On a random week in January, I started a five-week intensive comedy class. I have a habit of doing stuff like that. Trying out weird things at weird times and hoping that somehow it makes me feel less weird about things. I once started competitive bowling to get over a heartbreak – it didn’t help, but now I’m a great bowler.
My favorite professor recommended it to me. Her partner taught the class, she sent me the link, and before I knew it I had signed up to come to a Comedy Club a mile outside of campus to get on stage and tell jokes.
The premise of the class was simple, the first week was an introduction where you got on the stage for the first time, the lights shine on you, and you ramble for a few minutes until you spill a little bit of your guts out to a group of poor, unsuspecting individuals who become your classmates for the next month and change. The next week you show up with two minutes of material, then next three, four, and so forth until the last Tuesday you have workshopped a whopping five minutes of material. You then showcase your five minute set, two days later on the Thursday of that week, to a sold out club. Simple.
Those five weeks went by faster than I thought they would. Every Tuesday, at 7:10 PM, I would make the hike, leaving the lights of my brightly busy college streets, walk through quiet neighborhoods and recite whatever jokes I had worked on at the last minute to keep myself company. My classmates were a group of people that I don’t know if I would have intersected under any other circumstances. We were the poor man’s Breakfast Club. I was the youngest, I had no kids and no husband or a wife, unlike most of them, and I had to hope that these grown, mature adults would be interested in a 20 year old’s heartbreaks, and college classes.
As most odd things tend to do, the class came at an interesting time. A month before all this went down, I told my therapist that I don’t know who I am when I’m alone. When I’m not performing. I only feel like a person when someone is laughing at something I said. We talked about the tree in the forest and the Schrodiger’s cat noise it makes. If I make a joke and no one laughs, do I cease to exist?Â
I’ve always held my value up to how other people perceive me, and since I’ve turned 20 and have been thinking more and more about my future, especially realizing that I want to be a comedy writer – the link between performance and what I owe to myself has become more and more strange. This class was terrifying for a number of reasons, but one of the biggest ones is this fear that had planted in my stomach and began to sprout – what if I do this and find out I’m not funny? What then?Â
Do I change my major? Evaluate whatever my life plan had begun to look like? It’s terrifying to be afraid to discover something about yourself.
The class didn’t get less stressful, but slowly I started to enjoy being up there. This was something that I felt good at. Being funny is all I know; it’s all I try to be. It’s been my superpower, I just have never had to put it to test like this before. Finally, after five weeks, we had our “graduation” – the Thursday show.Â
I have never felt a pit of despair in my stomach the way I did that Tuesday. I dry-heaved for 46 minutes straight, six hours before my show, in my dorm room, where I proceeded to look up power poses I attempted until I put a weird pressure on my ankle and had to lie in the fetal position on the floor. I have never been known to handle stress well.
However, once I got to the club, something in me subsided, and I began feeling a little less terrified. I was going up on a stage to tell silly little jokes; I don’t know why I was acting like I was being shipped off to Nam or something. Finally, my time was up, and my name was called. I went up there and it all just spilled out. I just started talking. I talked about being stood up on New Year’s Eve and realizing that I might have been a resolution. There was something so healing about talking about something that hurt me so much and reframing it into something people could laugh in, myself included. I talked about college and my mom and spent a strange amount of time on Julia Roberts. My best friends came, and I originally planned on not telling anyone because I was too worried I was going to bomb, which would have been so stupid! I felt so loved and cared for. I had twelve people show up to this big, scary thing, just so I could have a familiar face. Once I was actually on the stage, I felt comfortable, like this was right. This is what I’m good at, what I love doing. Once my five minutes were done, a part of me felt a little bit devastated that it was over. I couldn’t remember the fear that had taken over a few hours before, I just loved it.
The whole process cemented my love for comedy, and making people laugh. One thing I know for sure though is, my Tuesdays are going to feel a little emptier for a while.