Open Mic Night
I’ve been going to a lot of open mic nights lately. I’ve been to some in the past, but I’ve usually only kept up with it for a week or so before leaving it behind for other thins. Stand up is terrifying, and that’s why I love it. It’s a rush, it scares the shit out of me, but I’m not sure why I love that. Roller-coasters scare the shit out of me, haunted houses scare me, going into my bathroom late at night— with all the lights off and pulling the curtain open to make sure no one is there to kill me—scares me, and I try never to do any of those things. One could easily argue those other things are far less scary then stand up because they’re all based on irrational fear of bodily harm where as fear of stand up is rooted in psychological fear of failure. I guess I have to live with the fact that I have the stomach of a 12 year old girl but the mind and psyche of a German.
The LA open mics I’ve gone to have been very standard comedy open mics: depressing. The audience is almost entirely comprised of people waiting to perform and comics aren’t know to laugh at other comics. Most of the people who get laughs have been around for a while and are friends with the other comics and they get laughs because they have friends in the crowd. To Curb this, I tend to travel with a pack of friends. Guaranteed laughs—forced and real—they’ve got your back. Until last night, I hadn’t really ventured outside the “established” open mics around town that had been recommended to me. Last night, however, was very different.
My roommate went to this open mic in Downtown LA that was a whatever you want open mic. When he went, he saw rappers, poets, spoken word guys, and musicians. When he told me about his evening, he said it would be a great place to do comedy, and I said I’d check it out.
Fast forward one week and the night has finally arrived. We head Downtown.
Downtown LA is a neighborhood rather than an identifying feature. When you say downtown and a major city, thoughts of a bustling metropolis come to mind. That’s not the case in LA, at least it isn’t the case anymore. Back in the 30’s and 40’s it really was the main hub of LA, but then people had the shocking realization that they’d rather live by the ocean and everyone moved West. I’m still not sure why it took so long for this to happen. Downtown LA, today, is essentially a ghost town at night except for in random little pockets here and there. The place we were headed was surrounded by nothing. We were in Downtown LA but at the same time we were further from LA then we’d been all day. It’s kind of paradox if a paradox is what I think it is.
We walk into a warehouse, Isaac, Tyler, and myself. Isaac is my roommate who told me about the show; Tyler is my friend who I dragged a long under the pretense there would be hot girls. When I told him this, I didn’t think I was lying but I was.
The warehouse is massive and the performance area takes up about 1/3 of the space. To add a ‘cozy’ feel the seating area is contained by the warehouse wall on one side, the stage in front, the back wall in back, and some giant funhouse mirrors on the other side. Fun house mirrors, scare me.
The wall behind the stage is decorated with lots of political infused graffiti. The first thing I notice is a poster that reads, “Corporations are people too.” We had been discussing the financial crisis on the ride over and I had made that point, and now, confronted with a poster saying the same thing, I wonder whether that helps my argument or undermines it. I try to avoid catch phrases. Besides the odd space the most noticeable thing about the room is that for the first time since I went to Africa, I’m a minority.
Their were 4 white people there, Tyler, a bearded guy from St. Croix (who is white but from St. Croix so does he count?), a spoken word poet, and me…stand up. This doesn’t really bother me, al though I decide not to do my impression of Martin Luther King Jr stuck in traffic. It’s more an observation.
Everyone that goes before me, does some form of poetry or spoken word. One guy raps, to no beat, but later, while riffing on my dream of one day becoming a ‘hype man’ on stage I offer him my services and he yells, “I’m not a rapper.” He’s Clive 85, he got very stoned before the show, and his ‘performance’ is really good. In terms of consistency, the acts are way less hit or miss than I’m used to at comedy open mics. I like most of the people who go up before me. Their content however is not condusive to getting people excited to laugh, so I’m nervous. Nervous + scared + new does not equal (couldn’t figure out how to get that symbol) funny.
The guy that goes up before me reads a poem that’s about fucking fairy tale characters. And by fucking I mean having sex with. It’s an interesting poem as quite cleverly works in how he’d fuck each character based on their circumstances as well as his reasons for doing so. I know that sounds like I’m poking fun at the poem, but it was pretty good, it just was about some ridiculous shit. Anyway, it kills, i mean he’s murdering the crowd. It’s like an Andrew Dice Clay routine, he’s got them eating out of his hand, and I’m thinking to myself, “awesome, he’s really warming up the crowd for me.” Upon completing the poem, he says,
“I’m going to read a ‘lighter piece,’ and I’m even more excited. This guy, who’s name is Wil Smith, that’s right Wil—one L—smith is setting’em up and I’m gonna knock them down.
He then proceeds to preface the poem with a story about how he fell asleep at the wheel and woke up under and 18 wheeler with his whole car destroyed except the driver seat, and how he now believes he has a guardian angel. Why does he think he has a guardian angel? Because the only injury he sustained was a scratch to his pinky. At this moment it could go either way, the pinky thing is kind of funny; the car crash/ angel not so much. I’m really hoping it’s a poem about the irony of a hole car be destroyed and only getting a tiny scratch on one’s pinky.
He reads the poem to correspond, it’s not about his pinky, it’s about the angel, and it’s a downer.
All the energy in the room is gone. You can feel it, it’s not as much about he quiet as it is the feeling that the audience is going to hate whoever’s on the stage. I’m fucked, I’m going, “OH SHIT” not only do I have to bridge the racial divide, I also have to make people laugh…hard. I jump up on stage and immediately, like the pro I am, do some crowd work to get people going and energized. I’m not sure how people feel about crowd work, but I love it so I practice every time I go up. My idea of crowd work is making fun of something that happened before I got up. It usually doesn’t go well, but it calms me. It’s not hard to think of something to make fun of as the guy on before me did the whole ‘lighter’ thing as well as a poem about fucking fictional children. it goes well. Then I move into my improvised bit about wanting to be a ‘hype man’ and loose the crowd. To my surprise, people don’t have as fond a love for ‘hype men’ as I do. I finish that, sheepishly, and go into my routine. I kill, I’m in a zone and in this zone, I’m on fire. It’s going better than I could have possibly imagined. It was amazing. Doing comedy at artsy, hipster, mainly poetry open mics is my new favorite thing. It’s hard to explain without sounding incredibly self aggrandizing how it felt and went, so this end is incredibly anti climactic. I apologize. Hopefully it doesn’t ruin the story. I will leave you with this, to take me down a peg.
I finish my set and finally get to live out a dream and tell the crowd to follow me on Twitter. As of today I have zero new followers. I like to think it’s because they were too cool for twitter like they were too cool for rapping.
NFtB
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