The Comedy Tribune

I was tucking my seven year-old daughter into bed one night a few months ago and she asked about the horse picture I had printed off the computer. I explained that it was for a comedy show that Daddy was doing, where I’d be playing someone who’d talk to comedians and then ask people if they’d seen his lost horse.

“But daddy, that’s not funny.”

“Well, it’s what I’ve got honey.”

She became very worried for me, that the horse routine would fail to make anyone laugh, that it would go badly for me, that I would be embarrassed. She begged me to come up with something, anything, other than the horse bit. I assured her that it would be fine, and that the ability to feel embarrassment for a failed bit left me a long time ago. I kissed her on her forehead, checked on my three year-old son, took my horse picture and walked over to Comedy Bar.

On the walk over, I thought about her, about her true fear for me, and about her withering assessment of what I considered to be a pretty good bit. In the many years of my start-and-stop comedy career, I never thought about the collateral damage of going up there and trying to make people laugh. I always felt my modest triumphs and failures were mine alone. But having children means finally gaining true collateral. Someone other than you who will lie in bed and worry that the strangers wouldn’t laugh.

They did laugh, by the way. The show was called Forever Jung, a monthly show hosted by Sophie Kohn where stand ups perform a seven-minute set and then sit down while a comedian playing a therapist analyzes them. It’s a wonderful, wonderfully silly show that combines stand-up with character work, improv, and even some Marc Maron-style comedian confessionals (people are amazingly open with even a fake therapist). I was the therapist that night, someone who practiced a radical form of therapy called ‘Pony Play’ where patients would address a hobby horse, and then I would show them the aforementioned picture of a horse and ask if they had seen him, my former horse that had pulled my pants down at a show jumping competition and was still ‘at large’. It went over reasonably well, due mainly to the great lineup of game stand ups who were on the show.

One thing should be made clear: I was never one of those great stand ups. I barely poked my head above the level of open micer, meaning that instead of scraping to get on to sparsely attended shows for no pay, I’d occasionally be invited to perform on sparsely attended shows for a drink ticket. My stuff was impersonal, vaguely observational and nobody was beating down my door to hear more of it.

Domestic life was always bumping against the comedic life. I had to miss the second ever show of my sketch troupe because I was getting married. It was after one sketch rehearsal with that same troupe that I came home to my wife sitting on the couch telling me I should keep my shoes on in order to buy a pregnancy test. And when my daughter was only a few weeks old, I left my wife to drive to Montreal to perform a 30 minute sketch show at a festival for free, then drove back the next day. She hasn’t quite yet forgiven me for that.

It became increasingly difficult to justify missing bedtimes for five minutes of stage time. When I started working nights bartending, it became doubly hard to use the remaining nights workshopping my bit about Chinese food (It was a good bit). Two young kids, a dying parent and a job where I’d routinely get home at 3am didn’t leave much space for the increasingly dwindling rewards that came from hacking it out in the lower rungs of live performance. So as I stopped doing it, I stopped being thought of as someone who does it and then stopped getting invited to do shows. And just like that, the person who does comedy becomes the person who used to do comedy, who then becomes the dreaded Funny Guy at the Office.

There’s a romantic vision of the standup comic crisscrossing a city by night to hit as many spots as he or she can; stacking five minutes at a time until it adds up to the Gladwellian 10,000 hours. There’s also the camaraderie, the bullshitting, the gossiping, the catching up that happens in the back of the rooms and around the bar afterwards. I loved that, and still do. But that concentration of funny people can be dangerous. You cash in your drink ticket, stay for just one more and suddenly: 2am.

Not conducive to 6am wake-ups.

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Things are radically different now, of course. Live comedy exists solely on Instagram Live or Zoom or Twitch. Domestic life doesn’t just bump up against comedic life; there is only domestic life. I had started a new bartending job at the end of January, and after one shift where I was cut early mid-March I got a grave late-night call saying that the restaurant would be closed indefinitely. All film and television productions were immediately halted, meaning a commercial I had booked was cancelled at the eleventh hour. The news filled me with a combination of relief that I wouldn’t have to be on set around dozens of other people and unease for what laid ahead.

The days start early and don’t end until a three year old is coaxed into finally going to sleep. By day, my wife works from his room in the basement, surrounded by stuffed toys and picture books, while my full-time homeschool/detention centre roils upstarts.

Photo by David Leyes

We deputized our seven-year old daughter to teach her brother the basics, and I’m trying not to reveal to her just how limited my math is. Science experiments are conducted (baking soda volcano, playing the hits), ventures out to the local park are preceded by reminders about staying apart from others, and Netflix is a near constant.

I see friends making use of the time that comes from forced isolation to create innovative outlets for their comedy: shorts, Instagram Live shows, Zoom parties. I’ve largely been feeling wrung out, like I’ve had less time or energy than ever to be funny.

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Late last year, the restaurant where I used to work was hosting a corporate holiday party and reached out to me to come back. Not to bartend, but to do stand up. 30 minutes of post-dinner entertainment. Now, I had not done stand up in a long time and certainly not for 30 minutes, but they didn’t know that and I needed the money. Rather than dusting off the old Chinese food bit, I wrote new, more personal stuff about being a father and trying to have a career in the arts (I also wrote yogurt jokes. It was a yogurt company).

I was nervous. I had a lot of time to fill and no guarantee that any of this new stuff would work. If I bombed, there was going to be a lot of contractually-mandated bombing. I told them to have the money ready in case I had to flee. I thought of my daughter, lying in bed and fretting about her dad standing up there in silence.

Well, she could rest easy because the laughs did come and the time was filled with ease. Personal stories can be riffed and expanded upon in a way a rigidly composed conceptual joke cannot. The more personal and specific I got, the more universal the connection.

Again, do not get the wrong idea: Even the greatest corporate gig of all time is not going to be enshrined in the annals of comedy history, and this was certainly not the greatest corporate of all time. But it felt good.

Paul Beer - @PaulDanielBeer