The Day The Laughter Coughed

I was working out the set list for my very first stand-up comedy show as a headliner when the phone rang at quarter after eight that morning. I knew I was fucked.

I knew I was fucked because everyone who really cares about me knows that I hate the phone. And that summer, a ringing phone meant it was one of three girls who were so intent on making me happy that they were willing to make me fucking miserable in order to do it. Somehow I found myself spending the summer juggling these girls with varying degrees of utter, miserable failure. They were:

• The One I Was Dating: a girl I knew from high school who refused to believe I had changed a bit since then, no matter how many times I pointed out to her that High School Rob was far less likely to yench warm Samuel Adams into her glove compartment and far more likely to at least remotely feel embarassed for doing it.
• The One Who Wanted to Date Me: a beautiful fellow comedian who wanted us to be together in spite of the pesky obstacle of being engaged to marry one of my closest friends.
• The One I Used to Date: A girl who broke up with me upon moving to New York City for grad school several months earlier without taking into account that there was a chance some other woman might not be too offput by my drunken misanthropy to suck my dick. She had recently contacted my mother behind my back for tips on wooing me and was disappointed that the first tip was not to contact my mother behind my back. But to be fair, she only did it because the voodoo doll didn’t work. Don’t worry; I’m only serious.

This time, it was The One I Used To Date, calling to ask me to go visit her in New York. I told her that sounded like a delightful plan, except for the part about being stabbed in the nuts upon my return to Boston by The One I Was Dating. So she got teary, like she always did, and I got short tempered, and I told her to go downtown to her fucking class and not to call me again, because I didn’t have time to deal with this shit; I was about to become a headlining comic. Headlining comics get sloppy blowjobs from drunken groupies; they don’t travel 250 miles for tepid handjobs from failed voodoo priestess wanna-bes.

She hung up, and I congratulated myself on getting rid of her. I had a headline set to put together, and I felt it would be bad karma spending a lot of time on the phone trying to convince someone that I wasn’t worth paying any attention to. Ten minutes later, it looked like I had gotten rid of her just in time; I had to start writing some new jokes.

Because the news said some drunken fuckwit had just plowed his Cessna into the World Trade Center.

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Fourteen hours later, I had spend seven of those hours trying to raise The One I Used to Date on the phone to make sure she was all right. The One Who Wanted to Date Me had recommitted to her New York-born fiancee. And not only was I still not a headlining comic, but the conventional wisdom was that my chosen profession as a whole had, in the course of two hours, become completely obsolete.

Some days move faster than others, that’s all I’m saying.
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Make no mistake: once I established that no one I knew was dead (The One I Used To Date was fine despite exiting the subway into a fucking war zone, which usually only happens on the train to Queens), I was glad that I wasn’t a headlining comedian. The only way anyone was getting laughs on the night of September 11, 2001 was if you took the stage with Osama Bin Laden’s head on a stick. And I hate prop comics.

At the time, I was personally hoping that every comedy show in Boston would be cancelled for, say, seven or eight months, but Wednesday morning I got a call from my friend Benari Poulten, asking me if I’d be willing to be part of a show Friday night to benefit the Red Cross. Which initially sounded like madness, but as I thought about it: we wanted to do something to help, but it’s not like we could just traipse down to the local Red Cross and give blood. We were comedians. We drink at work. Personally, my blood’s about 60 proof, and when the microscope light hits it, it hisses at you.

So I said I’d do it. And I sat down with my pen and paper and promptly failed to come up with any material about the whole thing.

Comedians are trained, and train themselves, that it’s not only possible to make fun of anything if you pick the right angle, but that you should. It’s your job. But how can you do that when you’re talking about an incident that just mentioning it makes people either crazy with rage or burst into tears? Hell, you couldn’t even joke about not being able to joke about it, because it would sound like you were pissed that you couldn’t make fun of 20,000 dead New Yorkers. It was the first time in the history of Boston that you could your ass kicked for saying that the Yankees sucked.
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The benefit show was at a theater as opposed to a comedy club, hence, no bar. So I showed up with a six pack of Sam Adams Boston Ale, which made me very popular with the other couple of comics whe were already there. “Thank Christ!” my friend Tim said, “That’ll get us started until the five cases we sent the open miker for get here! Because there is no fucking WAY I am doing this sober!”

There were six or seven of us actually scheduled to perform that night, and another ten hanging out just in case they could help out in any way. And at first, I was glad to have them there. I could do about forty minutes, provided there’s a reasonable amount of crowd reaction. However, considering the media had pronounced comedy as dead, I figured I’d be either doing my material in front of those sixteen comics in an otherwise empty room, or finding my act cut short by a scream of “Too soon!” just before a beer bottle ricocheted off of my forehead.

But as showtime approached, people began to filter in. The place wound up selling out. The comics were all sitting on the floor at stage right, choking down beers at a baffling clip because now we had to do the show. We had to stand up in front of these people in a show where September 11th was in the title, and make them laugh. And being a theater, there wasn’t even a microphone, which is where comedians get most of their power. And with no bar, the crowd wasn’t drunk, which is where comedians get the rest of their power. It felt like meeting your girlfriend’s father for the first time and finding yourself pantsless. Because your dick’s still in her.

So we cranked up the show. As I recall, Benari hosted, so he went up on the stage, thanked everyone for coming out for a good cause, told his first joke…

And the crowd laughed. I don’t know if it was because they wanted to or because they needed to or because Osama Bin Laden was trying to kill us by pumping nitrous oxide through the air conditioning, and I don’t give a fuck why. Because I needed them to. I think all of us at stage right did.

Because implicit in the pundits’ assertion that irony and comedy were dead was the unspoken coda of, “And you’re a fucking asshole if you try.” Like trying to make people laugh made you a dick after September 11th. Because it was a serious situation with a serious enemy… and it was, but what’re you gonna do? Live in constant fear? Of what? A blood-pissing gimp with a messiah complex and an overwhelming urge to do some starfucking?

Sorry, Tom Cruise ain’t that scary.

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While it took a while, life went on. Pretty much every comic I know, including me, started doing material related to September 11th, and the crowds started liking it. The One Who Wanted to Date Me dumped her fiancee and we’ve been together for five awesome years, full of good laughs. Which is the only way to fucking live, and I’ll fight any man what says different.

And the guy who proclaimed the death of irony wrote a humor novel.

What a dick.

[tags]9-11, September 11th 2001, World Trade Center, Osama Bin Laden, The Death of Irony, stand-up comedy, dark humor[/tags]