On The Comedy Store

I’ve been away too long, and not by choice. Turning my life into something recognizable in spite of being broke and brokenhearted has been a 24 hour a day job lately, and it hasn’t even worked, which is devastating and definitely somebody else’s fault. But those are the exact times that force you to rally and do stuff you’ve been doing forever, whether you want to or not.

But I’m deeply thankful to my subscribers for giving me an excuse to even treat writing as an option right now. That’s a huge screaming deal.

Fact is, the last month in my mind has felt like being chased by wolves in a place I never wanted to be to begin with. It’s really only age and being “oh fuck it” levels of honest that’s made me appreciate that this is how every single other person feels unless they’re that bastard over there, that guy who sucks. And I’m not that guy. You’re not that guy either.

Coping with that involves a lot of self-help type tricks and doing dreadful things like having a relationship with your parents or, oh man, calling your siblings, but for me it also involves trying really hard to laugh. Not so much actually laughing, which almost never happens for me anymore (which just means I’m 36), but the desire to laugh, and the infinite search that comes with it.

When everything has gone to hell, and it has for me because wanting to be alive is a decision I have to make repeatedly every single day, I know for a fact that laughing helps. It’s better than any drug. It’s innocent, one of those unbelievable, natural good feelings that tells you yes, you should be here, doing this, this is fine and you’ll be fine too. Laughing is a miracle, the master’s handiwork, it’s too good to exist. 

So I decided to ruin everything and watch the Showtime documentary The Comedy Store.

The titular store, which they mythologize like a high school football career, is an oddities and curios shop in Baltimore, founded by Ukrainian immigrants in the 1910s, that sells joke books, your basic stage magic kits, props, sparkly stage jackets, and fake vomit for the kids. True to co-founder Vasyl’s idiosyncrasies and stubbornness, they also sell classical sheet music and violins. Above the cash register (they only accept cash) is just one picture, of Jack Benny. 

I want to keep describing this thing I made up indefinitely just to see how long I can go without research because the alternative is describing the real Comedy Store, which is the mental equivalent of cleaning the men’s room at a Barstow truck stop. Or the men’s room at the Comedy Store, actually.

Basically it’s a stand-up comedy club on the Sunset Strip founded in the 1970s. It’s where they sourced acts for Johnny Carson, and Johnny Carson made your career, like a mafia kingpin (and like a mafia kingpin I think he could have had people killed). If Johnny liked your act and had you on the couch, you were now a millionaire and cocaine was free. And that’s important because if you were a first-timer comedian on Johnny Carson, you probably lived in a broom closet and woke up every morning contemplating a loaded gun or a bottle of vodka sourced from sewer water and made by a guy who escaped from an El Salvadoran military prison. It made your life. You exchanged your rags for clothes.

It’s also a place I remember from college as being disgusting and full of dreadful acts that were never going anywhere. Wish I could say I had a funny memory there but it was just a place full of people who made you feel like you should take a shower. Entourage types. People still casually using coke and generally just standing around being judgmental and Godless. I never went in. Acts you actually wanted to see were always playing various Improvs or the Ice House.

The documentary is long, which is great because I use documentaries to sleep, but it’s long because it’s all hagiography. There are interviews with some of the legends who started there, like David Letterman, but you can tell they didn’t give long interviews, so the whole thing gradually devolves, even as hagiography, into interviews with people you’ve never heard of, rambling about people you don’t care about. There’s not a ton of real history, because that would be profoundly unpleasant. Ultimately this was a business in West Hollywood, which means there are literal demons there.

It’s basically ephemera, containing nothing of even comedy junkie import, but it got me thinking about stand-up as an idea and why I care about it. If I hate 99% of the people in this documentary, and it makes me want to join the church and exile all comedians to an island somewhere to see how long it takes for them to break down in tears trying to tie a basic knot and eventually eat each other (day one: they figure out they need water, day two: they try to drink salt water, day three: they try to drink other peoples’ blood), why do I still think about stand-up so damn much?

I’m not sure. The following is definitely true: I only like about ten stand-up comedians and you can guess who they are. The rest of them, I basically want their bones to bleach on the desert. They sicken me as much as kids in Malibu trying to become DJs. For me to even go to a stand-up show (all the headliners I really like are dead) would be devastating.

And the way they all romanticize the craft of stand-up, mythologizing bombing and crowdwork while nakedly hero-worshipping, feels not like a fake energy but a misplaced energy. Energy that should be spent on school or a trade or volunteering. It’s wrong. And half of them actually are just apologizing for drug addictions or undiagnosed mental disorders. Don’t you have a DUI class to go to?

They’re generally not good at their jobs anyway, they just hope their desperation will be rewarded. Go play the lottery.

And yet and yet and yet. I still think about stand-up a lot even though it’s basically a 20th century artform. It belongs in night clubs. With a few exceptions, none of it holds up to sober morning scrutiny, which drives them nuts, but it actually can. Rodney, Pryor, Norm, whoever, the material can survive daylight examination. 

I think laughing and the search for laughing is almost a holy thing. When it happens, your day just became good. You want to be with others. You want to celebrate what you’ve discovered. And when you do it, it’s a high you want to chase forever. At least if you’re of my temperament, which is a lot of depression, loneliness, and isolation. You want to get it back so bad. You will study how to do it. You’ll learn rhythm, you’ll learn pauses and the virtue of silence, you’ll learn how to use stage space, you’ll learn what word choices sound funny, you’ll learn what gold claims to keep mining. It’s a true skill that takes a life of practice and it’s really hard and heartbreaking but the result is magic. There’s not another word for it. When you succeed at being authentically funny on stage, which doesn’t require much of the audience to laugh actually, you know magic happened. You made Bigfoot exist for a second and you brought back the dead. It’s a beautiful ritual that’s probably roughly as old as language.

Stand-up actually is dead. I never watch it. But I think about how to do it a lot. Because it’s about summoning something with language and the way we use language and nothing else. At its core, stand-up is creating a reaction with speech and it’s powerful. You can feel you’ve created something new and unrepeatable, and it does help people in a fallen world. That’s a lofty characterization because it’s all true, but the reason most stand-up you actually see is antisocial garbage is because it almost never happens, almost nobody makes it happen. You just have to keep searching and it takes a lifetime.