are not my kind of acts, not my kind of people. Stand up and specifically open mic comedy is potentially the best argument that the answer to the downfalls of free speech is more free speech. An argument was recently made along similar lines by Dave Chappel when he was asked in his NPR interview about getting “cancelled” for jokes about trans women, he said in a comedy club, “every opinion has a champion,” and “You can’t silence the team you don’t like… but you do have the opportunity to go on after them, say your piece.” That certainly is true at comedy’s base level. Say for example that guy goes up and talks about how much he loves cuming in his wife. If I followed right after him I could say, “I also love cumming in that guy's wife,” and If the crowd felt similarly to me they might laugh, or on the opposite they might think I’m a rude asshole and respond in silence. Either way the worst outcome is a disgruntled silence. That’s what makes the open mic sacred. It’s egalitarian in its simplicity. In my time watching Chicago open mic comedy I have seen: An impeccably well groomed and fashionable gay man talk about how he hates when people talk about the weather, a muscle heavy ex-marine who’s voice sounds like dirt talk about how the marines are gay, An Indian American guy who talks about how his identity is most at conflict with the first generation Indian Dunkin Donuts workers. A first generation Columbian woman who talks about how she fetishizes white men, A Tennessee man who’s 4 minutes are on how he hadn’t realised Polish people had their own language, and a perfect impression of the sound Korean men make when they are impressed (a set that I realize is deeply Chicago), One woman goes up for her first time ever missing most of her teeth as an ex crack addict and talks about how she’s been locked up so many times she thinks it time to retire from being a criminal. I could go on forever, a comic for every identity and yes I have seen multiple trans women perform, one of whom’s material about her deep depression had me in stitches (That makes me sound evil, you just have to see her perform it). I think there are issues with holding the open mics egalitarian free speech as a defense of your Netflix special. It is certainly not true that after Chappel’s special there is a little 4 minute slot for any trans woman who cares to to riff about how dumb Chappel is, but it is true that that degree of beautiful, all-leveling free speech exists. It's just that it is reserved for comedies lowest rung.

In any one night at an open mic you can hear from anyone, that is magic, but if like me you decide to frequent these mics you can hear the same someone over and over and watch as they process their life in real time. Breakups, divorce, parenting, grief, jobs, dating, sobriety, your favorite open micer is human and will go through those things and they will certainly talk about them. There is one woman, Rose, who is visibly seconds from giving birth. She starts every set with a joke about her period being late, before going into these beautifully insightful bits about womanhood, motherhood, culture, and just life. Every time I have seen her she is a good chat too and is obviously well liked in the community. I look forward to seeing her perform. I am curious as to what’s on her mind that week. The accessibility to the open mic comic makes it really what it is. At the form’s best it is not just a night, but a scene. A single mic like a weekly update of the mundane hosted by my friends. Christy one night walks in with visibly plump lips to talk about how the woman at the plastic surgeon's office is helpful in a mean way. Later Connor talks about the difficulty of  being sober while living in boys town, and Rose talks about what it means to jog when visibly pregnant. How much of life is captured in one night?

Of course as I said there is also a lot of sitting and watching extremely bad stand up, a truly torturous pastime. I do not want to overly romanticize a mostly painful experience. I am not saved from its lows either. No writing on an introduction to standup would be complete without talking about bombing. Bombing is what comedians call getting no laughs. It is a brutal and soul crushing experience. My fourth time doing stand-up I really bombed. Not even a chuckle. It was at Schubas tavern, an institution in and of itself for both the local music and comedy scene whose old neon corner sign is a holdout against Lakeview's corporate remake. Schubas has you write your name on a sheet of paper and put it in a bowl which they pull from at random throughout the night. Which means you could go early to a big boisterous crowd or you could go at almost midnight to a sad group of almost always men. Which is what I did that night. I am not blaming the crowd either. The next guy to go up got plenty of laughs. I'm just saying trying to be funny to a mostly empty room which actively doesn’t want to hear you and getting truly nothing in response is a special kind of sad. It makes you desperately want to pretend you never ever even tried to do comedy. To ink back into just being kinda funny to your group of friends. Bombing hurts so bad in part because of how we think of being funny as that god given characteristic and if you bomb then you probably don’t have it and you are an asshole for ever thinking you did. But bombing is also worse than that. John Green talks in his book, Everything is Tuberculosis, about how writing feels like a big lonely game of marco polo. The writer is alone for so much of the process until they release their work like yelling out marco and then wait for a reader to find their work and relate to the work in a way saying “polo”. I think this idea of Marco Polo is true for any art form, but stand up is the most raw and lonely version of the Marco Polo game. In stand up, the comedian goes into a room of people to shout out Marco, and sometimes they shout Marco into a mic for four minutes to receive back nothing but all consuming silence. If that wasn’t terrible in its own right you are also confronting that loneliness on stage with a room full of witnesses. There is a desperation to the experience that is unique to the art form. It is no coincidence to me that so many of these performers struggle with addiction or even that suicide is so often brought up on stage that it is more hack than shocking. 

To me, the lows of comedy make it what it really is. If the stakes were low, who would care. Instead, the lone well lit mic stands at the backs of empty theatres and dingy bar rooms, a challenge to any brave soul who thinks they've got something. The lone mic stands like a snorting bull in a rodeo pen waiting for a rider. It asks “Think you’ve got what it takes? Step right up. You can say anything at all. Just make sure it’s funny. There are people watching.” I can assure you those who rise to the challenge are self-selecting and like bull riders, they are not entirely okay. That’s the glory of the open mic. It’s a show of society's fringes begging to be seen. They win rarely and fail often but in all likelihood they will be back next week. If you liked their stuff, tell them. They’re probably hanging out at the bar after their set. If you want you can see them for yourself Mondays at the Logan Theater, Tuesdays at The Lodge, Wednesdays at Cole’s Bar (I hear it’s a good hang), or Thursdays at Schubas, or one of the many others I have yet to discover.