Stand-up Comedy

Put your hands together, ladies and gentlemen, and welcome to the stage . . . Tammy Marshall!! (Applause and cheering noises.)

Photo by Matthias Wagner on Unsplash

For a number of years, I tried my hand at stand-up comedy. 

I appeared on stages in Lincoln, Columbus, Fremont, Neligh, Norfolk, and Omaha, mostly as an unpaid amateur learning the ropes. I also served on the original committee that organized and brought The Great American Comedy Festival to Norfolk, Nebraska, in honor of Johnny Carson who grew up there (just like I did!).

I loved doing stand-up, especially when I got to be the emcee or hostess for a show as well. It was both the most terrifying and the most exhilarating thing I'd ever done. I had plans to continue learning the business in the hopes of taking it on the road someday.

Then things changed. I changed. My life changed. And I haven't done a minute of stand-up since.

People who know I once did stand-up will sometimes ask me if I'm ever going to do it again. I may, but I doubt it. If I do, it will be firmly in the realm of amateur with no aspirations to rise above that. Perhaps someday I'll stumble across a local watering hole holding an open mic night, and I'll hop on stage for old time's sake, or maybe I'll get an opportunity to host some event and throw some humor into the mix. Who knows? For now, though, I'm not planning on doing any stand-up.

When those who have seen me do comedy before ask me why I haven't done it for a while, I usually just shrug and say something about how I lack the time for it or that I don't feel like driving hours just to go on stage for five minutes or other such excuses. Until recently I didn't really understand why I'd suddenly lost the drive to do comedy, and then one day it hit me like a load of bricks.

    I'm not married anymore.

That's the real reason. Because I'm not married, I'm no longer angry and looking for outlets where I can express that anger in socially accepted and psychologically beneficial ways. I no longer need to tell others, in only slightly veiled and humorously twisted ways, about the misery of marriage. Okay, the misery of MY marriage.

When I was married, you wouldn't have been able to convince me that anyone could be both happy and married. You wouldn't have been able to make me believe that love wasn't the gateway to eternal misery.

Instead, I spent numerous evenings with other bitter and angry people who used comedy also as an outlet to vent their frustrations about society, politics, sports, relationships, etc. upon often raucously drunken crowds of people who would laugh at about anything short of an actual punch in the face. While there are many happy-go-lucky people who do stand-up, most harbor some level of cynicism about something, and those are the things they choose to poke fun at.

I made fun of teaching because I was a teacher, so making jokes about it was a way to deal with my daily frustrations in that field. I made fun of parenting because I am a mother, but most of what I said concerning that topic dealt with amusing things my kids did -- no cynicism or anger involved there.

I made fun of marriage because I was married, and I hated it. Mostly, I hated the person I had married and the person I'd become as a result of our bad marriage.

I recall doing stand-up in a bar one night on my birthday and telling the crowd that it was my birthday and that my gift to myself was being there doing stand-up for them. A few people after the show approached me to ask me if it really was my birthday, and they couldn't believe that I'd rather be there with them, a bunch of strangers, than home with my own husband. In retrospect, it really was a horrible birthday gift to myself, but at the time, it was one of my best birthdays because I was away from the one who made me miserable.

Ten years ago, though, I filed for divorce, and he moved out, and in a matter of seconds (I am not exaggerating in the least here), my life of complete and total cynicism melted away. Oh, I'm still a cynic about many things, but not to the level I had been. I was wallowing and drowning in cynicism, unable to see how life could ever be worth smiling about, so I'd put myself on a stage and get people to laugh with me and at me in a feeble attempt to put some humor in my life.

You could say that for a while stand-up was like a drug for me. It gave me a temporary high in a life full of low points. Don't be mistaken -- my kids brought me joy; without them, my life would have been completely hopeless. However, it was also because of them that I stayed with a man I hated for far too long in the misguided hope that somehow things would get better someday.

They did get better, but only when I removed him from my life. And it was an instantaneous improvement to my psyche and to every single aspect of my life.

I think initially I told myself that I was refraining from stand-up because it took too much work, and I was focused on the divorce, and then when that was finally over after more than a year, I told myself that I'd been away too long. I just kept finding excuses for not going back on stage until one day the truth of the matter hit me. I didn't need stand-up anymore.

I'd rather write, anyway. Things like this, where I can interject humor amidst more serious subjects, and things like my books which can have a more lasting impression on a reader than any ten-minute comedy routine, no matter how funny, could ever have.

However, I have found myself thinking about stand-up again. Not because I want to bash love and marriage. No, I want to bash the sad state of our society and the craziness that seems to be out of control everywhere. Those currently are the topics about which my inner cynic is most disgruntled, but I think there are enough stand-up comics tackling those very issues right now.

I'll wait a bit. The itch is there, but for now it's just an itch. Maybe I'll scratch it again someday, and maybe I won't. Whatever I do, though, I won't be making fun of divorce because it's the best damn decision I ever made, and these ten years away from my shitty marriage have brought me nothing but joy.

I will share with you here, though, a couple of my old jokes.

My ex thought of himself (and still does) as a cowboy. Thus, this one:

There are lots of things I don’t understand about cowboys, but I have learned why they wear such huge belt buckles. They’re not just there to hold up their big bellies. They actually use them to pick up women. We women are attracted to large, shiny objects, and we naturally assume that a guy who would buy himself some big belly bling would also spend a lot of money on some bling for his wife’s hands. Hmmmm, (holding out my bare hands toward the audience) well, we all know what happens when we assume.

Here’s another:

Let’s consider that word — cowboy. Kind of a wimpy name for a man to use, isn’t it? We have policeman. Rrrr. Fireman. Arrr. Cowboy. Hmmm. I guess it’s appropriate since they like to break horses. That’s a rather childish thing to do. Other people spend thousands of dollars on a horse only to have my husband break it. Children get punished for breaking other people’s toys! It’s okay for him to break the horse, but God forbid that horse should break its own leg because then they’ll have to shoot it! Last year, my husband broke his wrist, and the doctor fixed it! Next time, I’m taking him to a vet, and we’ll see how that works out for him!

Those are both pretty tame jokes, and I’d say that overall I was a pretty tame comic. I have no desire to do sex jokes, and I’ve never done drugs, so I can’t even go down that road with jokes the way some comedians can. I’ve actually joked that my drug-free lifestyle has crippled me for comedy, but, hey, I’m getting old, so maybe those later-in-life prescription drugs will open a whole new door for me in the stand-up comedy world.

While I love to watch sit-coms and comedy movies, and I really enjoy a good stand-up comedy performance, sometimes I feel like the insanity of our world has sucked the comedy out of me. I hope that’s not the case, but once when I was feeling especially humorless, I wrote the following poem.

Have you seen my sense of humor?
 
I lost it somewhere.
I remember it fondly,
Even with glee, but no, that cannot be,
For, you see, I have no comedy
In my life now that
My sense of humor
Has been lost, or perhaps was tossed
Out of my life.
But if so, it was
A mistake, and I need
It back.  I’m grouchy,
I’m crabby, I’m glum
And I’m dour.
I’m gloomy, I’m cranky,
I’m grim and
I’m sour.
So, if you’ve seen my sense
Of humor, please tell it
To come home, that
I’m sorry I didn’t nurture
It more.

I hope you see the humor in it!

Next, I’d like to share the first story in a collection I started writing many years ago. The working title is Stories from the Leave ‘Em Laughin’ Lounge, and the stories are all about people who populate a fictitious comedy club in Lincoln, Nebraska. I hope to complete the stories and publish the entire collection someday.

You can read that story on your own if you are a paid subscriber. If you are not, please consider subscribing. The paywall will be raised higher on subsequent editions.