Earlier this month, I passed the 6 year mark of chasing comedy as a career goal. Two weeks after graduating from college in 2003, after doing stand-up about 6 times in college, I went to the Pittsburgh Improv for an open mic night with the specific goal of that being the jump-off point, the very first step in what I knew would be a very, VERY long road. Herein, I’ll be looking back at what I’ve done, what I should have done, where I am, and what I still need to do.

All through my life, I knew I wanted to be an entertainer, but I didn’t really know how to do that or what it entailed. To be honest, I still barely know. I denied that a lot, because I grew up in an area where people didn’t do “entertainment industry” as a career choice. Beaver County wasn’t a place where dreams grew, it was a place where dreams rusted out, then you got someone pregnant and eventually taught yourself to hide your seething animosity for your own place in life. It wasn’t until I was hanging out with a girlfriend in college that I said I wanted to be a comedian, and she turned to me and said “yeah, I can totally see that.” That was all the validation I needed, because she’d trusted me enough to let me fuck her, so I knew she believed in me.

I took the stage for the very first time in October of 1999, during Penn State’s East Halls Talent Competition. Like most talent competitions, this meant “a bunch of singer/songwriters.” And me. If you ever feel like you want to do comedy, but keep chickening out, here’s my advice: hire Rob Griffiths to come over and force you to do it. Standing in front of the sign-up list, after passing it and discussing it for weeks, he dropped the gauntlet: “You can either write your own name on the paper, or I can do it for you.” To protect my dignity, I wrote my own name.

The night of the show, I specifically remember being so nervouse that my vision blurred a few times. Lucky for me, my sense of responsibility and my secret lust for danger and instability far outweigh my fear. I had written the themes and keywords of my jokes on the back of my hand, and the sweat had smeared some of them past recognition. I thought I was going to die, in front of 300 people eating or waiting for food at The Big Onion. I did my first joke, which I believe was something terrible about Penn State instituting a course in Pimpology. I must have thought it was REALLY funny, as I later repurposed it for an article in the school humor magazine a year later. When I finished the joke, a table of 12 people sitting directly in front of me got up and walked out. This was entirely visible to everyone around, since their table was slightly elevated, and thus, they blocked people’s view of me during their exit. At that point I knew that, no matter what, nothing would ever happen on stage that was worse than that. I birthed my very first comedic thoughts in front of hundreds of strangers, and in a very public display, a dozen said “No thank you,” got up, and went home. It helped me relax.

So flash forward: post-grad, living at home with my mother (aka LIVING THE DREAM), I called and put myself on the list for the Improv open mic night. My mother was in the audience that night, and I remember ordering her a Mike’s Hard Lemonade from the stage to either make up for a joke about my childhood, or to thank her for being there. Either way, I remember the important part: the alcohol.

The material I performed was adequate for someone who’s set the game to “child” difficulty. I felt good after getting off the stage, adrenaline still rushing as I checked my notebook to see if I had done every joke I’d planned. Somewhere, I have a notebook with this material. Also still lurking in my mom’s apartment, I’m sure, are scraps upon scraps upon scraps of paper with bits, notes, and ideas. If there was something to write on, it was written upon. Recipes, seed planting instructions, napkins, menus…I think I even ripped off part of a greasy box of KFC to write something down and kept it for a very long time. Sadly, the bit had a shorter shelf life than the cardboard’s.

Soon after I was doing 1-2 sets a week, and man, did that feel good. The only problem with all of the performing I was doing was a) in my head, I knew I wasn’t very good yet, and b) most gigs required about an hour of travel. That can be difficult when you don’t own a car, and your only methods of transport are your mother’s 12-year-old Plymouth Acclaim with 125,000 miles on it, or borrowing your dad’s 18-year-old Lincoln Towncar, a behemoth of a vehicle that spilled every fluid inside of it at any chance, and couldn’t be driven over 50 because of the cracked cylinder heads in the engine. Wow, I’m writing this as if my worst times are behind me, and meanwhile I haven’t been gainfully employed in 4 months. Career trajectory, or patterns of life? Jesus, kill me now.

Anyhow, soldiering on is what my dreams called for, and soldier on I did, until a downturn in my mother’s health and a lack of a car of my own prevented me from doing more than 3 sets over a 7 month period. I won’t go in to too much detail, but I still don’t know how the fuck I – or we – survived then. My dad played a big part in helping my mom meet her rent, and I handled all the bills in the apartment while my mom slowly fell apart. Trying to help with that while working 40 hours at a $9.00/hour job meant something had to give, and that something was comedy. This was easily the most depressed, darkest place I had ever been in my life. Reminding myself about what a shithead I was even now makes me a little uncomfortable. You know what I thought I was going to be doing 6 months after graduating college? Living in New York, trying to do comedy. You know what I WAS doing 6 months after graduating college? Working at my 5-year-old summer job, in the winter, taking care of my mother, broke, with no idea of how to make anything happen for myself. Luckily, I fell in with a good group of people that were having some fun doing improv, which helped me get back into comedy and out of the funk I was in.

*This is a good breaking point. Tomorrow, I’ll post about how The Cellar Dwellers helped keep my head in the game, and taught me that no matter what field you go in to, there are going to be fucking douchebags.*