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Standing on the Edge, Rubber Chicken in Hand

Well, today’s the day. Today I enter the infancy of my standup comedy career.

All right, so technically, it’s not quite the ‘infancy’ yet. My first show’s not tonight, or anything official like that. So I guess I’m still in my… um, fetusry.

(Or something. Ew.)

But the point is that I’m about to get serious. Over the past few weeks, I’ve come up with material. I refined some stuff, I reworked other bits, and a lot of it I crumpled into tight little balls and buried in the yard. And then peed on the spot, and covered it up with leaves. Believe me, I am capable of dreaming up some horrible, unfunny shit.

(Yeah, I know — I’m preaching to the choir. Suck me.)

Anyway, there was some crap that made the cut. About twenty minutes’ worth, in fact. So today I have to make some tough choices. I have to edit, to winnow. To separate the chaff from… well, from the other chaff, pretty much. None of this is friggin’ Shakespeare, after all. But again, that’s not the point.

All I’m saying is, it’s gonna be tough. These little skits and bits are my babies now.

(Well, except that they don’t produce any green poop or early-morning screaming fits. There’s still a bit of projectile vomiting from time to time, of course, but that’s okay. It’s usually not mine, and that’s all that’s important.)

But how to choose? How to choose?! Do I cut the ‘assbag’ bit, or leave out the ‘wet spots’ routine? Do I do the thing that ends with ‘licking herpes’? Then I might have to leave out the part about being ‘in my bedroom with a cucumber for an hour and a half’. Oh, they’re all so priceless — how on earth can I be expected to choose?

(And yes, if you’ve been paying close attention, versions of most of this crap have appeared here on this very site. That’s right — you saw it here first, whether you wanted to or not. Hopefully, you still manage to sleep at night.)

Anyway, by the end of the day, I’ll have a five minute set all ready. There’s a ‘dry run’ on Tuesday — on stage, but with an empty house — and then next Sunday’s the big show. I guess that counts as the ‘wet run’.

(Which could be taken several different ways, very few of them good. Unless this was a porn movie shoot. Which it isn’t. Damn.)

And we’ll see what happens after that.

So hopefully it’ll go well, and I won’t leave anything good on the cutting-room floor. Assuming there’s anything good in the first place. And assuming that I actually had a ‘cutting room’, which I don’t. I’ll probably end up doing the deed in the basement, or the spare bedroom. Somewhere out of the way, where I won’t be disturbed — or embarrassed, by getting caught in the act of miming how I ‘raise the roof’ or ‘eat like a bird’.

(Jeez. How the hell did I fall into this crappile, anyway?)

But getting the set together’s not the end of the process. Oh, no. Once I have something ready, then I’ll have to practice. And record it, and time it, and play it back while I cringe in horror and make the ‘I sound like that?!?’ face. Yeah, that’ll be fun. I’ll probably have to do that a few times, too, to get the timing down. It’ll be a little repeating loop of me being a moron over and over, with slight variations each time. Like when I went around to every girl in my class in high school, trying to score a prom date. Or that time I ended up on the wrong side of a plate-glass door from the keg at a party a few weeks ago.

(As in:

‘Hey, beer!‘

‘Ow! Shit!‘

‘Hey, beer!‘

‘Damn! That hurts!‘

‘‘Hey, look. A keg!‘

‘Ouch! Ow-ow-ow! Oh, hoppy goodness, why hast thou forsaken me?!‘)

Anyway, I’ll let you know how it goes. And, of course, I’ll keep writing this drivel down, and maybe I’ll find something else I can use. (Like ‘fetusry’. Hey, shut up! You never know.) In the meantime, I’m off to talk to myself in the mirror. At least this time, I’ll have a good reason.