Anatomy of a Hell Gig

Twenty-seven minutes on a sticky stage in rural Pennsylvania.

The following is a page from my private journal. It’s a little different from the things I usually share— it’s more raw and unfiltered. I’m more honest. I write these entries down for myself before I misremember the shape of the emotions. I vacuum up all the details. Probably too many details. I hope you like it. (Part of me hopes you don’t.)

Friday, September 27, 2025
Williamsport, Pennsylvania

The sweat was dripping down my back like a leaking tap. As I opened my mouth to deliver my next joke, I got a ringing in my left ear. I don’t know if it was tinnitus or God’s way of giving me the light.

The ‘audience’ was watching a football game with comedy as background noise; the world’s most depressing elevator music. Dry-tongued, I stammered through the first twelve words before she cut me off, “I like your shoes!” The ensuing silence went for what felt like a holiday weekend. “My shoes,” I repeated. “They’re boots!” Someone yelled from the next table over. I opened my mouth to respond— Just then, a touchdown was scored and the ruddy-faced smattering of drunks leapt from their plastic chairs in elation, hollering and clinking mugs over their love handles and chicken wings. An old woman in a moon boot wobbled in off the street and leaned against a high top. I turned towards her and we locked eyes. She took one look at the desperate scene before clicking her tongue and limping back into the night.

I’d woken up early that morning, hungover and took a Greyhound to Williamsport, Pennsylvania. The bus was mercifully empty, but the blackwater tank was full. Plumes of passenger poo wafted through the cabin like smoke in a cigar lounge. It reminded me of a bus I took to Atlantic City nine years ago, when an oblivious lump of a man unwrapped a fresh hoagie and filled the packed cabin with onion stank.

Taking a bus to the middle of nowhere sounds like the kind of trip you’d make if you were fleeing a crime scene, but in my case, it was to knuckle down and finish my book. I’m dangerously close to deadline. My editor is being very patient, but I could hear his teeth grinding from the I-80 West.

Emily Flake—New Yorker cartoonist, saint, and benevolent landlord of the St. Nell’s Writers Residency—told me and a couple of other comedians that we could have a small room for a week. A little monastery for comedy writers. Because if there’s one thing comedy writers need, it’s confinement. The other two comics hit a snag with their rental car back in the city and couldn’t make it until later in the week, so for now, it’s just me and my cavernous skull sharing a room.

John, Tug and Emily. The dream team behind St Nell’s. (Photo by Mindy Tucker)

The bus stopped in front of an old family-run cigar store with a neon sign in the window for Coors Light. They did not sell Coors Light. As he pulled my luggage from the undercarriage, I noticed the driver had a tattoo of a bass clef on his right forearm.

“You a musician?” I asked.

“He turned out his other forearm and showed me his other tattoo, a treble clef. “Bass player.” He said, with a grin. We talked about Jaco Pastorius and Weather Report for a minute as he yanked the door shut, I tipped him five bucks and rolled my broken suitcase along the crooked sidewalks towards the house. The vacuum-of-space silence was a welcome respite from the sonic miasma of Hell’s Kitchen.

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I unlocked the front door and lumbered up the creaky wooden staircase, where I met a bathmat warding me against bad decisions. The whole house is a shrine to comedy; little jokes and drawings either scribbled or framed on the wall. I feel very much at home here.

The house, nestled among the quiet streets of the 250-year-old town, has birthed some of the greatest books you’ve seen on the humour shelves of your local B&N. The residency is usually for women, non-binary folks, and other people of marginalised genders working in any humour-related field, but since nobody else was booked to stay, Emily generously offered it to me. I half-expected to find a shrine to Nora Ephron in the pantry, but instead there’s an empty LaCroix box and a bottle of Kentucky bourbon. I love comedians.

There’s something noble about it: a bunch of cartoonists, stand-ups, and comedy misfits shoved into a house, all trying to make something while praying nobody’s loud chewing makes it into their acknowledgements

St Nells in full flight, with a packed house of comics cracking wise and busting balls. In all sincerity, it’s the best place I’ve had the privilege of being part of. (Photo by Mindy Tucker)

Williamsport itself is best known for the Little League World Series, which makes sense. The whole town has a vaguely Little League vibe: hopeful, awkward, and more concerned with uniforms than talent. I’ve been to Williamsport several times in the past few years to perform shows. The audiences —with a large quotient of medical workers from the local hospital— are usually generous and friendly, if they decide to show up. The after-show drinks are usually more entertaining than whatever happened on stage.

Nearly every show I’ve done here —including Nell’s Fest, an annual comedy festival the whole town gets behind— has been great. The people are happy to be entertained by outta-towners, and when there’s a weekend-long line-up full of comics from the big smoke, they show up in droves. Usually.

Performing at Nell’s Fest 2023: Trying to keep it together while telling a funny story about my dad, who had died two months earlier. (Photo by Mindy Tucker)

My old young friend lives here. He’s an aspiring comedian, which is a little like trying to be an Olympic figure skater in Death Valley: you can do it, but you’ll need to be very inventive. You’d have a better chance of becoming a marine biologist in the Sahara. Even so, he’s got a great act.

At the last minute, a venue that usually books leather-clad cover bands decided they wanted comedy on a Saturday night. This is how you know they were desperate. So my young friend scrambled and called in panicked favours, promising a paycheck I couldn’t refuse, and I ended up on the bill. One New York comic couldn’t get a rental car, which whittled us down to three comics and a host, performing 90 minutes of comedy nobody had asked for.

When I arrived, the venue was empty.

Not just “light crowd”, empty—deserted. Baron. The reason? What else? The Game. I don’t know if it was college or professional. In Pennsylvania, they could televise a middle-school scrimmage and people would cancel weddings to watch it. Comedy is no match for sports in towns like these. I once performed in to five people in Muncie, Indiana, during the NBA finals. Three of them didn’t speak English. Later that night, I broke my phone while doing a trick shot on the pool table. I couldn’t call anyone for a week.

Loud music blared through the speakers, hooked up to the bartender’s phone via Bluetooth. The owner, a morbidly obese, bespectacled beard with a gap-toothed grin, kept wobbling outside to crack the same joke about the “packed house.” He repeated it for every comic as they showed up, making it less of a joke and more of a verbal tic.

Nobody laughed. This would become a theme.

I’d seen a million versions of him before. He was the spitting image of a bar show booker I’d met in Indianapolis, who, after a 12-hour drive from New York to the gig, told me and the other comic the show was cancelled and the bar was closing for good. He didn’t think to text. “I don’t like phones.”

“Haven’t owned one in years.”

“The game’s on tonight. Most people are probably out watching that,” the owner said as he puffed on his vape pen. I walked through the bar doors into the vestibule. Neon lights lined the flaky ceiling, the floor sticky with old beer. It smelled of the same noxious cleaning fluid every dive in America uses to napalm the toilet bowl. You know the one.

I grew up in my family’s pub back in Australia, so I feel oddly at ease in spaces like this. My shoulders drop, along with my heart rate (and bank balance). I turned to see that, sure enough, the game was playing on a gigantic wall-mounted screen three feet from the edge of the stage. Whomever dared come in for the ‘show’ could watch the Steelers crush Ohio State or look at me sweating into a microphone. Their choice seemed clear. I took a deep breath and looked at what liquor they stocked on the high shelf.

Across the beer fridge was a glitter sign that read “OLD AS SHIT”. Appropriate, since I’d just turned 41 this past week. The celebrations continue.

Comics call this a “Hell Gig.”

Not because of the pay, which is often the reason for saying yes, but because of the conditions. Comedy needs some pretty basic things: A mic, a spotlight in a dark room, and some chairs— ideally packed closely together. This room had none of those things.

The show’s start time came and went as six punters wandered in and scattered in the back, talking loudly. They faced away from the stage, waiting for their buffalo wings and ordering IPAs. I was starving. I approached the bar, which had four more large screens showing various men in helmets charging at each other, and ordered a burger and a beer. Not in that order.

The bartender, Lashawnda, turned as she was tapping the order onto a screen with long acrylic nails.
“You a comic?” She asked. “What’s that?” I said. “You’re on the show tonight?” “Oh, …the show. Sure.” “Comics get half-off food and free beer if you choose the local draft.” I nodded, and she pulled a pint of something. It tasted like free beer. Someone lit a cigar out front and started puffing steadily; the smoke wafted through the bar like poo gas in a Greyhound.

One of the other comics sidled up to my table while I was huffing French fries. He told me that to get stage time around here, he would sign up for karaoke and pick a song that went for five minutes. Then, instead of singing, just do his set over the music. Imagine trying to tell jokes while “Sweet Caroline” is blaring. Bum, bum, bum indeed.

It had been thirty-five minutes, and the owner was getting anxious. Two round tables far from the stage had been partially filled with beer drinkers watching the game on the big screen. These were not medical workers. A wrinkled old man next to me nodded at the owner. “It’s time to start the show,” he gurgled through the hole in his neck.

The stage, usually set up for a full band, was completely barren but for a broken mic stand from 2001, a small wicker basket, two small, wonky plastic stools and a giant deflated Rastafarian banana. The front tables were empty.

My young comedian friend nervously crept onto the stage to welcome the small smattering of unwilling people now squinting and grimacing towards the stage. The game was now into the second quarter. A real nail-biter. The sweat on his brow was disguised by the wash of blue LED light flooding his face. There was no spotlight, and all of the house lights were up. If there’s one thing comedy loves, it’s a fully-lit room blasting “Blue” by Eiffel 65.

As he nervously tried some crowd work, the punters decided to crick their necks towards the irritating noise coming from the stage. He finished his introductory set with all the enthusiasm he could manage before bringing the first comic on stage. He opened with: “This seems like a child porn kinda town, right? I’ve seen all the statues.” He was referring to the Little League Museum. It went down like a lead balloon on Jupiter.

Music continued. The host wandered over to the bar to politely ask the bartender to stop doing the world’s worst Hans Zimmer impression. She pulled her phone off the counter and paused the song, just as I overheard a line that I’m still not sure was a setup or a cry for help: “I have a poem called My Sex Robot Is Gay.” After the silence that followed, he admitted he’d been high every day since George Bush was president—“and not the second one.”

The bartender’s Bluetooth was still connected to the speakers, so the next comic had a jazz-like underscore of loud text notifications: tap-tap-wooOP, tap-tap….tap-tap-tap…. wooOP!

In the front row sat a woman in her late twenties, wearing a mini skirt and a bright pink blazer. It almost matched her magenta loafers, which she’d kicked off and slipped under the table. Between long sips of her espresso martini, she heckled every comic relentlessly. She’d said never been to a comedy show before, and it showed. She treated the entire night like a live-action podcast where she was the guest, interjecting mid-joke and throwing off the timing of almost every punchline. Nobody stopped her. Her giggling boyfriend sat next to her, paunchy and dishevelled. She made the young man on stage wish he’d stayed home and caved his own skull in with a hammer. The comic, a rake of a man with long white hair and a dark moustache, persisted with a painted-on grin for fourteen minutes before throwing up his hands and stepping off the stage, half the man he was when he stepped on.

Before this year, I’d taken a bit of a break from comedy. I’d felt guilty and sad booking anything. My agent died of COVID two weeks before he was eligible to get the vaccine. He was 57. I was in a Starbucks writing new material when I got the call. I drenched my mask with so much snot that I had to remove it, and was asked by another patron to leave.

After the clown car of grief and near-death-death I experienced amid the pandemic, I need to take some time to gather myself. I took a step back from performing, which I think was a mistake. Stand-up and writing on

Substack

have been the most cathartic outlets I’ve had to work through the spaghetti bowl of emotions I’ve been poking at with a fork these past few years. It sounds cliché, but for a comic, working it out on stage or on a page can be better than therapy.

The host, my persistent young friend, took to the stage one more time and thanked the previous comic. “Keep it going” usually implies there was applause to begin with. There was not. He brought me up to do my set. I slugged the rest of my beer and ambled into the solemn arena, my boots peeling off the sticky ground. I had my notebook in hand, open to the page with a list of new material I’d been working on back in the city.

A sweaty hand shook mine as I took the mic out of the stand, leaning on the cradle with my elbow. I wanted to appear at ease, despite the knot in my stomach and the steady stream of sweat already running down my back. I wasn’t going to let these fuckers get to me.

“I like your shoes!” came the uninvited compliment. I’d barely sputtered a dozen words. I recalculated my route and diverted from my material, diving trepidatiously into crowd work. I acknowledged the deflated banana in the room. “Stick around. For my closer, I’m going to cram that entire banana inside your host’s asshole.” The bartender brought a clinking tray of glasses filled to the brim with clear booze to the table of football fans near the TV screen. They’d ordered one too many drinks, so they sent one up to the stage. I took a sip— tequila. Terrific.

I set it down on the small plastic stool and started a fresh bit, mentioning that aside from comedy, I do other things to pay the bills. Someone yelled out ‘anal?’ At that point, the young blonde took the opportunity to share that she was a former porn actress. Her boyfriend later confirmed her résumé, which is one of those conversations you mightn’t expect to have in a small town bar: “Yes, sir, she was a professional. Mostly DP stuff.” (Don’t Google it.)

I responded, “Well, at least we could connect on a professional level; We both know what it’s like to take it in the ass for a paycheck.” This was way too much rectal talk, and it’s too much of a departure from my usual stuff. I had to get back to my bits and stop talking about my bits. Nevertheless, she persisted…

“I was the emo girl who walked to the Dollar General to hang out with the guys who were too old for me.” People laughed awkwardly, piping in with their own words of ‘wisdom’.

I paused. This could be an opportunity to take a completely different route in this set, or it could be a comedic cul-de-sac. I leaned down and took a long sip of tequila through the broken straw.

“Tell me more,” I said. (I figured she was going to keep talking anyway, so I may as well direct the conversation.) She continued to reveal details about herself that I parlayed into bits that resulted in passable laughs from the quorum of drunkards. For the next twenty-four minutes, I threaded my act in and out of the steady stream of verbal diarrhoea being flung at the stage by the cadre of gormless oafs and witless tits.

They were tough. They were making me work. —Go to material, now go to crowd work, now brush your teeth wearing boxing gloves, back to material, switch again, get ready to dodge a beer can. I refused to let them get the better of me.

I had a flash of my first gig back in Perth. I was on stage at the Hyde Park Hotel— “Werzel’s Comedy Lounge,” and did five minutes to near silence. I wore ill-fitting jeans that bunched up around my pelvis, so it looked like I was wearing an adult diaper. When I got off stage, the headliner told me nobody was listening because they were too busy looking at my crotch. I don’t know what made me try comedy again after that. Likely some kind of derangement in the prefrontal cortex. Either way, I stuck at it and made it work.

I closed out with a story about a trip to Portland, Oregon, before putting the mic back in the rickety stand. I walked off stage just as the football game finished. The show was over. Finally.

I closed my tab and slunk outside to hide in a nearby alcove. There, I found my young pal, who apologised profusely for the show. He said he hadn’t had time to promote. I told him not to worry. I’ve produced shows where the only audience member was the bartender, and even he left halfway through. He said he was thinking of quitting comedy after this. I told him not to. Probably terrible advice, but I think he’s got good jokes. He just needs to try them on an audience who aren’t watching television.

I was paid in cash, which is always nice. I shook his hand and wandered down the street, stopping at the light to find a noisy Subaru covered entirely in pink Christmas lights.

This is comedy. It’s glamorous, if your idea of glamour involves Rastafarian bananas, free tequila, and a woman who feels compelled to tell strangers about her Dollar General phase. It’s frustrating, maddening, occasionally humiliating. But at the end of the night, I got to stand on a stage, do my act, and leave with a pocket full of cash and a story that sounds like a fever dream. And for better or worse, that’s why I keep doing it.

I started out nearly twenty years ago in my hometown. Unlike my friend here in town, I was lucky as a young comic to get a lot of stage time in bars and small comedy rooms to figure out how this works. Shapiro Tuesdays—a night where punters pay $5 to watch comedians do whatever the fuck they want for 5 minutes every week— contorted me into an absurd joke-obsessed clump of skin that still insists on saying sure to the world’s most oppressive gigs. Last week, I did a great show to a full house before performing the next day to three people in a Brooklyn crack den that smelled of nail polish. (ill-advised.)

Walking back to the residency, I passed an old house with a couple of friends on the patio smoking cigarettes and laughing loudly. They stopped to look up at me as I passed, then continued cracking jokes— howling into the night. It was nice to hear a laugh.