My Life in Standup

 

by Chairman Joe McDonnell

I've had a long-running fantasy of doing standup comedy, but there's no way I'm going to set myself up for that kind of potential humiliation. I've been master of ceremonies at various events and will throw in some jokes, but it's always a dud. Maybe someone in the audience will smile, but what I need is guffaws. Even if my jokes are not all that funny.

Jerry Seinfeld is the ultimate in standup comedians. He said that when he started out doing standup, he hoped he could make it to the one good joke he had reserved at the end of his monologue. As he got better, his jokes improved and now all his jokes are good. We expect Seinfeld to be funny so we'll laugh even at his far out stuff. 

Comedy is weird. When I was a kid, my father, who was a firefighter, worked a rotating shift. If he was working on a Friday night, my mother would let me stay up watching TV to keep her company. There was a late night show hosted by Jack Parr, who today is considered the Shakespeare of late night. I remember one night Parr had a guy on the show who had the crowd roaring with laughter while talking about the minutiae of his daily life. "Why is this so funny?" I asked. "It's the way he says it," my mother said. I noticed he was sipping from a coffee cup, which I later learned may have contained strong spirits.

I have sometimes gotten groups of friends laughing about the minutiae of my own life. Alcohol has often been involved. But drink is two edged. It can leave you flat. When I went back to college in my late forties, one of our early assignments was to tell the class about ourselves. Since this was in the social work field, it was a serious assignment, with a poster and a full litany of our personal details . 

Lots of people who go into social work have had awful lives and are seeking therapy through their education and career. It was sad listening to the stories of abuse and neglect of some of my classmates. By the time I got up, the crowd was ready for a break. My troubles have been relatively minor, and I soon had the class rolling in the aisles. Someone came up to me afterwards and said, "Forget social work. You should go into standup." The biggest laugh came when I told them about the time my pig barn burned down. This was a good lesson. People want to laugh about bad things happening to other people as long as it's told the right way. 

It's funny, but I rarely laugh myself. Something has to be hugely amusing to get a laugh out of me. And  oftentimes when I want to laugh out loud, I have to stifle myself. Like the time I was reading Catcher in the Rye on the subway. The way Holden Caulfield described his pathetic life was killing me, but I couldn't bust out laughing. Bostonians don't appreciate public displays, unless it's in a sports stadium.

P.G. Wodehouse can also crack me up, but I usually read him in bed and don't want to wake Teresa, though the shaking of the bed from my suppressed laughter might well do it. Then there's laughter at inappropriate times. Like the time I was going in reverse in my sister's van. We were picking up a chair at my parent's house and I was backing across the lawn to get as close as possible to the back door. The rear door of the van was up and my sister was directing me. Neither of us noticed the swing rope hanging from a catalpa tree that had caught on the side mirror, until there was a "Kraaack!" followed by a loud "Twanggg!"As I retrieved the mirror assembly about fifty feet away, I was overcome with inappropriate laughter, which I attempted to stifle. Fortunately, my sister has a similar funny bone and when I dared to look her way, she was doubled over in stifle mode. She has five sons and has lived through the demolition  of several family vehicles. "At least no one was hurt." is her mantra.

Back to my standup career. One comedian advised concentrating on one table at a time in a club, Get that group going and the laughter will spread. I have a number of friends who laugh uproariously at just about anything. If I could put one of these gut-busters at each table, I think I'd be a hit.

What I really need is an audience with incredibly low expectations. They don't even have to be drunk. As I sit here now, I think about my fellow comics around the world, killing 'em, or themselves dying on stage. Beijing! No, the sun's just coming up in Beijing. London, Paris? Everyone's in bed now in those capitals of comedy. How about the Big Apple? Too early. Folks there are just working on their second drink. OK, let's back up a thousand miles to Greenland, where things are heating up at the Chucklehead Club in the beautiful Empress Motel in downtown Nuuk.

"Good evening ladies and germs. Please welcome Chairman Joe, making his comedy debut tonight." (scattered applause)

"Thanks, everyone. It's great to be in Greenland! (cheers) Did you know you can't get here from Wannaska? Heh, heh." (good natured boos)  "So a musk ox, an Inuit, and a narwhale walk into a bar..."

"A funny thing happened on my way to Nuuk."