Stand-up comedy is hoping for a midpandemic foothold.
Glad to see the casinos reopen this week; I’d missed them so much I’d gotten to the point in the pandemic where I was just driving around throwing money out the car window.
Same result, but the feeling just wasn’t there, ya know?
That’s a poor little joke not yet fully formed, not at all ready for the stage, but a joke I’ve been thinking about in dark periods where I struggle to see myself on any comedy stage again.
Such is the generally unspoken fate of the old and the vulnerable, both of which I was before anyone had heard of the coronavirus, but the fact is, even after a couple of decades doing stand-up, I was not a lot more comfortable on stage than when I started.
Comedy allowed me to share the bill with scores of famous names and to build some cherished relationships — but mostly, comedy gave me nightmares. Comedy will go away for me, perhaps sooner rather than later; the nightmares will likely hang around like tired comics at a post-show bar.
There’s the nightmare where I can’t find the venue; the nightmare where I can’t remember my act, not one single bit of it; the nightmare where the mic or the lights or the jokes don’t work; the nightmare where the stage is a 4-foot circle floating in someone’s swimming pool; the nightmare where I’m following George Carlin; and the nightmare where the comics’ bar tab is greater than the gross receipts.
Wait, that last one actually happened.
My last show was March 7, when a delightful audience in Zelienople responded warmly to my socalled act, worn as it is, but few will lament the notion that post-COVID-19 comedy might go on without me. Comedy will have its rich and vital future, perhaps later rather than sooner, but it will have one.
That’s what I was talking about with Steve Byrne the other day as he was prepping for a weekend of live comedy as this weekend’s headliner at the Miami Improv. Mr. Byrne, the writer-actor-documentarian who grew up in Hampton, has been a standout touring comic for more than 20 years. This week’s trip from his home in Los Angeles felt like nothing in his experience.
“Flying here, I was shocked, just absolutely shocked — there was no traffic at LAX, there was no line at TSA, there was really nobody at the boarding gate, the plane was probably halffull, and you had to wear a mask from the minute you got into the airport until I got here,” he said from Miami. “I did a little pop-up show in Los Angeles with a number of comics — 50 people in a club all spaced out — and I did five minutes, but this is my first actually full-blown weekend in 3½ months, doing my hour. I’m not gonna lie — I’m pretty nervous.”
The great stand-up and Swissvale native Billy Gardell once explained to me patiently that it’s good for comics to be nervous. If you’re not, your head’s not right. Just when you think there’s no way you can actually stink, you’ll stink worse than you could have ever imagined.
Or more colorful words to that effect.
But comedy in the time of COVID-19 has to bring an extra layer of doubt as does rust, as Mr. Byrne described.
“It’s not nerves for health reasons so much because I know the club is doing things to social distance,” he said. “The seating capacity is about half, so 200 or 225 people, and there’s no front row now. The people are 12 feet back. Makes total sense.
“I’m just more nervous about wondering what I can remember about the flow and the cadence and the tone,” he said. “Stand-up comedy, as you know, with these jokes, it’s almost like a song. There’s a melody to certain jokes, and I don’t know if I can remember the melody.”
I’ve seen him enough to be fairly certain that he will remember it, but he knows as well as anyone the larger issue in this moment is the step we’ve all got to take toward whatever the so-called new normal is. It might be too early, but it’s certainly not too late, because there’s a psychological hurdle confronting us all right now.
“The one thing I know I can count on, the one thing that will always be there, is the human desire to want to interact,” he said, “and to hear some sense of levity in these crazy, confusing and, to some people, dark times.
“As a comic, you couldn’t find a richer well of subject matter to discuss.”
He’ll knock it out of a halfempty, mask-wearing park this weekend. Provided he stays nervous, of course.