The one and only time I've done standup

Disastrous instruction in how we recognize each other

Here is the brief tale of the one and only time I’ve tried stand-up comedy, an experience that was disastrous and illuminating. 

I was getting into improv classes right as the pandemic got off the ground and in-person interaction became fraught with mortal peril. Seeking to cling to some sense of momentum and normalcy I decided to continue my comedic education by transferring to the now-online standup class offered by the improv theater. When I started the 8-week class I was living with my girlfriend-at-the-time and by its end I had moved back in with my parents  - that relationship had collapsed, partially due to pandemic-related stay-at-home pressures but mostly due to deep and intractable emotional/life-goal compatibility issues. We were miserable for years. The immediate life experience that I had on hand to mine for comedy material was severely self-deprecating and depressing, which I’ve come to learn is pretty standard fare for stand-up comedians in general. We completed the 8-week program in June and then had to wait a while to perform at our promised capstone show, which finally happened in September. 

During the pandemic I’d also been faithfully attending online 12-step meetings, meetings I’d been going to regularly since I got sober in 2016, and like all 12-step meetings they featured the wonderful call-and-response where I go “Hi, I’m Max and I’m an Alcoholic” and the room goes “Hi, Max!” back to me. It meant a lot to me to keep those rooms open, to be there for people who needed help in those especially-trying times and for me to continue to know myself as a sober member of a sober community. That said, going to meetings online means that people are generally muted unless they themself are sharing, so instead of hearing “Hi, Max!” when I started my share I got a bunch of eerie silence and a grid of tiny people wiggling and waving to me on my screen. I missed the feeling of a whole bunch of people roaring my name in greeting, so I made the in-hindsight-foolish decision to open my set by trying to make people follow that same call and response for me. 

The vision was to walk out on stage and say “Hi, I’m Max and I’m an Alcoholic” and point the microphone at the crowd as half the crowd gave me a surprised half-enthusiastic response, then exhort the whole room to do it better the second time and only after getting an enthusiastic “Hi, Max!” would I begin my set, which was mostly jokes about alcoholism. The reality, as it unfolded, was very different - people in the audience at a stand-up comedy show understand and respond to the word “alcoholic” much differently than do people at a 12-step meeting. When my set started I did indeed walk out there and go “Hi, I’m Max and I’m an Alcoholic” and I did NOT get a warm, subdued, inviting “Hi, Max!” back - to my shock I instead got raucous, drunken shrieks of approval from an amazingly-inebriated audience. Drunk people were in front of me, people who understood “Alcoholic” as a term of decadent endearment, and suffice it to say my tales of falling apart and getting my shit together did not resonate in quite the way I had hoped. As of this writing I’ve never done standup again. 

Here’s my lesson: In a deep sense, our identity is defined by what we say we are, along by what people recognize us as. 12-step meetings are famously, consciously inclusive - the one and only requirement for membership is a desire to stop drinking. You, reading this right now, could go into any meeting and sit down and introduce yourself as an alcoholic and instantly get that response of recognition, without any preconditions or verifications. You might not actually be an alcoholic, in which case those meetings might not be a great use of your time, but all the same - if you do have a problem and want to quit, it doesn’t matter who you are or how far you’ve fallen or how much pain you’ve felt and cause or how certain you are that you are unworthy of love, as soon as you say that you belong then nobody can kick you out. 

We need to be recognized for who we say that we are, and it can be extremely jarring when that doesn’t happen. It was jarring for me to say “I’m an Alcoholic” and for that to be taken as “I identify as a renegade badass who plays by their own rules and drinks constantly because I love life ten times more than everyone else and also I’m ten times sadder than anyone else and need to drink for relief because I’m just that sensitive and precious”. For me, when I say “alcoholic”, it means “I have hit my human limits and need help getting my shit together”, which remains as true for me now as it did when I first got sober. 

The key word here, if you want to be fancy, is “recognitive constitution” - “recognitive” as in “how we are recognized”, and “constitution” as in “how we define our own nature”. Our recognitive constitution is what we say that we are and which others agree that we are. It doesn’t fit easily into a standup comedy set, but I’m not a standup comic - or, at least, I could be if I got up onstage and did standup comedy and had everyone agree that, at least for that moment, I was a standup comic. Perhaps I will again, next time doing a set about how badly standup went the last time I did it and how I want to get a new support group together for people who identify as comics and who need a hell of a lot of help to stop.