Mister Comedy

As I write this post, I’m on a bus headed to Minnesota. On Saturday night I begin my return to standup comedy, with a performance for the Rotary Club of Buffalo, Minnesota. On the surface, none of that exactly screams ‘show business’-not Rotary Club, not Buffalo, not Minnesota. But, it is a gig. I feel a bit like Michael Corleone in The Godfather–no matter how many times I try to leave standup, “it keeps pulling me back in.”I’m not even sure how I feel about getting back in the game. Excited, sure. And, in a weird way, a little resigned. So now I’m playing catch-up with all the hipster, alternative and most importantly, young comedians working today. And here I am, the Grandpa Moses of comedy.

First thing I have to do is throw out a chunk of my material, because I used to do topical jokes, and a lot of those are past their freshness date. Back in the day, I used to have bits about an out-of touch, incompetent president risking American lives in wrong-headed military action motivated by oil, while the economy stagnated and inner-city violence soared. Well, maybe I don’t have to rewrite that much material.

I also need to figure out how to market myself . Used to be if I wanted work as a comic, I’d send a VHS tape of a show to the club owner. Now I need to have a website, a clip on YouTube, I probably should have a MySpace page and I’m sure there’s some way to implant a microchip in the heads of prospective audience members so they’re forced to watch my show in an endless loop. Well, at least I’ve got the website and the clip, which you can view here.

I realize I’m sounding like an old vaudevillian here (‘why, if radio hadn’t come along I’d still be somebody”), but it’s a little scary getting back on the horse. I was lucky enough to get into standup when it was booming, in the eighties, when every town with a sewer system had ‘comedy night’ at the local bar. If you had twenty minutes of material and a car, you could make a decent living. Then comedy got devalued when the market was flooded with 18,000 mediocre twenty-something comics who realized it was easy money and you got to work in bars and occasionally get laid because for forty-five minutes in Cedar Rapids, Iowa you were a star. Yeah, I’m a little bitter. But it’s good to be back. I’ll post again after I rock the Rotarians.