Self-Inflicted Wounds: Heartwarming Tales of Epic Humiliation (23 page)

Because of the money.

I am admitting a bit of crass truth here. Corporate gigs always pay much better than
club gigs. Corporations have money to spend, mostly because that is what they are
in business for—because guys who don’t have boners really, really want boners, and
they are going to spend money to get those boners, the devil and the details and the
price tag be damned. And thanks to those bonerless guys, the corporation’s got a wad
to drop on their annual training conference or brainstorming retreat or employee recognition
dinner, and they are going to spend it on something fun just to make sure that their
employees don’t think they are dead inside or plotting to slowly grind their workforce
into emotional dust, and so they can point to the annual company event and go, “See?
Wasn’t that
fun
?”
³

So they hire a comedian, because hiring John Legend or the Black Eyed Peas or Gwyneth
Paltrow would blow their entertainment budget for the entire year, and because hiring
a magician or a hypnotist is just ridiculous. A comedian is affordable, and a good
time, and if you ask nicely and give the comedian a list of names, maybe they’ll make
gentle, ribald fun of Bob in accounting and the head of Legal Affairs. “Hey, go for
it! Jim’s super laid back. He
loves
jokes. He won’t mind at all.”
⁴

And the poor comedian, suckered in by the prospect of making this month’s rent and
more in one night, says yes every time. After all, we are comedians because we love
to make people laugh. But we also do it to make a living. If we wanted to make people
laugh and not make any money we’d draw political cartoons. And, unfortunately, you
do make great money doing corporate gigs. Also, unfortunately, you will not make anyone
laugh.

Well, except for one or two young, interesting (and probably gay, and so used to being
on the edge) employees who just got to the company and so don’t yet know that laughing
is absolutely not allowed under any circumstances, and especially not at some comedian’s
risqué material about how she thinks there should be marriage equality because that
way she could hire a husband-husband hair and makeup team.

For the record, I have done many, many corporate gigs. I have always been gracious,
and professional, and prompt and focused, and made jokes about Jim from Legal Affairs
and how green the new sales force is, and yelled out a rallying cry about how everyone
is going to break sales records this year, and so
go out there and get ’em
! And I have thanked the people who come up kindly afterwards and tell me how funny
they thought I was, even though they didn’t actually laugh out loud, because their
boss was at their table, and they didn’t want him to think they actually feel anything
or have ideas or likes or dislikes or hopes or dreams or anything. And I walk out
of the room with my money and my head held high.

And then I go back to my hotel room, eat a bouquet of muffins off my chest, watch
five episodes of
Law and Order
in a row, and pass out in a dreamscape of crumbs. And in the morning, I vow that
I will never, ever, ever take a corporate gig ever again, as long as I live. Until
the next one.

Quality muffins ain’t cheap.

( 27 )

The Day the Comedy Died

“The deepest wounds aren’t the ones we get from other people . . . they are the wounds
we give ourselves.”
—
I
SOBELLE
C
ARMODY

“Those stains will never come out. Just burn it.”
—
A
ISHA
T
YLER

Of
all the skills and personality traits that my father passed on to me, the one I am
most proud of, and the one I utilize most often, is “acting as if.” As in, “act as
if you belong.”

This is not the same as pretending you are someone you are not, or mimicking the behavior
of others in an attempt to blend in. This is a bigger, more ambitious, and much more
radically personal approach—acting as if you belong wherever it is you are, and behaving
as if you are completely comfortable there, regardless of whether on the inside you
are completely mystified by what is happening, and do not understand the language
people are speaking, comprehend the signage on the walls, or recognize the food that
has been set before you on your plate.

My father has always been a guy who has been comfortable no matter where he goes:
construction site, French restaurant, board meeting, slaughterhouse floor, underground
fight club, afternoon tea klatch. My father can slide seamlessly into any context
and immediately not just make people feel as if he belongs there, but that the entire
thing may have been his idea, he is on the board of directors or perhaps an anonymous
and powerful donor, and they are his esteemed guests. He is the kind of guy who looks
you in the eye and claps you on the arm and laughs just loud enough to make you feel
included but not self-conscious, and in minutes you have a lemonade in your hand,
have invited him to dinner in your home, and agreed to meet him for an evening of
vigorous salsa dancing sometime in the very near future. Later that evening, people
will wonder who the incredibly funny and charming black man was and where he came
from; they will compare stories and slowly realize that he was like a ghost—appearing
magically from the mists, delighting and confounding all he encountered, and vanishing
just as inexplicably into the night. He is like a full-grown, hilarious, very handsome,
potty-mouthed elf.

He is both truly wonderful and utterly nefarious.
¹

This quality, the “acting as if,” is a talent both genetic and cultivated. Part of
it is just the way he was born. My father is an insanely likeable guy, the kind of
person who could sweep all the dishes and food from the table mid-dinner party—just
as people were lifting the first bite of something delectable to their mouths—leap
to his feet atop the vintage furniture, tell a story comprised of both shocking subject
and salacious language, and leave at the end of the night with everyone sighing about
how wonderful he is and how this was the best dinner party they had ever been to,
even as their stomachs are growling from hunger because he punted their duck breast
into the fireplace during an especially explosive punchline. The man is that good.

The phrase “I just
love
your father” is one I have heard uttered so many times as to be able to smell it
coming and mouth right along, keeping my irritated eye rolls to a barely detectable
minimum. From the time I was very young, people have always thought he was delightful,
drifted toward him, fallen into his gravitational pull, even as I was dying of embarrassment
on the other side of the room.
²
One of my most vivid memories is of my father swinging my very tiny and arguably
brittle grandmother-in-law around the dance floor by her armpits (she weighed like
sixty pounds) to some interpretive jazz song at my wedding, before gleefully dropping
the f-bomb multiple times, then striding outside to illegally halt traffic in front
of the reception hall with a pile of hazard cones he had obtained from only god knows
where.

Everybody at my wedding just loved him. This is the effect he has on people.

I’m pretty sure I did not acquire this skill. Sure, I am loud and rude and love to
curse, but the bulletproof likeability thing I’m not quite sure I received. I talk
too much and too fast, am perilously clumsy, anxious, obsessive-compulsive, and quite
possibly the most neurotic black woman on the planet. These factors seem to counterweight
my more fun characteristics. However, the one thing I did get from my father, partially
from genetics but mostly from ongoing and relentless drilling from him, is the ability
to charge into a situation and “act as if” I know what I am doing when I have no freaking
idea what is going on, why we are all here, or even what day it is. The “act as if”
philosophy has a slutty and unscrupulous bedmate—the “fake it ’till you make it” axiom,
or “keep going through the motions as you learn what the hell you are doing those
motions for and gradually develop the skills and knowledge required to really and
truly belong.” In plainer language, I often have no fucking idea what I am doing.

That has never, ever stopped me.

I believe fully that if you want to do something, you just go do it. You can sit around,
thinking about it, waiting until things are perfect, wringing your hands, dithering
and hesitating and slowly twisting your panties into a perfect little fisherman’s
knot. Or you can get up off your lazy fucking ass and
do something
. What’s the worst that can happen?
³

As I’m sure you’ve gleaned from these pages, this philosophy has not always served
me well. I can attribute several broken bones, a dumpster full of ruined meals, a
wrecked racecar, some second-degree burns, and a scrapped short film to this charge-ahead
philosophy. However, I have just as often thrown myself into something, studied, watched
others, cribbed a bit from the Internet, and come out just fine. And sometimes, much
more than fine.

There is something truly invigorating, and also terrifying, about deciding to do something,
and then just doing it. Much like ripping off a bandage or touching your tongue to
the tip of a battery,
⁴
the dread of anticipation is usually much scarier than the actual event.
⁵
But we have all had the experience of wanting to do something, and then dithering
and planning and waiting and watching and revisiting and revamping our plan until
the opportunity has passed and that unbelievably hot guy or girl has left the bar,
never to return. And then we kick ourselves angrily, because we didn’t screw up our
courage to just do some shit that probably wouldn’t have been that hard in the first
place. So you get shot down. It’s not like you haven’t been shot down before. Seriously.

So we wait, and we hesitate, and all the awesome shit we wanted to do—start a rock
band, learn Mandarin, take up painting, become master of the Cat’s Cradle—have completely
passed us by, and we can’t play an instrument, barely speak English, resent art, and
fear lengths of string.

Don’t be someone who is afraid of string. Just pick up the fucking string.

When I decided to become a comedian, I just decided to do it. I didn’t take any classes,
I didn’t read any books, I didn’t ask anyone their opinion or get anyone’s permission.
I just did it. And as acknowledged previously, for a long, long while I wasn’t very
good at it. But that didn’t keep me from approaching it like I had been doing it forever,
like it was my lifelong passion and all I had ever been cut out for in this world.
I didn’t worry about rules, or conventions, or how things were done. I just figured
that shit out as I went along. Of course, I had doubts, and questions, and more than
a few panic attacks, but once I decided to be a comedian, I was a comedian. I wasn’t
trying
to be a comedian. I didn’t
hope
to be a comedian. I
was
one.

This bold unbridled approach led, in turn, to a pretty intense crisis of faith about
six years into my career. I had moved to Los Angeles, because I was sick of the breathable
air and delightfully potable water of the San Francisco Bay Area.
⁶
By this time, I had gotten relatively funny and pretty accustomed to doing well on
stage. Don’t get me wrong; I was no comedic genius. My act was formalized, stilted,
and more than a little gimmicky. But I had honed it into a pretty tight set, with
a hook that people could relate to, and my punchlines were reliably effective. Plus,
what I lacked in substance, I more than made up for in style, gesticulating wildly
and mugging as if my facial contortions might earn me extra points in a clownery competition.
My act was adequate and serviceable, and had been working for years, and I was feeling
pretty damn confident about it.

And then, suddenly, I wasn’t.

I don’t know how this happened, and at the time, I had no idea why, either. It was
abrupt and cataclysmic: all of a sudden, the same jokes that had killed the week before
just stopped killing. No explanation. Nothing I could point to. I just started to
suck.

I tried
everything
. Moving my jokes around. Talking louder. Talking more quietly. Making more eye contact.
Being more drunk.
⁷
Nothing was working. I was bombing repeatedly and consistently, and it was quickly
eroding my now brittle self-confidence.

I started to freak the fuck out.

The stress of bombing, coupled with the lack of comprehension of why I was bombing
or how to fix things, started to manifest physically: anxiety, lack of sleep, dry
skin, hiccups. The most dramatic of these symptoms? I started to develop flop sweats.
Up until this point, I had no idea what a “flop sweat” was, but let me tell you, when
you experience one, that shit becomes immediately clear. Being “sweaty” is not a flop
sweat. Leaving the gym drenched in perspiration is not a flop sweat. A flop sweat
is when you go from delicate daffodil to dock worker in 3.5 seconds flat, with no
warning and no explanation; when you can leave the house showered and fragrant with
a triple application of antiperspirant, and arrive at the club twelve minutes later
looking as if you just went three rounds in the octagon with Ronda Rousey. When the
most strenuous thing you did in between was
drive your car.

This is what I was experiencing. My body was in a constant state of fight or flight,
but it had no idea who I was fighting or what I was fleeing. It got to be so that
I would wear two or three tee shirts to the club at night, assembling them into a
kind of bulked-up MacGyvered torso diaper, then bring a change of clothes along so
I could whip off my soaked garments right before I went on stage, assemble a new chest
diaper, and promptly Whitney Houston the shit out of the second set of tees during
my set. I was an unholy mess.