Standing Up, Falling Down

"Oh, I don't drink," he began in a low, growl of a voice that often times would skip up or down in pitch and tone depending on the emphasis he was trying to put on a certain word or sentence. If his voice went up an octave or two he was joking, if it slipped down he was deadly serious; somewhere in the middle is where you'd want to find him on any given day. "I never saw the point. I was fine with it, really, until I was about 22-23 and I saw all my friends going out to drink night after night," his voice climbs up, his eyes bulge slightly, "but I thought to myself, 'self, why would anyone want to do something that makes you forget what you just did?' This is why I stick to pot." As he said "pot" his voice got almost cartoonishly high and excited, this way the crowd new it was his punchline and they could laugh now.

The joke, on it's own, is layered and not terrible, but it's outdated and a little broad for the tastes of the apparent comedy connoisseurs in the audience who came to hear jokes written by Chomsky. As if dissecting the crowd with his eyes, the comedian made several decisions almost instantaneously -or so it seemed- that would steer the next three to five minutes of his set. Should he continue on with his normal material and hope to god that the next joke he normally tells -one which involves a reference to a bear shitting in the woods next to the pope- or if he should riff on something he was thinking about earlier in the day to prove to the starched shirts in the crowd that he is more than just an automated joke machine with a microphone.

"Have you ever noticed," he chooses to riff on whatever it is he noticed. Possibly something pertaining to city living or how it's impossible to get a cab in Rochester, because there are no (voice very high, very nervous, very excited) cabs in Rochester even though that's patently untrue. The death knell, it seems for all comedians not named Jerry Seinfeld, is the opening line "have you ever noticed," it befits a sort of hack quality to the coming joke, but also allows the audience to bathe themselves in a half remembered, but oh so comforting form of entertainment that was only ever perfected by one man. "Yes," they nod almost in unison, "I have indeed noticed that," they say to themselves, but they aren't laughing and they don't want to be. This is the point where the audience is lost and the comedian is in purgatory blindly flailing away inside his brain to find the thing that will bring them back.

"Fuck, just fuck it, you know?" Ah, he goes blue, the guaranteed audience attention getter that never fails. What Lenny Bruce began other comedians, less talented comedians, have been using and reusing to, at the very least, get the audience to look at them and, seemingly, say, "I too, use swear words." The following 2 minutes of stand-up comedy is riddled with words that mean nothing in correlation to the words before it. It's a lot of "fucks" and "shits" and various combination's of the two that would make even the most weathered sailor blush (if even just a little bit). Still, there are no laughs, there is no sign that the audience will ever warm up to this fellow. He's drowning on stage and the audience is throwing him anchors.

"At least they haven't turned on me," he mutters to himself, voice deadly serious and so low that even his own thoughts have a hard time sussing out what he just said. As if sent from heaven above to teach this man a lesson, a voice from the back of the dimly lit room cries out "you're mumbling! What the fuck?!" Indeed. What follows could be an interesting case study in unwritten laws of social interaction. Mere seconds before, the crowd was willing to sit silently as the comedian tortured himself on stage practically begging for their affection, but now that one of their own has aired his dissent the rules no longer apply. "Hack!" A voice yells from somewhere the comedian can't see. "Loser!" "Douche!" "I can't believe I paid for this!"

"You paid for this?" The comedian asks sincerely. "Why the fuck would you...really? You guys spent, what, $4 to come out here and sit there and drink your sangria and beer and listen to someone you've never heard of before tell jokes and I'm the idiot?" The crowd quiets down. The comedian's previous nerves have been replaced with a vitriolic disdain and overwhelming desire to mete out his own specific type of justice to such an ungrateful crowd. He stops. He collects his thoughts and decides to take the high road, "fuck every single one of you people." A laugh comes for the first time all night. "You've got to be fucking kidding me." Another laugh, this time bigger than the last. "Next time, let's start with the heckling and go from there, okay?" Huge, inexplicable laugh. "Ah, I wish this is how it worked at home," he begins, "my wife never laughs at me when I tell her to go fuck herself." Gigantic laugh, and the comedian is perplexed but taking mental notes all the same, caressing his ego in the process and wantonly unleashing his id. "My kids," he pauses, voice raising in preparation for the punchline, "think it's hysterical."