Is This Anything?

Why I Could Never Be a Stand-Up

Hello, readers.

Next week I am hosting a stand-up comedy performance with some very funny people. It’s something that I do from time to time when I get an urge to scratch the itch.

While I see myself as a comedy writer, I could never be a stand-up comedian. This is the awkward part of the piece where you ask yourself “This is a comedy Substack?”

Yes, and while I try to regularly “keep it honest” by doing stand-up, I know that I am not very good and standing there and remembering jokes. I have a bad memory. Because of this, stand-up comedy is probably the most difficult thing I have ever done and still can’t understand how the greatest comedians remember all of their material.

Who are the greatest comedians you ask? Well, growing up I always admired Richard Pryor, Redd Foxx, George Carlin, Eddie Murphy, and regrettably, Bill Cosby. But my all-time favorite stand-up comedian is 70’s era Steve Martin. Thank you to all of the librarians at the Wallingford Public Library who let me borrow all of these stand-up comedy CDs when I was growing up despite the stickers on them that they had explicit material (especially George Carlin’s Parental Advisory Explicit Lyrics whose entire album cover is nothing but the top of the comedian’s head and the famous sticker put on albums with mature content).

I could remember jokes if I was able to listen to them, which helps me more than anything when it comes to my own joke memorization.

I would take those albums home and listen to them on repeat, less for the jokes and humor, and more at the fact that the comedians were able to encode, store, and retrieve the jokes as they actually constructed them. The best of George Carlin’s stand-up performances sounded like well-written essays, with logical structure, unity, cohesiveness, and compelling focus and coherence. The performance You Are All Diseased is a masterclass.

George Carlin, in what I imagine is the exact moment he accuses you of being diseased.

So my shoddy memory is the main reason I could never be a stand-up comedian. There’s just no way I can be asked to remember things and no matter how hard I prepare, I just can’t remember the joke the way I wrote it.

I think we should normalize allowing comedians to at least have a set list with them on stage. I know a few comics do it, but generally, I think it is frowned down upon. I mean, we allow musicians to have setlists, why can’t comedians? I think I would be a much better comedian if I was allowed to have a set list. Ok, maybe not. The only way I could be a good stand-up would be if the norm for comedians was to read a joke verbatim on a scrap of paper the way that I originally wrote it: with a beer on the toilet.

And how about some of those comedians who used to perform under the influence? How the hell did Sam Kinison remember his act while being fully inebriated? How could Mitch Hedberg even remember one joke from his large, random repertoire while on heroin? And Robin Williams? He used to perform on crack!

Maybe it is my dad-brain or maybe it’s all the hits to the head that I sustain while playing Old Boys rugby, but I ain’t remembering a 25-minute or 40-minute stand-up routine. I can barely remember what I did a few days ago.

And maybe that’s what I admire most about stand-up, the sheer memorization of it all. I used to listen to those comedy performances and marvel at the audacity of the comedian actually remembering their acts, some of them extremely nuanced and sophisticated. Just being able to remember all of that is an achievement in itself.

I think one of the most impressive performances of stand-up memory is recorded on Eddie Murphy’s Comedian album. It was recorded at the DAR Constitution Hall in Washington DC and the live performance of the album was released on HBO as Delirious, one of the greatest comedy performances of all time.

I’m just going to say it—Eddie Murphy is too handsome to be a stand-up comic. He needed to be more ugly.

Again, aside from the jokes, Eddie Murphy somehow remembers all these very funny and elaborate jokes, some of them which could be full short-stories to themselves. The bit “The Barbecue” (where Murphy talks about a barbecue with his actual family members and is famous for the phrase “Goonie Goo Goo”) clocks in at 12 minutes and 44 seconds. Again, that is just one complicated joke where he talks for almost 13 minutes straight!

The first time I ever performed stand-up, I was in 6th grade and let’s just say it did not go well. It was at a talent show at one of my church’s Youth Rallies, where a bunch of kids sleep at a church like homeless people for an entire weekend. I didn’t have to remember any original material because my entire act was nothing but the best jokes from all of the comedy albums that I listened to and memorized. And yes, most of those were comedians who did blue humor! A Redd Foxx joke about doing cunnilingus on a woman over 70? In church?

Luckily, Bill Cosby used to do a lot of Bible humor, so I would mainly rip off his act, and if you’ve never listened to Steve Martin’s Let’s Get Small you would know that his material is also church-safe, mainly just because it is so bizzare and he doesn’t ever swear. I tried to duplicate his bit “Funny Comedy Gags” and eventually received “the vaudeville hook,” where one of the youth ministers got an umbrella from the lost and found and took me off of the stage like he was Sandman Sims at the Apollo. Talk about fucking embarrassing.

A furry, bad comic sadly gets the old vaudeville hook.

Luckily, that didn’t really dissuade me from trying stand-up at other points in my life, but again, performing stand-up material wasn’t really my thing. I liked writing jokes mainly, and in college, I would write stand-up jokes for the comedians who performed on campus in case they were short on material for some reason and needed jokes from the crowd. They never did.

But I would still dream that these professional, road-proven comics would solicit jokes from the audience. Kind of like when people go to concerts and wonder if I could play all of the songs in case the band needed an emergency bassist.

So, I do have three jokes that I wrote in college that I actually remember. After all these years, crazy right? I spent the entire post talking how my brain is mush and I can’t remember shit about shit, and here I am producing jokes that are almost twenty years old. The memory is a crazy thing, amirite?

(But to be honest, I still have the notebook where I wrote these jokes).

So I’m going to share those three jokes with you. Promise not to laugh…no wait, please laugh, but not at me. I have also put photos of each comic during this era so you can really imagine them saying these jokes. Yes, that is very desperate.

Ok, so the first comedian that I remember visiting my college was Dave Chappelle. This was right before Chappelle’s Show, so mainly the people who attended this performance were white guys (like me) who loved Half-Baked.

So here’s the joke I wrote for him:

So, I was talking to my man the other day, right? He tells me he's trying to cut back on the chronic. I said, "Oh yeah? What's the plan?"

He leans in real close, eyes all squinty, and he whispers, "I'm only gonna smoke weed... on days that end in 'Y'."

I looked at him, dead serious, and said, "Brother, that's every day!"

He just shrugged, took a long drag, and said, "Exactly."

I still think that joke is funny and Dave Chappelle could sell it with that affected voice he does for his really hood characters and I think it would get a few laughs (please tell me it would get a few laughs!) Dave Chappelle is welcome to that joke although I think he only smoke Marlboro Reds these days.

The second comedian that I wrote a joke for was Jon Stewart. The Daily Show was at its height during the Bush Jr. administration, and I figured his comedy was now very political based upon what I saw every night on Comedy Central. But I also knew that Jon Stewart was also in Half-Baked so he would appreciate a political weed joke about Bush (you are seeing a pattern here that I’m really into the movie Half-Baked).

Here you go (note that I also wrote stage directions for him):

I hear a new tell-all book is coming out, and it alleges that back in his college days, George W. Bush... may have partaken in the occasional... recreational activity. You know, the kind that makes you think deep thoughts about... Cheetos.

(Jon Stewart does his signature incredulous squint)

Now, I'm not saying it's true. I'm just saying, imagine, for a moment, a young George W. Bush, staring intently at a lava lamp, saying, "Dude... what if... everything... is just, like, a metaphor?"

And then, years later, he's the President of the United States, making decisions about... well, everything. And you have to wonder, did those college experiments... influence his foreign policy? I mean, was the idea for "Mission Accomplished" just something he saw in a cloud of smoke?

(Jon Stewart leans in)

"Mr. President, are you sure about this invasion? Because, honestly, it kind of feels like you're just really hungry for some Funyuns."

So Jon Stewart is welcome to that joke, as well, but maybe he can change it from weed/George Bush to an alcohol/Pete Hegseth joke, I guess.

And finally, a joke I wrote for my favorite comedian during my time in college, Colin Quinn. He had just left SNL where he wrote really these really odd, amazing jokes for “Weekend Update.” I wrote this joke about New York in the post 9/11 era for Colin, but sadly I was not able to go to his performance which I think was in 2003.

However, I got a second chance to either give him or perform this joke for him on the set of a live taping of his show Tough Crowd with Colin Quinn, but my dad actually stole my thunder and was able to perform the title credits song to “Welcome Back, Kotter” during the audience warm-up. The best part about that was that my dad really didn’t know the lyrics to the song and just improv’d it. It was honestly the funniest things ever and I knew I couldn’t upstage him with my HILARIOUS joke. My dad was so funny they gave him a “Tough Crowd” t-shirt which I still own to this day.

So anyways, here’s the joke that I wrote for Colin Quinn which I never gave to him.

(Please imagine him saying this in his rambling way, all exasperated and with his gravelly Brooklyn accent):

So, 9/11, right? You remember that? Tough Tuesday. The kind of Tuesday where you're thinking, "Maybe I should have just called in sick."

What a day that was. Years later we’re still walking around like, "Did that thing really happen?" It was like the world did a trust fall, and nobody caught us. America was just laying there on the ground pressing our Life Alert going, "I CAN’T GET UP!"

Look, I'm not trying to make light of it. It was a tragedy. A lot of people died. A lot of heroes, too. Firemen running into buildings? In New York? That's like seeing an Asian tourist say "excuse me" in Times Square after bumping into you. Unbelievable.

So there you have it. No way I would have remembered these jokes if they actually called me up on stage to perform them when they ran out of their material, but who knows?