Mic 2
Mic 2: Put Your Money Where Your Mouth Is
Host: Cam Godfrey and Dezhawn France
Show: Ajar Mic
Set Time: 3 Minutes
I hadn’t seen an open mic. I don’t know what I expected. That’s not true. I expected order, professionalism, polished acts, and funny jokes. I expected crowds that laughed or heckled. The scene was bawdy and raucous in my head, but fun.
That is not what an open mic is.
An open mic is a test ground, a work in progress on display. It’s a free-for-all with a sign-up sheet and a host. Comedians have notes on scraps of paper, in journals, or on their phones. If you are aware of the metaphor of building a plane while flying it, this was that.
I was uncomfortable. Like first-day-of-school-on-the-bus uncomfortable. I tugged at my sweater and kept my bag close. People said hi. I tried to engage, introduce myself, but I was met with a sort of maybe, since we are stuck her, greeting.
The room was full of comedians. The audience and the performers were one and the same. They high-fived each other, chest-bumped, fist-bumped. If there had been a wet towel, they would have rolled it up and slapped each other on the tushy.
Imposters has a small room in the front of the venue. A crowded area, with a small bar and 15 seats, a pew along one wall, and a couch along the storefront window. No one sits in the chairs. I did. I didn’t know. The cool kids were on the couch, the pew, and standing in the back at the bar. I was alone in the front of the bus.
Other comedians from my class had goaded me into coming. They had been before and seemed to know people, too. I can honestly say I have never felt like an outsider anywhere, anytime, in my whole life. There were cliques here. I spotted them immediately. And I was not part of any of them. I have never not been part of them.
The show starts with a host. This is a woman I just met at the bar, and she is talking to the room about her sex life. I’m too uptight to laugh. Next up, several comics who tell—dick jokes. I don’t want to offend a reader, but I will use this term a lot as we go on. I have made my own jargon for all that is stand-up for me, and a “dick joke” is a general classification for any comedic routine about one’s privates. Regardless of gender.
Tonight was a firehose of topics and language that are not part of my day-to-day vocabulary. There were also jokes about mental health, kids, and family. It was a true cornucopia of subjects.
Each comedian did three to five minutes or less. They were all trying new material and working things out in real time. Some people were really funny to me, while others weren’t funny at all—to me.
Not a lot of laughs happened in general. It was a comedy show, and not a lot of laughs happened. That was jarring to me.
I had read somewhere in my obsessive, overachieving, self-assigned homework that good comedians should get a laugh every 10–12 seconds, and if you go 30 seconds without a laugh—that’s not good. There were sighs, small chuckles, and brief “ha’s,” but not a lot of laughs. So were we all bombing or were we learning?
I got up and talked about how I was arrested in a Catholic school parking lot. How the children learned “please,” “thank you,” and plausible deniability. How I have an open relationship with law enforcement. I follow the rules until a better option presents itself.
No one was really listening. In fact, people saw me head to the mic and left the bar to smoke or just talk about something they felt was more interesting than anything someone who looked like me might say.
It was a subtle snub, I felt—dismissed a bit. Maybe three or four people were listening to the two minutes I put out there. I got a laugh and a couple of chuckles, but mostly I got ignored.
I could see the room when I was at the mic. I could feel the gaps between the little ha-ha’s. I fought the urge to yell something wildly inappropriate. It is always funny when kids and old people swear or say something inappropriate. I could have done that. But I was doing recon and stand-up at the same time.
I have been in business a long time, and I understand that failure is part of product launch. Research is important, and I had prepared some thoughts and jokes, so I needed to put that product out to this ragtag focus group and see what they had to say.
Mic 2 was frustrating, performative, and it took me a while to identify the feelings. I hadn’t felt that kind of outsider discomfort in decades. It was a lot; the rusty mix of self-consciousness, uncertainty, and wanting to leave while pretending I belonged.
I signed up to take Bills class again. There has to be something I missed.
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