Get up, stand-up
The identity crisis of the pandemic-era comedian
I remember hearing Brent Butt once say that anyone who could quit stand-up should, though I can’t remember what the context was. The idea behind what he said, though, was straightforward and sensible enough: stand-up comedy makes no sense, on paper; it doesn’t add up in any strictly utilitarian or practical or straightforward way, and so clearly in the end it would ultimately be left up to the people who, for whatever combination of idiosyncratic, weirdo autobiographical reasons, simply couldn’t imagine not doing it.
On one of his albums, Patton Oswalt speculated on the grisly possible childhood trauma necessary to produce a person willing to stand on stage telling humiliating stories in order to make strangers laugh, but even if you can get past that, there’s still the sheer economic absurdism of the industry. A working stiff, non-celebrity comedian might stand on stage for nearly an hour for $250 if it’s a club on a weekend, or ten times that for the same price if it’s a company Christmas party — though it will be at least 100 times more painful an experience. They’ll do 20 minutes for $50 in some restaurant in the middle of the week, and rarely get paid anything for a spot of 15 minutes or less. In the very best case scenario, they’ll become successful enough to never again be able to lead what would qualify as a normal life, traveling constantly, away from their families and friends, pacing vast fields of time with only themselves for company. In 2019, I was on the road for 45 days, and I’d be willing to bet that I travel less than almost any other headliner in Canada.
Or at least, I did. We’re all more or less on par now. I was away from my family for just over a month and a half out of 2019, traveling those 45 days; in 2020, I logged three. I haven’t done the math — which is to say, my 2020 taxes* — yet, but that’s likely a fairly decent ratio for guessing what the difference was in my incomes between those two years, too.
Last July, I did a show on Zoom, which was, at the time, my first comedy performance since March 7, 2020. It wasn’t, strictly speaking, a stand-up show, but a funny cooking demonstration that I did with my daughter, making (very good) chicken cacciatore for the Cowichan Valley NDP, and it had felt good to be doing something. A few weeks later, I did my first live show of the pandemic, for a small and physically if not mentally spaced out indoor summer crowd at the Little Mountain Gallery on Main Street, where I drew an appropriately lukewarm response for a nervous and lukewarm performance, then left the stage and was immediately seized by one of the worst panic attacks I had all last year. If I’d had more lead time before my next live show, I would’ve cancelled it, but it was the following evening, in someone’s backyard, and I didn’t want to leave anyone hanging by flaking out. I took a prescription benzo before the gig — something I would typically never do before a show because of its effects on onstage energy; some of the same adrenal rush that causes panic attacks is good, in the proper proportions, for feeding a crackling show — and the show was wonderful, one of the fondest nights of the pandemic summer.
I’ve spoken to two friends about this, a twenty-five-year-old woman and a sixty-five-year-old man, and if that utterly unscientific, entirely anecdotal sampling are any indication, then the pandemic has wrought show business anxieties for those just beginning their careers as well as those moving into the recapitulation portions of their comedy sonatas. As a comic in mid-career, I can only say that forced coronavirus hiatus has been like hitting the brick wall I’m supposed to be standing in front of, telling the best jokes of my life. Mentally, I have retired from stand-up two or three times over the past year and a half. The idea of leaving my family for fifty days, of lying around a club condo or a hotel room all day in anticipation of a club show, fighting for the attention of patrons who’ve just been brought their bills for those three buckets of Rolling Rock, seems almost impossibly distant right now (when I had to pick a bran of beer just then, I’d started typing ‘Coronas,’ and didn’t even realize I was making a hackneyed and tacky pun — that’s how out of pocket I am).
But the three days I clocked on the road in 2020 were in Winnipeg, Manitoba — coincidentally, the last place where I’d bagged any serious pre-pandemic road time, for a week in December 2019, as COVID-19 was clearing its throat. Now it was late autumn 2020, and new emergency restrictions were being enacted by the Manitoba government; but there were exemptions for certain cultural events, and so the immensely scaled-down Winnipeg Comedy Festival was still going ahead.
I had two shows. The first was in wonderful and legendary 232-seat Gas Station theatre, where I performed for a live audience of six people. Happily, I had some relevant experience in this regard, having previously performed at the Gas Station on the same night that the recently-resurrected Winnipeg Jets made the NHL playoffs for the first time since the franchise had ignominiously left the city; there may actually have been fewer people that night than during COVID.
The following evening, I was taping a set for television in front of a fractionally-sized audience at the Burton Cummings theatre. I was sad, because it was really fantastic material, as good as I’ve written, and here it was about to have its one shot at posterity ruined, performed huffing and puffing by an out-of-practise comedian in semi-retirement, for a small and nervous crowd of people in masks, every single one of us terrified and grief-stricken and entirely uncertain of what was coming next.
When you first hear what Brent said, about how there are certain people who couldn’t quit stand-up if they wanted to, it sounds like there’s something impulsive or compulsive or even obsessive going on inside them — and there’s a little something to that (sometimes a lot). But what he’s also talking about is locking in to a certain experience, having a particular and irreproducible connection, not to persons, but to people; to a crowd. As a young teenager, I was talking once, one summer, to a girl from France, and I remember noticing the beautiful way she smiled and having, for the first time, the conscious realization: if I keep saying funny things, then she will keep laughing that way. For the professional comedian, the relationship with a crowd is identically thrilling, proportionately amplified for the larger numbers with — and here’s the miraculous part — no loss in intimacy.
When I stepped out onto the stage of the Burton Cummings that night, I’d missed them so much, and they’d missed us, all of us, so reciprocally, that I had by no small margin the best television taping of my career — 16 years in to stand-up, and with about four live shows under my belt that whole year.
As I got off stage, fed my microphone into a Ziploc bag, slipped the N95 back on over my stage make-up, and got back into the shuttle to the hotel, I knew with a certainty I rarely feel with respect to any non-fatherhood related questions in life, that: however long this thing takes, I am a comedian, and I’ll still be one when it’s over.
*self-employed taxes aren’t late yet
BIG SHOW FOR A GREAT CAUSE, TOMORROW (SAT.) NIGHT!
Hello everyone! Canadians across the country are holding out hope that we are heading into the final months of the COVID-19 pandemic. Whether that's true in this country depends partly on whether we can stay the course of public health orders just a little while longer, & whether that's true globally depends on an aggressive commitment to global vaccine equity & quality of care around the world. So this May Long Weekend, while we spend hopefully just one more holiday close to home & away from the crowds, SIX OF CANADA'S FUNNIEST COMEDIANS are giving you a great reason to stay inside, all while RAISING MONEY TO HELP ADDRESS GLOBAL HEALTH CARE INEQUALITY!
Since its beginnings in the late 1980s, the work of Dr. Paul Farmer and PARTNERS IN HEALTH has been synonymous with solidarity-based health care in the world's most plundered regions. I haven't seen it yet, but there's even a (one assumes) tigerless Netflix documentary about Partners in Health called 'Bending the Arc'! PIH engages with local communities, addressing health care needs AS WELL AS the historical & political conditions which exacerbate them. PIH has been working hard to mitigate the worst of the coronavirus crisis in hard-hit areas around the world; they are also fighting for the vital TRIPS waiver to ensure that intellectual property rights aren't prioritized over the lives of millions of the global poor as they wait for vaccine relief.
COME SHARE AN EVENING OF ONLINE STAND-UP COMEDY TO RAISE FUNDS FOR THE IMPORTANT WORK OF PARTNERS IN HEALTH-CANADA! STAY IN ON MAY LONG WEEKEND & HELP END THE PANDEMIC AT HOME & ABROAD!