One Laugh, Two Anniversaries
Marking 19 Years of Comedy over Vegan Quiche
This afternoon I ate vegan quiche with Gary Gulman and Myq Kaplan while the three of us pulled jokes apart the way other men pull apart carburettors: reverently, greasy to the elbows, with no real intention of putting anything back the way we found it.
Why does this word land and that one doesn’t. Whether the laugh lives in the syllable or the silence after it. The sort of conversation that would bore a normal person into the grave and kept me pinned to my chair for two hours.
It was, I realised somewhere between the pumpkin quiche and the third tangent about rhythm, the perfect way to mark the date.
Because nineteen years ago today, I did stand-up comedy for the first time.
It was 2007, at the Hyde Park Hotel in Perth, in a room called Werzel’s Comedy Lounge. I was doing 5 minutes in front of a comedy duo called Luke & Wyatt (the latter would years later become my roommate).
I did jokes about muppets. I did a Ray Romano impression. In Perth. In 2007. To a room of people who had come out on a weeknight to drink beer and were now watching a nervous local pretend to be a sitcom dad from Queens.
I got one laugh.
One. A single, audible laugh, from somewhere in the dark, and I have spent the nineteen years since trying to find that person again. Everything else about the set was a catastrophe. I bombed the way only a first-timer can bomb: thoroughly, sincerely, in a blazer. Any sensible person would have taken the hint, hung up the blazer and gone back to a quiet life.
Instead, I got the bug. That one laugh went into my bloodstream like a splinter, and I have not stopped chasing it since. Nineteen years of open mics, bar shows, clubs, theatres, festivals, green rooms, late trains, and standing in the dark waiting for strangers to decide whether I get to feel good about myself tonight.
But that’s only half of what today is.
Three years ago, also on this very date, my dad died. I keep turning that over. Nineteen years since the thing that made me who I am started; three years since the man who made me, full stop, ended. Same square on the calendar. I don’t believe the universe schedules these things: the universe can barely coordinate the F train. But if it did have a booking system, this is exactly the kind of dark, economical joke it would write. Setup in 2007. Tag in 2023. Callback every July for the rest of my life.
I’ve noticed the two anniversaries have started keeping each other company. The sad one stops the proud one getting smug. The proud one stops the sad one swallowing the whole day. It turns out grief and comedy are perfectly happy sharing a table, which anyone who has ever been to a comedian’s funeral could have told me.
So I didn’t do a gig tonight. I had lunch with two friends who love the machinery of jokes as much as I do, and we sat there taking language apart, and somewhere in the middle of it I thought: this is the job. Not the spotlight. This. The shop talk. The vegan quiche. The nineteen-year attempt to earn a second laugh from a stranger in a pub in Perth.
I hope he’s still out there, whoever he was.
I hope he knows what he started.
‘til next time!
Your pal,
PS: If this one landed, restack it on Notes. Morris has been informed it is my comedy anniversary and has responded with the same level of enthusiasm he brings to all my achievements, which is to say he sneezed on my shoe and went back to sleep.