The night started off odd as around nine o’clock, when the open mic at 37th and Zen usually starts, the club was empty. And I don’t mean empty like sparse, I mean there were literally four comics, four employees, and 1 customer. Two of the comics left, understandably so, leaving just me and the host, Tim “The Big 44″ Loulies. It was looking like we weren’t going to get to do any comedy, since there’s not much point playing to an empty room. We hung out for a little while and a group of about ten of my friends and friends of other friends showed up, along with some other random folks and comedian Derek Williams. Since we now had an audience, we decided we’d put on a show. Of course, then we couldn’t get the microphone to work and had to get Traylor, the only employee who knows how to work the audio stuff well, and just generally a cool dude, to come and set it up. We started around 10:30, a full hour and a half after when the show is supposed to start.

Because of the late start, lack of comics, and generally loose atmosphere, rules were kind of off for the night and everyone was allowed to do their material for as long as they wanted, or until they ran out. 44 started things off great as usual, but lost everyone a little with his political humor, which is a shame because his political stuff is incredibly funny. I think people are just dumb. (Which is mean to say since most of the crowd was made up of my friends, but come on guys, that stuff was great.) Next he let a guy named DeWayne go up and sort of talk extemporaneously about not having a left leg anymore. The guy was kind of funny in the way that drunks amputees are sometimes. I didn’t realize it until today, but later in the evening when I tried out a newer bit about a woman with no arms asking for a fork nobody laughed because that guy had gone up and was still at the club. I get it, but that’s stupid because I know the stuff is funny. Again, people are just uptight.

After that guy 44 forced my good buddy Travis Jones to go up and I’m glad he did. I first started doing stand-up because Travis said he’d do it with me, but he’s only gone up three or four times. He was very, very funny, especially his material about dating and strip clubs.

It didn’t happen much during Travis’ set, but at some point during the guy with one leg’s time, a couple of guys sitting at a table in the back of the room started talking loudly, interrupting the show. Mostly the bigger of the two, a guy who was about 6′3″ 250 plus pounds, was the one being disruptive, constantly repeating “Oh baby” as the people on stage were saying things. After Travis Derek Williams, who had already performed once that night at a different venue, came up and went into his stuff. The guys in the back became more bold and started directly addressing Derek. You could tell it was throwing him off his game a little, but he did a great job of keeping his composure, talking back with them a little, but mostly ignoring them. At some point during Derek’s set 44 went over and issued a challenge to the loudmouths: If you think you’re so funny get on stage. It’s a common challenge to hecklers, because most of them are cowards who just want to piss all over a show from the back and would never get on stage, but these two actually accepted his challenge. Unfortunately, this did nothing to quiet them and they did their best to disrupt Derek’s set.

Once Derek finished his material, 44 invited Christian, the bigger of the hecklers onto the stage. About a minute after he started talking I realized, not only was he drunk, but he was probably also on cocaine. Other people have guessed he was high on Red Bull since he mentioned it several times, but I’m pretty sure it was Columbian gold. He proceeded to flutter about the stage in a non-stop salvo of nonsense, basically muttering to himself as we all watched him with dead silence. About halfway through Travis told me to start recording it, so I have some of this fool’s time on stage that you can watch:

It’s worse than it looks because that went on about twice as long. It’s also worth mentioning that early in the set he was pulling out the contents of his pockets in the worst attempt at prop comedy ever. At one point he pulled out a couple of bullets and placed them on the table on stage. It was pointed out later that this should have been the cue to usher the guy out of the club, but really nobody could have been expected to think he was anything more than some drunk idiot with a few bullets and a phone charger in his pocket.

After he got off the stage 44 let his little buddy, who couldn’t have been more than 5′2″ tall, go up. I recorded his set too, but it’s not even worth watching. All he really said was “Norfolk sucks,” which is not only untrue, but also not funny. After him, 44 let a drunk girl, who apparently was the guy without a leg’s girlfriend, go up with her friend Deaf Nate, who is, yes, deaf. The hecklers started up again with their “Oh baby”s but it didn’t phase her since she was just drunkenly rambling.

So this is what I get to go up after, about half an hour’s worth of coked up drunks and a ventriloquist show with a drunk girl and a deaf dude. Needless to say, the room is not primed for comedy at this point. I made my first mistake with how I started the set; I’m not going to sit here and pretend like I can remember everything I said, but basically I commented on how fucked the night had gotten and how much it sucked that I had to follow the coked up dudes from Night at the Roxbury. I think I would have been fine right there, but then I kept going and asked if they didn’t have a drug deal to get to and leave us all alone. That’s when the big guy started yelling stuff at me. I can’t even tell you what. I know he kept saying I was fat, which was dumb because not only was he as fat as me, or fatter, but the beginning of one of my jokes was “I’m fat” and he kept talking about my shirt, which had an x-ray of a dog with a bunch of school supplies inside of him (the dog ate my homework…). Oddly, earlier in the evening when I had walked by him he seemed to love my shirt.

He stopped jawing at me for a little while and I got to do some jokes, most of which were going really well. I was throwing out every one of my jokes I could remember and a few new ones, which went over really well. But, douchebaggery always wins out in the end and the guy had to start talking again. This time I just put the mic down by my side and let him talk for a while before going back to my material. I won’t lie, that shit was distracting and it was pissing me off and from that point on I really wasn’t doing well. And, like I said, I tried to do amputee jokes whith an amputee in the room, which will probably never work out well. 44 got the guy to settle down for a little while and even though I wasn’t feeling it anymore I had to keep going since the audience was basically all there for me. And when else am I going to get unlimited time for stand-up?

There’s something I’ve noticed about drunk people: You can say something to them at one point in the night that will roll off of them at the time, but hours and hours later, for no reason whatsoever, it will suddenly piss them off and they want to fight you over it. Well, I think that’s what happened with Christian. Out of nowhere in the middle of a joke he jumped up out of his chair and started yelling at me. He was calling me all kinds of names, I can’t remember what specifically but I’m sure they were really intelligent and poignant, and telling me if I had such a problem with him I should come fight him. Again, I just dropped the mic and let him talk, which must have pissed him off more because he proceeded to stalk angrily toward the stage, informing me that he was a greenbelt in some form of martial art nobody has ever heard of and that his cousin was Somebody Van Halen. Not Eddie Van Halen, the one you’ve heard of, but some other Van Halen. Not that it would matter if it was Eddie Van Halen, cause that had nothing to do with him acting ridiculous at a bar.

So he runs up to the front of the bar and keeps yelling at me, telling me to get off the stage and fight him. Honestly, I wanted to fight him. Even more honestly, at about three different points in trying to do my set all I wanted to do was set down the microphone, run to the back of the room, and kick his ass. But, I’m an adult. Adults don’t get into fights. If adults do get into fights they go to jail, or at the very least have a bunch of annoying paperwork to fill out.

Now, at this point, nobody had moved. This guy was right up at the edge up the stage yelling up at me and everybody is just watching him. A few of my best friends in the world are sitting a few feet away happily watching as a crazy man stalked toward me and confronted me. Thanks, guys. Christian makes an attempt to grab the microphone out of my hand, to say what is anyone’s guess, but I easily swiped it out of his reach. This caused him to make a fellatio gesture toward my crotch, which was right at his eye level, and say, “I’ll talk into your microphone.” I could spend the rest of my life pondering it and I’d never figure out how he thought threatening to suck my dick was an aggressive gesture.

Now is when 44, Traylor, who is built like a mac truck, and Bradford, the club’s manager, who is built like the opposite of a mac truck, jumped in front of Christian and corralled him away from the stage. This other guy, who I’d never met, and later found out was named Keith, jumped up on stage with me, looked at me and said, “I got your back.” I kind of dumbly nodded, but in my head I was thinking, “Who are you? …I love you…Don’t leave me.”

The intervention only pissed Christian off more and he decided that everything wrong with the world was my doing. As the group pushed him out, with little Bradford in the front doing most of the pushing as he yelled for the bartender to call the cops, he continued to salvo me with insults and baseless challenges. While they were getting him and his friend to leave I wandered over, put the mic back on its stand, and took a seat on the stool at the back of the stage, watching the action and shaking my head.

When they came back, without Christian and his little coked up friend, the crowd cheered for me, with Traylor loudly shouting my name to egg them on. It was very flattering but all I wanted to do was get off stage. They wanted me to keep going, so I did a horrible rendition of my Helper Monkey joke, which is one of my favorites and usually fun to do, before basically running off stage.

So I went from never being heckled to having a guy try to fight me on stage. It’s like losing your virginity to Megan Fox; it’s way too much to handle for your first time. 44 later asked me if I was scared, and I had to honestly tell him that I was nervous because the situation was uncomfortable, but I wasn’t scared, because I knew the guy wasn’t going to hit me. If someone is going to hit you, they do it, they don’t talk about it or tell you to hit them. That’s what coked up pussies do.

This story has become a little bit of a local legend in the last week, but I’m sure once something else more interesting happens nobody will really remember it but the folks who were there. Of course, there were very few people there, so maybe it won’t be remember at all. And anything worth doing requires that you keep doing it, so I got right back on the horse the next night at Cozzy’s and killed, while talking a little about this experience:

When I was up there I thought I was doing terribly; I was uncomfortable, didn’t know my material that well, and didn’t feel like the audience was really responding. But, only two-thirds of that is true. I didn’t know my material that well, which made me uncomfortable and unsure of myself and led to me giving up. Sure, the audience wasn’t responding exactly how I’d want, but that’s all part of the stand-up; if you’re funny enough, if you’re on your game, if you know your shit and are delivering it well, they’ll laugh how and when you want them to. The reason I sucked in this set, and the reason I sucked in the other set a week and a half ago at New Belmont, is I gave up on the set and let myself suck.

I don’t know how long I’m gonna keep giving stand-up a try; I’m not sure I see it as a long-term thing that I want to keep doing, I don’t know that I’ll ever feel very comfortable doing it. But, I do think it’s something that I can be good at, I’m funny and smart and there’s no reason I can’t be both on stage and make folks laugh, so there’s no reason for me not to do the best I can at it in the time that I’m doing it. So this was a good lesson and one I’m going to take to heart. It’s hard to keep plugging away up there when people aren’t reacting the way you want because it really is all cyclical, you feel better and funnier and everything flows better when people are with you and laughing. But, in classic catch-22 style, it all starts with you being comfortable and funny. If I get off stage and feel like I sucked I want it to be because I didn’t make people laugh, not because I was unprepared or unsure of myself or because I gave up.

And, as always, I have to talk about how awesome the other comics are. They’re ridiculously supportive and they really want everyone to come out and do a good job. You can see in the video when I wasn’t doing well some of the other comics were trying to help me out and when I gave up and left several of them made sure to tell me I did better than I thought and not to give up. All this makes it so much easier to get up and try at something that’s incredibly hard and I can’t begin to say how much I appreciate it.

First, we’re back to the fairly poor video quality again. This time my friend Liz taped it for me and I guess she didn’t get a good focus from the start. It didn’t help either that my other friend Ashley was in front of her and the camera was auto-focusing on several things the whole time. But, as I always say, it’s not her camera and she was awesome enough to video it for me so she’s under no obligation to make it perfect. You can hear me and you can see me well enough to get the performance, so if that’s not good enough, well, you’re kind of a jerk.

I’m definitely getting more comfortable on stage; I still feel like I want to throw up before I go on, but that’s getting a little better and at least now when I’m on the stage I feel somewhat comfortable. Anyway, I don’t feel my legs shaking as bad. The last two thirds of this set were mostly what I did on Sunday so it was nice to see they actually are funny and it was the situation on Sunday that hurt me. This is the first time I’ve done something a second time on stage and I definitely see why people do the same jokes again, you get better by doing them repeatedly. Still, I want to make sure I’m doing mostly new stuff as much as I can, if only because it’s forcing me to write and to try to be as fresh and funny as possible. My friend Stephanie, who works at 37th actually thanked me for doing different stuff each week; she said she’s gotten a little tired of hearing the same stuff from the same comedians each week.

And again, as far as the other comedians, those guys are awesome. They’re so inviting and open and supportive and it really makes you want to come back and keep trying.

It’s also worth noting that Travis went up and performed both on Sunday and last night. On Sunday, well, there’s no other way to say it, he was not good. And it wasn’t as much a function of the setting as it was of him forgetting to actually tell any jokes. He did the same stuff last night and actually remembered to tell jokes and it went a lot better. I took a video of his stuff but he’s too much of a wuss to let me put it up. Maybe one day.

Apparently MTV has just know figured out what the rest of us have known for the last decade, and possibly longer: that they don’t show music videos any more. In fact, they have almost no programming whatsoever devoted to anything even remotely related to music. I guess by removing the “Music Television” from their logo MTV is saying they’re through the lie that they’ve become and they’re going to fully embrace themselves as the purveyors of, mostly, reality television. Yes, the horrible trend that started in the 90s with The Real World and Road Rules, continued to be blight on the world with The Osbournes and The Hills, and finally jumped the shark with the inexplicably popular Jersey Shore, has finally taken over the network that was once the most cutting edge thing available on popular TV.

For me, this is the ending to what has been a sad transformation. I gave up on MTV a long time ago, but it’s still sad to see something that was so vital to my teenage experience morph into an unrecognizable mess. MTV was beyond innovative, and what made it so likable was that they did something nobody else did, played music videos. As a kid, the great thing about MTV was that they played videos literally all day long, so you could just put it on and have it playing while you were doing whatever it was you were doing that day to entertain yourself. It didn’t matter if the video currently playing wasn’t something you liked, because you knew that in a few minutes something you would like would be coming on. I was watching the first time they showed the Thriller video, in its original eleven minute long version; it’s not only the greatest music video ever made, but, despite the fact that he transformed into a degenerate pervert, it featured the coolest person on the planet, Michael Jackson.

With this new MTV format great things like that will never happen again. The channel used to have shows devoted entirely to genres of music, and none was better than 120 Minutes. Every Sunday night you could sit and watch videos of up and coming rock/alternative bands and know about the next big thing before anyone else (or so was the thought, really you’d know about them roughly the same time as the other million or so viewers). Every huge name band from the late 80s and early to mid 90s was shown to the world for the first time on 120 Minutes. I’ll be honest, without a show like that, I know I miss out on a ton of great music. Sure, it’s all out there in the world for me to find, but I’m just not that savvy, I need a little help.

Not only is it sad that there haven’t been any videos on MTV for years, but the stuff they’ve been replaced with is awful. I’d rather have someone poke my eye with their finger for six hours than have to watch a half hour’s worth of current MTV programming. The stuff is just terrible; it’s a collection of assholes, bitches, crybabies, spoiled brats, and, well, assholes and bitches. They never show anyone likable, intelligent, funny, or interesting, and they never show anything that has even the slightest bit of redeeming value. Now, I’m sure that there was plenty of crap on back when I was a more than regular watcher of MTV (pretty sure I already mentioned The Real World and Road Rules), and I know it reeks of errant nostalgia to say “things were better in my day”, but the fact is, it’s true, MTV not only had it made with all the videos, but they had truly original, often brilliant programming as well.

There were a number of live action shows that were great, including the admittedly awful but undeniably enjoyable Undressed, but the cream of the crop was the sketch comedy show The State. Not as well remembered or beloved as The Kids In The Hall, though often just as irreverent and hilarious, The State was one of the most innovative and, frankly, weird sketch shows ever and it launched the careers of a number of comedians who would later create such shows and movies as Reno 911, Role Models, Stella, The Baxter, and, surprisingly enough, Night At The Museum. The show had the kind of talent and entertainment and complete lack of regard for convention that is just absent from current television. Here’s a great example of the show.

But where MTV really used to shine with original programming in the old days was with their animated shows. Long before Cartoon Network came up with their Adult Swim concept MTV was perfecting adult oriented animated content with series like Liquid Television and Bevis and Butthead. Aeon Flux is one of the most visually stunning cartoons ever created and as a viewer in my early teens the subject matter was so far ahead of my knowledge that it was nearly incomprehensible. It’s a show I’d love to watch again and see if I could understand because I’m fairly positive that the content was as intricate as the artwork. Here’s the opening credits, with the super cool fly in the eyelashes thing:

Another cartoon that was visually amazing, it changed animation style depending on the naratorial perspective, and ridiculously ahead of my time was The Maxx. As a fourteen year old watching this show I barely had a clue what was going on, but I was positive it was worth watching. I always had the sense there was a lot going on in the show that was never explained and it turns out (as I learned through some research) that that was the case. There were all kind of subtextual issues that might have been explained if there had been a second season. Still, The Maxx was an fantastic show and, like Aeon Flux, one I’d love to watch now as an adult. Just the preview for the show if fairly stunning:

This change of focus for MTV is sad, but it’s also sort of a non story, since the network’s ability to create interesting programming faded out over a decade ago. It hate to be the old fogey dousing everyone with nostalgia, but any time you’re forced to examine the demise of something that was an integral part of your personal experience, that’s just bound to happen. I guess now that I’ve gotten all this off my chest it’s time to wonder what exactly the ‘M’ in ‘MTV’ stands for now.

I guess I felt a little more comfortable this time than I did the first time, but still, very, very nervous. It didn’t help that the whole mood of the place was completely different; there weren’t even half as many people and the folks that were there didn’t seem very inclined to laugh. One of the other comedians, Derek Williams, told me about an open mic he was at a few weeks ago where there were six comedians and two audience members. So, I guess it could have been worse.

Now, obviously, I wasn’t as funny this time as I was the last time. One thing that I don’t think mot people realize about stand-up comedians is that they perform the same material pretty much every time they go out. Sure, they’ll come up with new stuff and work it in and dump some older stuff gradually, but for the most part they’re doing the same bits over and over again. JoAnna was definitely surprised when all the comedians were doing the same jokes they did last week. But, even though I know that the Friend Zone bit I did last week would get laughs, and that it’s probably the funniest thing I’ve thought of so far for the stand-up stuff, I chose not to do it because I really want to force myself to try to come up with new things and to have to be continually funny. This isn’t to say there won’t come a point where I’ll do the same stuff over again, of course I will, but at least for a little while I feel like I need to be writing stuff and trying things out and figuring out what’s funny.

For instance, while there were some laughs in what I did last night, the reality is that the vast majority of it is too personal to me and not universally relateable, which is never as good. Ideally you want things that everyone can hear and say, “I know how that feels” or “I do that too”, but I didn’t have that element in what I was saying. So while some stuff was funny, I need to keep that in mind for whatever I do next week. I also cursed a lot, which was just weird. That sort of snowballed. I don’t really care, it was just kind of odd.

Travis and JoAnna said they were going to go up this week and both turned out to be liars. Travis worked about seventy hours this week, so he didn’t feel like he’d had any time to prepare to go on. That’s fair. Of course, he’s had the several months we’ve been talking about doing stand-up to prepare, so it’s also bullshit. Hopefully he’ll go up next week. The day after JoAnna said she would go up she changed her mind, but, she did actually end up getting on stage. Ken Phillips, who teaches comedy classes at The Muse, needed a volunteer for an improv bit during his act and JoAnna, completely ignorant to what she was volunteering for, jumped up on stage:

It’s funny that because JoAnna is a musician she took the choosing of the songs way too seriously. Most of us would just sing whatever song first came to us and go but she was working through her mental rolodex to find just the right song. Still, she was great. And it’s funny that the song she chose was a reference to our most popular (to date) short:

We searched around and found a few open mic nights in the area (actually it turns out there’s one almost every night) and decided to check out Wednesday nights at 37th and Zen in Norfolk near the ODU campus. The plan was originally to go to one and check it out then try it ourselves the next week. But, I got impatient and was ready to get the first time over with, so I went ahead and gave it a go last night. I signed up late, well after the show had started, so Tim Loulies, the guy who runs the thing, told me he could slot me in, but only for three or four minutes. I told him that was fine with me because I had no idea how long anything would run for anyway. I decided to go with what I thought was my funniest bit and Travis was cool enough to video it for me with my digital still camera. So here it is:

So first thing you notice is the quality of the video isn’t great, but it was just my movie function on my still camera. I think Travis didn’t realize that he could zoom before he started and the zooming after he started lowered the quality, but hey, he’s never used my camera. (If you don’t believe the guy can use a camera check out his Recognition short.)

Of course, the lack of quality in the video is fine by me because you can’t see how bad my legs were shaking. I’m glad I did it but man was it nerve wracking. I’ve always had this weird thing with stuff like this where I’m put on the spot where I’m really relaxed and fine before I start and it’s not until just after I’ve started that the nervousness hit me. I was cool walking up to the mic and the first few things I said and then just as I was about to start into the bit I could feel my legs turn into jello. I took this weird three quarters stance to try to keep my balance. I’m glad I opted against taking the mic off the stand because my hand would have been shaking so bad the sound would have been awful.

All in all though, I think I did pretty good. Folks laughed, I didn’t get booed, and I didn’t actually lose my balance, or vomit, so that’s a start. I think I’m gonna do this again next week and Travis says he’s going to give it a go for the first time then too. The lovely JoAnna Lynne came out to support me and decided she could go up and be funny too, so maybe she’ll take the stage next Wednesday as well.

I actually posted this without adding this last part but I have to mention that the other guys who were doing the stand-up, some of them for a while, some of them only starting recently themselves, were amazingly great guys. Tim Loulies was more than happy to fit me into the schedule and encouraged me to come out next week. Derek Williams went out of his way to introduce himself and talk to me for a bit about the whole thing. It’s pretty great to see the people in what could be a very insular environment be so open and encouraging and that’s definitely a huge part of what makes me want to come back and do it next week.