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This week on my podcast, I talked to Meaghan Strickland, a very funny standup and my close friend. The clip above is a bonus from the extended episode, and it includes a realization I want to expand here.
In December 2018, I snagged a weekend of 5-minute guest spots at the Comedy Bar in Chicago, a touristy spot three floors above a local deep-dish chain in one of the city’s douchiest neighborhoods. It’s like a grown-ups’ Chuck E. Cheese, except the animatronic band is local standups trying to pinpoint the EXACT difference between men and women.
I was excited to book these spots. It was a few months after my first Edinburgh Fringe. I didn’t see a future for myself as a strictly-club-playing, road-dog standup, but this felt like I was pursuing all avenues to getting money, a higher profile, and access to bigger opportunities.
Backstage one night, the hosting comic asked what I was reading. I held up The Noonday Demon: An Atlas of Depression, a 600-page brick not exactly ideal for reading in public (but great book!). When I explained in more detail the depression book with the self-explanatory title, the host responded, “You know you’re allowed to lighten up, right?” Fair.
I don’t remember the sets, and that’s just it. There’s something particularly painful as a standup about not even bombing, just being unremarkable. It threw me into an existential crisis, as most bad sets do.
I texted a friend/hero/sometimes mentor, Chris Gethard, a fellow weird white guy with alternative taste and lots of feelings who nonetheless flourishes at New York City’s comedy club-iest comedy clubs. I asked him how he did it. He talked about having some intro material that was hard-hitting, with surefire punchlines (which I’d thought I had before that night). He said it was like a boxing match, and he took some pride beating the audience into submission so they would listen to his longer, more emotional stuff.
I respect Gethard so much, and his answer makes me so sad. I don’t want to treat a show like a boxing match. The language of comedy success and failure is hyper-masculine and violent: bomb, kill, own, murder, die, crush. I reject that dynamic. I’ve felt the feelings these words describe, but domination doesn’t feed my soul like the intimacy, vulnerability, and joy at my best shows.
Back then, I wasn’t able to own the epiphany I describe to Meaghan, one of my few definitive takeaways from quarantine:
I don’t want to be a club comic.
Like I say to Meaghan, that Zoom show I did went great, so my confidence in rejecting this identity might be a result of one good set. And as confident as I am, it’s still scary to say, “I don’t want to be a club comic,” because there’s a LOUD voice in my head that says I have to do lots of clubs to be a Real Comedian.
It’s like I’m an electronic musician, and even though I know I want to make ambient music, I feel obliged to impress the party DJs.
Anyone looking in on that scene from the outside would say, “Great! Ambient music is a totally legitimate genre that exists, and it sounds like you know what you want, so you should do that.”
But that voice in me thinks, “But I want to make ambient music and still have the DJs respect me and think I’m the best at what they do too, even though I don’t really do that or even want to.”
Thanks to a year in quarantine, I haven’t seen anyone that voice could use as grist for the comparison mill. Turns out isolation is a real resolve-booster.
When the pandemic ends, I’ll see the party DJs again. And like all epiphanies, this one will lose its charge. I just have to hold onto the truth of it.
THIS IS MY PODCAST, THIS IS YOUR AFTERLIFE
My guest: Comedian Meaghan Strickland, who is this funny:
We covered: which of her jokes I’d tell at her funeral, friends who make you funnier, cultural misunderstandings around garbage disposals
Extended version on Patreon: “Diapers, Disposals with Meaghan Strickland”
THEY’RE JUST, LIKE, MY SUGGESTIONS, MAN
Read this L.A. Times profile of saxophonist/multi-instrumentalist/songwriter Sam Gendel, who I recommended a few weeks back. I had never seen the Clown Core videos! I love Sam Gendel’s music, but now I’m in awe of His Whole Thing.
Tell me if you’d like to join my Sunday Workshop. It’s a small group that grew out of my Unblock the Artist classes. We meet weekly for artists of all genres/media to discuss and hone their work, and I have a couple spots available for next month. It has become a lovely community, and facilitating it has grounded me this past year. If you’re interested, email thisisdavemaher@gmail.com.
Donate via Red Canary Song to one of the victims of last week’s Atlanta shooting or one of the organizations supporting sex workers—especially Asian sex workers—listed at this link.
I donated $10 directly to Red Canary Song. Reply with what you donate to any of these funds, and I’ll report our total next week.
Celebrate! Last week, we donated $30 to Chicago Community Jail Support to provide direct aid to folks released from Cook County Jail.
Got a response to something here? Reply or comment, and I’ll hit you back.
MAY I PLAY YOU A SOUND?
My dad loves an accomplished instrumentalist. He’ll get albums for Christmas by dudes I’ve never heard of but apparently they’re the 7th best zydeco guitar player in the world and just finished a run at the Grand Ole Opry. I knew Chick Corea as a pianist my dad liked in that “this guy’s got chops” tradition.
It slipped my mind that CC played on some of my favorite Miles Davis records, but his death in February gave me an unfortunately posthumous reminder to check out his solo albums. I’m glad I did.
This isn’t the best version of “Crystal Silence” (that’s the one on the Crystal Silence album), but it’s the one on YouTube and still great. I’ve realized recently that the Fender Rhodes piano is one of my favorite sounds in the world, and Chick plays it here like a tranquil, wobbly dream. Mellow morning music.
Definitively for now,
DM
A totally legitimate genre that exists