#80 - I Took a Stand-Up Comedy Class!

Lying-Down Comedy; Keeping Up; Keeping the Faith

Hello, my friends,

I was too tired on Thursday evening to finish this week’s edition of HMF (even though I did start on Wednesday) and was off from work on Friday, so I took my time to finish. The weather has been a little cooler this week and both kids are fully transitioned to their new schools so the climate is calmer here (except when Michael refuses to get ready in the morning, then things get stormy). I’ve continued exercising, mixing in flexibility drills, running, and calisthenics throughout the week. After my 5K at the end of July, my main fitness goal became to do 100 burpees straight through (first mentioned in #70, 6/21/24) with intermediary goals of increasing how many I could do without resting at all. In #76 (8/2/24), I mentioned that I could do 21, then the following week (#77, 8/8/24), I was up by one to 22 with a total of 95 from multiple sessions throughout the day. Now, I’m happy to say that I can do around 26 burpees without resting and I have done several single sessions where I’ve gotten to 100. My fastest 100 so far was a few days ago when I did it in 18:41. Naturally, I don’t expect these numbers to mean anything to anyone else. To me, they mostly symbolize progress from effort. A general dictum of self-empowerment that I find motivating with fitness and beyond.

“The Cosmic Athlete” (1960) by Salvador Dali)

Lying-Down Comedy

A couple of months ago Ashley brought home a flyer with a few summer classes at a local arts center. One of them was a class on stand-up comedy. I was like a feral cat with that flyer — I approached it slowly many times before jumping away, finally, I looked. The two-week stand-up comedy class looked very appealing! I’d always wanted to try stand-up comedy. Should I take this class? I asked Ashley. Yes, she answered. So I signed up. The second of the two two-hour classes was this Tuesday and I had barrels of fun!

It was taught by talented local comedian, Seth Lawrence, and attended by like 10 people over 50 (some well over) who all knew each other from the community, and two young whippersnappers who knew no one. I was one of the whippersnappers. During the first session, Seth taught us the fundamentals of one-liners and then set us loose coming up with jokes on common topics. Then, holy hell, we had to go up on stage one-by-one and perform the jokes we had just written. This class was definitely not for people who thought public speaking was worse than death.

Most of our jokes were not good, but the group had a nice camaraderie which made the workshopping we did after each person went up enjoyable. The group stayed in high spirits throughout and Seth gave kind and useful feedback. We were sent home with the assignment to come up with three one-liners. By the end of next week’s class, you will be on the way to having a decent three-minute set, Seth promised. Maybe…I thought.

Every day that followed I spent a little bit of time writing jokes, reading them an hour later, and wondering what I had been thinking. Making up jokes is hard, and one-liners, which are a minimalist’s favorite genre of comedy, are even harder. It’s just a set-up and a punchline, no padding. Which means no place to hide! I was writing the haiku of stand-up comedy and most of mine were not haiku. (Confidential to Dan: Your haiku were more haiku than my jokes!) Needless to say, I had a ball! Every time I’d fire up my brain to come up with jokes was a moment of pleasure. Even though the results were mostly unmentionable, the creative process was a delight.

As the following Tuesday got closer, I narrowed my options to three jokes that weren’t terrible and began to pare them down, getting rid of everything nonessential and re-arranging the words for ideal effect. As I wrote last week, I’m pretty well used to public speaking so I wasn’t exactly nervous about performing, but I still practiced my bits a lot, working out how to say them naturally. On the drive there, I added a fourth joke to my mini-set.

The moment arrived and members of the class began going up. Some misunderstood the assignment and told entertaining stories with no punchlines, others had long jokes or near-jokes with occasional highlights, a few of us delivered one-liners and didn’t do too badly, and a rarer few demonstrated real talent! The lady that closed us out stood facing sideways like two feet back from the microphone and belted out like 25 old-school one-liners that were hilarious when I could understand what she was saying. I’d pay to go see her!

I was among the category that delivered actual one-liners and didn’t do too badly. People laughed when I expected them to but I made a tactical error with the joke I’d made up in the car and tagged an extra punchline on a perfectly good set-up at the end. I had made-up like four punchlines for that joke and should have stuck with one. Oh, well.

Nevertheless, my first attempt at stand-up was encouraging. Seth hosts a weekly open mic at a nearby club and gosh darn it, I am of the mind to polish up five minutes of comedy and go perform it in front of strangers.

“The Lute Player” (1623-24) by Frans Hals

Keeping Up

I’m lucky to be part of the generation that straddled the start of the digital revolution. What I mean is, I was already a functioning human (albeit a teenager) when cell phones became commonplace and in my twenties when smartphones burst onto the scene. Though my elementary school computer lab had Apple IIc and I recall playing on it (and getting my computer user’s license), we didn’t have a personal computer at home until my mid-teens. Likewise, I was a very late adapter with texting and I’m still not exactly a fan. The point is that I remember the world that was in a way that let’s me see the distinctions between past and present and one of the differences that I think about relatively frequently is the changes in how maintain relationships.

In my formative years, you called people, spoke to them on the phone, made plans to get together. Short of doing that, you made small talk with acquaintances at parties or reconnected randomly with old friends at museums or, I don’t know, publishing cocktail parties. If you stayed home and called nobody, you lost touch with people. Social media changed that dynamic, MySpace, Twitter, and Facebook (to give three examples) introduced more passive ways to have the feeling of being in touch. I vividly recall meeting people who I had only interacted with on Twitter at one of my first professional conferences — I may have still been a student, even — it was awkward at first but ultimately through our online interactions, the ice had already been broken. We knew each other in some way.

A while ago (#65), I wrote about my dissatisfaction with Facebook’s dissonant feed slowly descending into irrelevance by showing me posts from random groups, random ads, and too many mediocre memes by a small subset of friends who post multiple times a day and night. This kind of nonsense is the opposite of the purpose Facebook has served in my life for the past two decades, which has been as a low-effort way to keep up with the friends I don’t call and see on a regular basis. Some (probably 5-10) years ago, I deactivated my Facebook account for a significant period of time and attempted to replace its function with email. Essentially, I would periodically email people I liked and wanted to keep up with as if we were pen pals.

This worked with some people for a while but eventually tapered off. Sending several paragraphs of an email every few months seems turned out to not be as low-effort as one would expect. Sometimes I dropped the ball on communication and sometimes they did. In the end, we fell out of touch. I came back to Facebook because it met that contemporary expectation of constant low-effort connection, a cognitive load that did not exist on the other side of the information age. Now, I find myself at loose ends; there are people on Facebook that I like and want to stay connected to but the platform itself is becoming increasingly frustrating. Plus, I have long appreciated social media critiques of figures like Jaron Lanier, Cal Newport, and the example of people I know in real life that don’t use social media.

This brings me back to the start, I know that I can eschew social media because I have lived without it before. It is non-essential to my life. But it’s not the right time for me to completely pull the plug. Right now, I maintain accounts on Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram, and Are.na, though I really only post every few weeks on the first two (participation in Are.na is different). Before I take any further action, I’ll need to look deeply at the pros and cons of each platform. Some are easy, the only reason I keep my Instagram account is because Ashley forwards me posts sometimes and I like looking at Hillary’s art. While Facebook and LinkedIn are a little deeper. These days, I’m just trying to stay mindful of not getting sucked in. Too much to do in the world outside.

“Opposite and Laterally Spaced Circuit” (1976) by Franz Erhard Walther

Keeping the Faith

I just finished reading Simplicity: The Art of Letting Go (Crossroad Publishing, 2003) by Franciscan monk Richard Rohr. In his essay, “The Social and Political Vocation of Christians” he wrote:

"The problem with so many churches in our country is that every worship service tries to produce step one of Christian existence. And that's why we don't get many mature, grown-up Christians, but often very childish Christians who are concerned with their own feelings and nothing else." (148)

This very general point is expanded throughout the essay as Rohr explores two levels of religious maturity: The “step one” Rohr refers to above is the emotional engagement and uplift that is characteristic of the charismatic movement; people have exciting experiences that draw them into the fold but frequently remain superficial. He contrasts this with Catholics or Orthodox who, “are much better at the later stages,” following with “…but it does little good because a high percentage of the laity have never had any real experience with Christ” (147). Presumably, these later stages refer to a more memorized, intellectual, or cerebral relationship with religion.

I have very little experience with the internal religious experiences of Christians so I won’t presume to comment on Rohr’s spectrum of adherence, but I do feel like the general framework may have some application to our integration into communities built around an idea and/or a pathway in life. Many people involve themselves in a hobby, an area of study, or even a cult because something about it gets them excited; it appeals to a surface-level emotional need — the equivalent of supermarket tabloids that catch a person’s attention and ideally have a pulse-elevating pay-off in the reading. We contrast this quick, but short, emotional spike with the later, longer stages of digging in. A personable professor’s lecture can be fascinating, but will it be followed by hours (years!) spent buried in books on their subject?

In the religious context, a person might be inspired by a flawless sermon, but does that breath from above affect their actions throughout the rest of the week? In the relationship context, do the newlywed’s vows and elations of the honeymoon period transition into the consistent effort required for a loving marriage?

What I wonder about isn’t necessarily the nature and differences between immature stages and the mature stages — though in Rohr’s conception, they aren’t necessary sequential so his calling them levels or stages may be a confusing — but how we can effectively move between and balance our need for both. For Rohr, this is a question whose answer brings people into deeper communion with Jesus. My thinking about it is clearly more mundane.

UPDATE (9/8/24): After I published this newsletter friend of HMF, Elizabeth, wrote in with a deeper interpretation of Rohr's later stages that I was thankful to receive and wanted to share. She wrote: "I think the later stages are actually the opposite of memorized, intellectual, or cerebral.  Instead the later stages seem to come with a developmental and embodied waking downwards, where one becomes attuned with acting in integrity and compassion to what is.  It is a felt experience of the Divine that changes how one sees/senses the world and walks through it.  And another aspect of this I find interesting is that there are parallels with this in the teachings of other religions too."

“Mount of Five Treasures (Two Worlds)” (1933) by Nicholas Roerich

Time Machine

Here’s what I wrote in HMF a year ago (in issue #27):

• Keep Looking: A reminder to take enough time to look at nature. Eventually, life will appear.

• Fire Signs: Pointing out the confusion regarding a button in our elevator.

• What Idle Scientists: Wondering where those government scientists who do experiments on mutants in movies come from.

“San Gabriel Rode” by Guy Rose