Starting Stand Up

In May it will be my five-year anniversary of doing Stand Up Comedy. It has been an interesting five years and over the course of the next few months I am going to recount some of my worst and best memories from these years. I am going to start with my very first time on stage doing stand up.

If I recall correctly the first time I ever set foot on stage with prepared jokes to tell was May 6, 2004. I had recently returned from my mission in the Philippines and was looking for a way to make a living and not hate myself. I had always thought about doing stand up comedy but never knew how to get started. It turns out it is the easiest thing ever to start doing. Just find a microphone and people and talk to them, so that is what I did. I started looking for an open mike night and as luck would have it there was one ten minutes from my house at the old Medina Movie Theater, which had recently re-opened as music/performance venue. I emailed the lady in charge of the open mike night and started writing my jokes and rehearsing them in front of a video camera because I thought that’s how it was done.

I showed up at the venue which had many great childhood memories attached to it. This is the theater were I such classics and Jurrasic Park, Independence Day, Ninja Turtles 3, and Six Days, Seven Nights. I walked up the long hallway and found the lady in charge and asked a bunch of stupid questions. She told me I would be first and would have five minutes. I waited around for what seemed like hours and it almost was because I got there way early to make sure I could get comfortable before all the crowds showed up. So while I was waiting I started talking with some of the other would be performers and some of them had some real big time experience. They had performed at open mikes all over the area which sounded so awesome to me. The time came for the show to start and I eagerly waited for my chance to tear it up on stage.

I took the stage and started into my material. The jokes I wrote were terrible humorless stories about growing up and being a small child that played video games. I can’t remember exactly how it goes but it was something to the effect of “I was a little kid and I played video games and I learned from Mario that bricks were full of mushrooms so I took a hammer to our house looking for mushrooms that would make me grow.” That was what I opened with, a humorless lie since for one we didn’t even own a video game console until I was at least nine years old and it wasn’t Nintendo it was Turbo Graphix 16 and second although yes I was a dumb child I was never actually dumb enough to believe that bricks contained magic mushrooms that double your size. The next joke I wrote was about my crazy family and how I think it would be great to see these dysfunctional people try and get out all their old grudges by having a punk rock mosh pit and the joke was that my father would take advantage of this situation and use it to beat my mercilessly, which had he seen me perform this joke he probably would have. Not because he thought I was belittling the family but out of sure respect for the art of stand up comedy and so he could say I died an honorable death. Oh I almost forgot that joke had an act out in it where I hit myself in the head with the microphone and fell on the ground. Yes I was three and a half minutes into my stand up comedy career and I had already done a pratfall. I pulled myself off the floor and said that is my time and said this “ If you want to see me perform again I will be working at Sea World…I’ll be one of the seals.” That was my closing line and it got a good laugh, as did the other stuff I did but let me put those laughs in context. I was performing at an open mike with an audience of maybe ten people six of which were comedians performing that night. I went first and obviously the people there saw I was nervous and were very kind with the laughter.

Overall it wasn’t the worst performance ever, it wasn’t even the worst performance of my life but it was not by any means good but it did feel good. There was a rush that I felt that got into me and it kept me going and eventually I got good.