A comedy writer recalls their first open-mic at 20, performing five minutes of material at New York Comedy Club after a month of practice. The adrenaline rush from that set hooked them on performing and writing jokes.
20
New York Comedy Club (small room)
About five minutes
I think there's two things in life that are the hardest.
Yeah.
Boxing.
Yeah.
And stand up comedy. Because it's just you.
Yeah.
You don't, you know, unless you're Carrot Top and you have a bunch of stuff.
Yeah.
Like, it's really just you and a microphone and. Okay. Make me laugh. Yeah. Funny guy, like, sort of thing. What was the first time you went up, like?
Yeah.
How old were you?
I was 20. I had been going to college in New York, which is really fortunate because there's a, you know, a thousand open mics everywhere. Comedy clubs have open mics, bars have open mics. So as far as a place to start, it was nice just. Cause I had options right away to get on stage. And so I went to this place called the New York Comedy Club, which still exists. And they used to have two rooms. They had the main room, which is like your big room where you have like, you know, 50 or 60 seats and a big stage. And that's where like, people shoot videos. And they had a closet that they converted into what they called the small room, which was probably as narrow as one of these bookshelf aisles. And they would have like chairs kind of like around in this weird. Not semicircle, but kind of weird C shape almost, and a stage that was not much farther than I am from you. And so that's where they had the open mic. So it was like me and maybe six other people. I had spent a month writing things down and practicing in my dorm room. And I went up there and I didn't do well and I didn't bomb. It was more like the adrenaline rush. It was more like kind of like what I was saying about jumping into the pool, where I was like, boom. And then I did it and then doing it, I was like, oh, I love this. But it really needed that sort of running jump into the pool for it to work. But once I did it, I was just like addicted to that adrenaline. And once I got good at it, I was addicted to the mechanics of joke writing.
How. How long were you up there the first time?
Oh, just five minutes. Just five minutes, which felt like 20.
Do you remember any of the jokes?
I think I talked about, like, masturbation, probably the lowest level. Idiot. You're 20. I was 20. I was, you know, sophomore in college. Yeah. It was not.
It was relevant.
It was not going to be that deep. Yeah.
