the torture you're comfortable with

the night Tom Hanks coughed

When live shows stopped in March 2020, I was in Burlington, VT, doing shows that weekend. There were 85 tickets sold, but that night was something else. Tom Hanks had gotten sick and the NBA had shut down. Our two pillars of strength.

Only 17 people showed up. They were all socially distancing themselves. I was onstage just like an oscillating fan, wondering aloud what we were doing. After the show, I went back to the couch I was crashing on. The next morning, the comic I was staying with said, “It’s kinda cool that I get to work from home today.” It got less cool.

Shortly before that, I had recorded my first stand-up album, Emergency Contact. Not to be confused with Schumer’s special, Emergency Contact, which was released three years later. Obviously, it’s very different and comedy is so subjective, but mine is better.

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before-Hanks Cough Era (BHCE)

Until that point, I’d done stand-up in New York most every night for 7.5 years. From rough open mics to bad bar shows, good bar shows, clubs, and random one-nighters. I featured for great comics, headlined wherever I could, and spent birthdays on overnight Greyhound buses. Nothing was unique about that – it’s kind of just what comedians do. It’s what I’d wanted to do since I was eight.

When I was eight years old, I’d heard Bill Cosby’s “Noah’s Ark” routine. Sadly, most of the comedians I grew up admiring ended up having four-part docuseries made about their crimes. But that’s for a different essay.

I loved stand–up. I consumed it everywhere. Hour-long specials, older and newer comics. DVD compilations of comics making Tonight Show appearances. My dad would take me to the Comedy Cellar when I was too young to be allowed in there. Estee, the booker, would be outside with a clipboard and wave me in anyways. I’d watch comics I loved, like Colin Quinn, Greg Giraldo, & see drop-ins like Robin Williams, Ray Romano. Years later, when I passed at the Comedy Cellar (meaning, approved for regular spots as a comic), I auditioned following Colin. Estee, still the booker, told me I’d passed. It felt like a nice full circle thing. I told her that she used to let me come watch at the Cellar when I was a teenager. She didn’t seem to find that interesting. Totally fair. My mistake.

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chicago, failing privately

I studied education in college. I always wanted to do comedy, but I wasn’t sure I’d have the courage to pursue it. In middle school, I felt okay sharing that ambition. High school felt different. I hated my environment and most of the people I was around. I sort of fell into myself and felt like I had to blend into the wall to survive. I was just depressed, like a shell of myself. I didn’t tell anyone I wanted to do comedy, because it felt like a discouraging environment. It still feels like a risk to tell someone, “I want to do something,” because that gives them the chance to say, “You can’t.” That requires a certain sense of self to withstand that blind discouragement. At the time, I had none of the self-confidence needed to disregard shit like that. I would have just internalized it.

Whenever I see people who start out and bring all their friends and family to watch them, I really cannot imagine. When I started, I didn’t want anyone I knew in the audience. I wanted to just fail in private. That’s why I felt more comfortable starting stand-up in Chicago. I’d take the L from Evanston into Chicago to do open mics or small shows at cafes or bars. Times have changed a lot. The private failure feels like it’s not so much a thing anymore, because of the pressure to just generate content. Now, everyone pretty much posts every joke they’ve ever made, finished or half-baked or fully un-baked from their first open mic onwards. Whatever works.

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favorite torture

Once I finished college, I went straight back to New York and started doing comedy. I did mics and eventually shows every night. Every night, multiple times a night, for years. Definitely the life of an unwell person. But I knew I wasn’t good yet, and I wanted to be. It’s fun to have a purpose, to find something that makes you self-motivated. Seinfeld said in some interview: “Your blessing in life is when you find the torture you’re comfortable with. That’s marriage. It’s kids. It’s work. It’s exercise. It’s not eating the food you want to eat. Find the torture you’re comfortable with and you’ll do well.” For a long time, that was my favorite form of torture, that felt the most rewarding.

I look back on that time with some fondness and some cringing. Maybe that’s how we look back on most times. I was definitely so immersed in stand-up through my 20s that it deprioritized other stuff. I feel like I was a bad friend at times, just caught up in my own world and my own work. I used my obsession with stand-up as an excuse to keep people at a distance. I don’t know. But I also loved feeling like I was getting better at stand-up, at finding community with great comics. I lived in Astoria, Queens for years, which had and has so many comics I loved in the neighborhood. You could go to NYCBCH on 23rd Avenue and know you’d see at least one comic you loved working on something and you’d get nothing done once you saw them, but that was fun, too.

Through comedy, especially early on, you also meet some of the most deranged people you could ever dream up. Memories of both the friends and the psychos will stay with me forever and sadly the deranged folks will be remembered more vividly.

Stand-up was this form that I loved and it was very fun to become more present and comfortable onstage, to start to figure out what I wanted to talk about, how I wanted to joke about it. To make mistakes and learn from them, then make the same mistake a dozen more times and try to learn from them again.

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changing setlist

That night that live shows largely paused in 2020 was an interesting point, because it represented some shift in my focus. The next few weeks, I did Zoom shows for a minute, but I found myself not looking forward to them. People would be on mute, lightly smiling, or they were doing the dishes while you did jokes. It was odd. So I took a break. I had already been developing Flatbush for Showtime. The network ordered it to series in September ‘20. The show took up all of my professional energy and my personal sanity until it ended in September ‘22. After that, I figured out how to reengage with stand-up in a way that was healthier, that wouldn’t just transfer my insanity from the show into my insanity back to stand-up, a way that might allow me to be a person, too.

Since then, I’ve continued to do stand-up, but with less obsession than I used to. I don’t love it the same way. Part of it is that the form feels different in the last few years – also something for a different essay. Another big change came after Flatbush: I realized how much I love the world-building, writing, directing, working with department heads, all the pieces that go into making a show. The creative energy I once poured into stand-up every night has now moved into these areas. I’m developing shows, writing scripts, finished a doc, directed a friend’s movie in a different genre than I’ve done before.

Yet there’s still this voice that says if you’re not grinding at stand-up, you’re somehow slacking. I’m not sure that will go away.

It’s probably okay that I don’t have the same love for it. Right now, stand-up feels like a way to keep my performing muscle active, and that’s totally fine. There’s a part of me that thinks stand-up is a torture I’m comfortable with more out of routine than comfort pulled from joy. I feel that joy more from the painstaking (torturous) process of writing, filming, working on those longer-term projects. Still, I’ve wanted to find a new access point for stand-up, a way to make it fun again in a fresh way. It’d be cool to explore ideas I can’t in other forms, or at least push myself to try.

So, that’s what I’m doing. On August 22, I’m headlining at Grove 34 in Astoria, Queens, where I grew as a comic. On September 3, I’m headlining at Laugh Factory in Chicago, where I started out quietly.

If Tom Hanks even sniffles, the shows are off.

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