Prologue: 100 Sets
Welcome to my blog. I’m Gabe, and here’s a little prologue for what follows.
My first job after college was a year-long teaching fellowship in Edinburgh. I wrote a different blog about it. If you want a quick summary, I learned two things. 1) That meaningful friendship is a prerequisite to a fulfilling life and should not be taken for granted, and 2) What it feels like to eat gummy bears every day.
The previous Spring, I applied to the job on a whim, the day after being broken up with by my first serious girlfriend. (This was still Obama’s America when we had time to care about personal relationships.) Three months into living there, my new romantic interest from the summer, who I’d foolishly (and indulgently) attempted to “stay with” from across an ocean, ended things with me and immediately started a relationship with my college best friend. (This hurt a lot, even in Obama’s Scotland.) It was a high-volume/high-intensity level of rejection for someone whose mother, to this day, reminds him that “the greatest day of my life was the day you were born.” To pile on, I had moved to a country I knew nothing about, started a new job, and, the first time in my life, didn’t have a friend group to laugh and confide with. Basically, there was an overabundance of alone time to contemplate my feelings of rejection, betrayal, pride, attempted empathy, loneliness, and my ever-unquenched desire for more gummy bears.
Desperate for a distraction, I took up some hobbies. I became pretty quick at the Rubik's cube (sub 1 minute — ladies?) and, for the first time in my life, supplemented my heavy diet of TV shows with all of that year’s Best Picture Nominees. Still, though, I was in the market for something creative and expressive that would also be cumulative and challenging — I basically needed a goal that would make the extended periods of loneliness more bearable.
So, like many people who feel like things couldn’t get anymore embarrassing than they already are, I started to write and perform standup.
My first time was on a weird, midnight, post-Fringe Festival show that would most graciously be described as “alternative.” It was bizarre even before my drunk ass wandered in and, from the back of the audience, asked for stage time while the show was going on. (Really poor form — don’t do that.) Anyhow, the host quickly hated me and the crowd was all-too-ready to turn on the young, drunk American who insisted he had jokes to tell a crowd that did not want to hear them. It’s a long story you can read in this post.
After that, I got into the stand up scene and performed all over Scotland in their biggest regular venue, The Stand, at a few college shows at Edinburgh University, and even a few sets at the Glasgow International Comedy Festival. Most importantly, though, I started carrying around spiral notepads with jokes, stories, and ideas. Throughout my time in Edinburgh, and the years since, these notebooks have provided me a creative respite from life’s stresses.
To be fair, things have gotten way better. I met my amazing, soon-to-be wife later that year, and we really couldn’t be happier planning out the rest of lives. (Not really. I’ve been single and living with my parents ever since. But the point is, the notebooks are good.)
More recently, a few weeks following my 25th birthday in February of 2017, I decided I wanted to get back into stand up in a serious way. Partially motivated by the implicit fear of getting older without ever pushing myself towards a creative goal, my day job inspired me, too. During business hours, I work with high school seniors on their writing and college essays. Since beginning this work, I’ve learned there’s something about teaching kids to write about their passions that makes me feel like I also should continue to be a student — to fail as often and as eagerly as I tell them they should be. Most of my favorite teachers were still curious learners, and it’s almost never a bad idea to learn life skills from former teachers. (Just not the one’s that were clearly sad all the time: try not to imitate those guys.)
In terms of a plan for “getting back in the game,” all the comics, on all the podcasts, are always saying “Do sets, bomb, meet people, and repeat as much as possible.” Since my first set in 2014, I’ve thought about stand up a lot: I watch it, listen to people talk about it, and see lots of shows. So, in order to not live a life of regret, I resolved to perform 100 comedy sets. Whether they be open mics or eventually real shows at a bar, club, or fundraiser, my goal is to do it 100 times before I have a real opinion on my ability to do it. If that number seems arbitrary and a total rip-off of the metric system, it is!
My sister once told me a Tig Notaro quote that was like “If you ask someone ‘how many times a week should I be performing?’ you probably shouldn’t be doing it in the first place.” I guess I hear that sentiment: there’s no clear path or blueprint to do comedy or to have “comedy success.” The only formula for getting better is performing a lot and pushing yourself — whatever that might mean for you. So, in order to sort of put my head down and not focus on the big picture as I fumble through open mics, I’ve decided to put a numerical goal on it so as to focus on that goal so as to not be too reactionary to any one set or joke. Each performance is 1% of this experience I’m looking for to start, so I can’t get too high or too low, I can just add more data points and figure out if stand up is A) Something I’m willing to make big sacrifices for B) A hobby I want to keep up, or C) Perhaps something I want to still enjoy as a fan, but not as the primary creative force in my life.
In addition to the numerical goal, I also decided it would be a fun and potentially revealing exercise to post a sort of box score for each stand up set and publish them in this here blog. These posts might include the set-list, my impressions of the mic, the people, the host, as well as material and jokes that did or did not “work.” Hope you both enjoy it and won’t passive-aggressively blog about my blog. (My feelings are in here!)
For now, I’ll include my first entry so you can get the sense of the form. As I do more sets and write about them, I’ll try to post about 3–5 of them at a time.
Before I begin, I’ll mention what Pete Holmes’ therapist (“Dr. Gary Penn, whose book is available now”) might call a “pop-up,” or moment to describe feeling pressure to qualifying what you’re about to say. My pop-up is: After writing a few of these entries, I realize how raw and embarrassing some of my own thoughts/jokes/self-analyses/joke-analyses are. I think part of that is also the point of the blog: to honestly expose the thoughts usually reserved for my spirals. Not only is stand up cumulative and hard, it requires you to slowly change your thinking about joke-writing, venues, performing, crowds, etc. So I guess what this pop-up disclaimer is about how, even a second after writing some of these thoughts, I also know they’re wrong or misguided!
Anyhow, here we go.
1.QED, Astoria, Queens — 4 minute set — Open Mic — 2/16/17
SET
Having a birthday on Valentine’s Day
Life Expectancy Statistics/The Dorito Taco
Dating a Christian
Watching Football w/friend’s girlfriend
Big Laugh: The premise for this joke is watching football with my friends and seeing a player get knocked-out after helmet-to-helmet contact “So my friend’s girlfriend watches this and says “Oh my god?? Is he important?””
Surprise Laugh: “We watch football like two guys who are glad they chose theater”
Crickets: “If you have a Valentine’s Day Birthday and your ex-girlfriends don’t send you a text message to wish you a happy birthday, that means they’re never thinking about you.” (Feeling the silence after admitting this was, in retrospect, not my favorite emotion)
Overall: I definitely liked this mic. QED folks seemed supportive and friendly. (I’ve done the Creek and the Cave before, a venue I’m looking to go to regularly, and this place seemed almost intentionally friendlier to newcomers.) The football bit worked best. I wanted the dorito taco bit to be better (need to punch it up — just more funny thoughts about.) Probably won’t be talking about my February birthday in, let’s say, June, but I might try the bit a few more times. I’ll try again, but will probably retire idea for other things. (I tried to record this set, but didn’t have space available on my phone — occasionally, I’ll upload audio for a specific set.)
Thanks for reading, friends.
As always,@gjmollica on the Twitter, gjmollica@gmail.com on the e-mail.
