I Bombed Nearly Every Time

In my early twenties I did stand-up comedy. I was usually out of my mind. I bombed damn near every time.

Both halves of that are relevant and the second one turned out to be useful.

What bombing is

If you have not done it: you say the thing, and then there is silence, and the silence has a length to it. You are still standing there. The next line has to come out of your mouth anyway, into a room that has just told you it is not with you.

The clock does not speed up. Five minutes is a very long time.

There is no equivalent in most jobs. The feedback is instant, unanimous and public, and nobody is being cruel — they just did not laugh, which is worse, because it is honest.

What it teaches

You find out immediately. A joke works or it does not and there is no partial credit, no "they'll get it later," no explaining. That is a brutal and extremely efficient way to learn what actually lands.

You stop being afraid of the room. After enough silences, a bad night stops being a catastrophe and becomes a Tuesday. At thirty-six that is worth a great deal — you cannot be rattled by something you have already survived forty times.

You learn timing from the inside. Not as theory. As the physical experience of being half a second late and feeling it die.

What I was actually doing

I should be straight about this: I was using at the time. That is a different page but it belongs in this one, because "I bombed" is less of a mystery when you know I was wrecked on most of those stages.

I do not think I was ever going to be a comedian. I think I was a writer with nowhere to put it, same as the cryptic poetry I was posting on Facebook around the same years.

Where it ended up

The video for “Sauce That” won Best Comedy at a festival in Los Angeles. From a jury. In a room where I did not have to stand there and find out.

There is something very funny about that, given the strike rate. But it is not unrelated. Funny is harder than sad, and the only way I know to learn timing is to get it wrong in front of people, repeatedly, until the shape of it is in your body.

I paid that tuition between twenty and twenty-four. Badly, and mostly high, but I paid it.