Columbus, Ohio. Thursday.
I got here on the second flight, because the first one was cancelled by a biblical flood in New York, the second weather event this week specifically engineered to sabotage my comedy ‘career’. I’m beginning to feel like a deleted scene from Geostorm.
So it’s a Hail Mary flight that hits the tarmac roughly as the shows are starting. Hotel, dump the bag, sprint to Seventh Son Brewery for the nine thirty. And the strangest thing happens when I walk in.
People know who I am…?
This never happens. Usually I’m the grey bloke in the middle of the line-up nobody can place. Is he South African? British? Why is he here? But I was in town three weeks ago for the Reuben Awards and headlined a show while I was at it, and now comics are saying oh, you’re the guy from the thing. It’s pleasant, and I don’t entirely trust it.
My girlfriend featured for me on that show. I stood at the back and watched her do fifteen minutes that felt like five, a full house that wouldn’t let her go, and then I had to follow it. I waited for the small mean voice every comic keeps in the back of the skull for exactly this situation when you have to follow a kill, and it never showed up. Just pride, in an amount that felt slightly insane. Then I went up and closed strong, which is easier to be gracious about.
She’s not here this time. I’m on my own in the same city, out front of the same brewery, and a truck is making wood-fired pizza. I order a margherita and a margarita, eat the entire pizza myself, and the truck drives off before I can tip them. The festival director, Walker Evans, introduces me to a photographer who has spent twenty years watching Austin curdle into ground zero for American bro comedy, and we have a serious conversation about the state of the art.
Three feet away stands a comedian named Eric Boso with two black eyes, a split forehead and a wad of tissue jammed up one nostril. He got hit by a car while riding his bike. He looks like hell. He’s still doing shows this weekend. A true comedy addict. He’s already posted the whole thing on Instagram with a link in his bio so you can help fund his facial reconstruction. Fun!
Walker takes me upstairs to the main room where I’m on tomorrow night and asks me to sign the wall behind the stage. I graffiti it and add stickers, because why not overdo it before I’ve set foot on the stage.
Then it’s a hop, skip and a schlep past a sea of Buckeyes flags to Hashtag Comedy Club, which contains more comedians than I have ever seen in one room. I’m fifth on the open mic list until the fourth guy doesn’t show, so suddenly I’m up with no notes, no recording running, and a stomach full of pizza and tequila. I did well, I think? Who knows. Sometimes the comedy gods are generous to out-of-towners.
Out the back everyone is smoking and working out how long until we migrate to Sweeney’s, an old house in a row of old houses that have been converted into coffee shops and wine bars and, in this case, the unofficial festival headquarters for after Seventh Son yells last call. I bump into my pal Johnny Mocny and some other comics I met in Traverse City in the spring. This is the thing about us. We’ve never really met; we’ve shared a green room and a line-up, and that’s enough. Turn up in any city on the planet and there’s an instant shorthand between comics, a race to say the most appalling thing the fastest, because the shortest distance between two people is a laugh. Or a cringe. Possibly a well-timed fart noise.
And behind all of it, spray-painted across the entire back wall, forty feet of Alfred E. Neuman with an eyepatch.
Mad Magazine. The place every one of my heroes worked. The thing I read under the covers in Perth with a torch, thirty-five years and ten thousand miles from this yard. I think maybe three people out there knew who he was. I stood with a beer going warm in my hand and felt the way you feel when a stranger on the subway is wearing your dead father’s coat.
