Shame At The Scene of The Crime

I should know better than to set foot into a comedy club.

After all, I was a working comic for ten years, so I know that what appears to the common club goer as inspired mirth built for the love of the crowd is actually barely controlled, seething ambition to succeed in a filthy industry that is based thousands of miles and millions of dollars away from whatever tiny stage you happen to be sitting in front of. It is worse than Quixotic; imagine six to ten Quixotes a night grimly tilting at a windmill, without recognizing that nine times out of ten, it’s not even a windmill, it’s a fucking outhouse. The windmill’s five thousand miles away… and it actually is a hungry giant who will eat most of them on sight, sparing one only when it grows horny.

Watching comedians is like checking out the prize pigs at the county fair: it’s only fun if you don’t know that the next stop is the killing floor… and if you can somehow forget that, despite the fact that there are literally thousands of farms, there is only one Charlotte to save one pig, and even she will eaten by her contemporaries if Dane Cook tanks another opening weekend.

If I sound bitter, like I was chewed up by the beast and spit out, it’s because I am. Believe me: I’d be waxing rhetorical about the simple joys of working clubs if you were reading this as part of an interview in Playboy Magazine – or even in Juggs Magazine.

And yet somehow I find myself compelled to return to a comedy club as a spectator around once a year. I usually don’t understand the impulse myself; it’s uncomfortably akin to going back to visit your old concentration camp: “C’mon, Honey! We can probably get in for free, what with my old work tattoo! And it’ll be more fun than when I actually worked there because we can pack a lunch, relax, and watch the current emaciated inmates pitchfork the babies for a change!”

This relapse was for a damn good reason: my friend and fellow giant-slayer was opening up a club in the heart of downtown Boston. Which normally wouldn’t be any kind of big deal because comics open up “clubs” all the time: usually shitty basement rooms in suburban bars with an advertising plan consisting of, “Hey Mom, wanna come to my comedy club? Okay, next week maybe?” and a slate of comedians comprised of other comics with shitty basement rooms in suburban bars that the “owner” wants to work in. It is the performing arts as pyramid scheme, only everybody winds up ruined, and the unfortunate spectators learn to hate even the concept of pyramids so much they’d rather nuke Egypt than risk witnessing another one.

But I wanted to support my buddy, so I arranged to go, but I needed a buffer. So I invited one of my non-comedian friends and his as-yet-unmet fiancee to meet us… three hours before the show at a different bar, because I cannot enter a comedy club sober anymore. Because sober, I might remember my act, and that’s when the mind monkey starts: “C’mon Rob, ask for a guest spot… your pitchfork’s rusty, but I bet it can still move babies… there’s still a little room for you on the killing floor, and spiders just love you…”

In retrospect, this was the worst possible scenario to meet a good friend’s fiancee; to shake hands in greeting I had to put down my fifth glass of Guinness, and when you find yourself interrupting your own stories to say, “Look, I realize how all this sounds but I’m not really a bad person,” you are probably likely to find yourself disinvited from the open-bar reception, which would be heartbreaking.

Three hours later, my girl, my buddy and his disquietingly silent fiancee walked (I weaved) to the club – a bar in the heart of the party district of Fanueil Hall – and I was shocked to see actual signage advertising the downstairs comedy club. I walked downstairs to the club… and found clear sight lines to the stage. A convenient bar. A wait staff. And a customized stage that was clearly made to be a comedy club stage. And I heard the comics quietly, yet excitedly muttering about the growing crowd since the owners had promised them an actual percentage of the door.

This is clearly no circle jerk comedy room for rank amateurs to hone their “If I had a four-hour erection, I would have sex! Lots of sex! Ha HA!” material. Make no mistake: it also isn’t one of the famed windmills; after all, the closest thing to the entertainment industry in the place was me, who knows a disc jockey on a station in Worcester… but it was a room built by people who care about comedy and who want to make sure that the comics go home with a little money in their pockets for their hard work. Which sadly says more about the state of stand-up comedy than it does about the room itself. In an industry of factory farms, Mottley’s Comedy Club is a free-range farm with cruelty-free killing… but it’s an exciting step in the right direction, and you can almost believe you can see a spider spinning busily in the corner.

Too fucking exciting. As I’m looking at the closest thing I’ve seen to a dream club in years, the co-owner of the club came up to me and said, “Rob Reuter! I haven’t seen you in years! You still doing any comedy?” as if he wanted to book me, which was like offering a cigarette to a man trapped in a cancer ward. So I replied in the only way I could: “Nice club you clearly have taken a lot of care here it’s very very exciting excuse me I need need need to go the the bar.”

So I double-fisted through the show to keep the monkey in my head quiet (“What a great crowd! I’m sure they’d love to hear your jokes about Strom Thurmond and the Brady Bill!”), to the clear discomfort of my buddy’s fiancee, and we adjoured to the upstairs bar to hang with the comics. And, since the place was in Fanueil Hall, it was filled with slutted-up college girls with fake IDs and wobbly stiletto heels. And, having spent the evening in the company of comedians, I took the opportunity of one of these skanks asking to bum a cigarette as an opportunity to fuck with her to show everyone that, even though I was retired, I was still funny live…

…and I failed. I was so drunk that I couldn’t respond to simple questions like, “Why do you think dressing up means that I’m out to get laid by some stranger?” The correct answer would have been: “You are wearing clothes that expose your midriff, thong, and ass crack, and traditionally the definition of ‘dressing up’ does not include clothing that makes anal porn queens look dowdy. The only way you could be more clearly advertising would be in a t-shirt that read ‘Pork Me You Lunatic.'” But I could only muster the relative elequence of, “Uhhh… what? What did I ask you? And how did I get out here? Am I being kidnapped?”

I went back inside, unmanned, and told my girl that it was time to get a cab.

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So thanks for at least feigning interest over bringing me into the fold, Mottley’s, but clearly I can’t help you. I’ve been around the block enough to remember the high of working clubs, but what you’re offering is a close to China White as is available north of Manhattan, and years of rotten street skag have collapsed my veins too much to handle that kind of heat.

Besides, I will obviously be busy making blanket apologies to get myself reinvited to a certain wedding.

[tags]stand-up comedy, dark humor, satire[/tags]