I get to the club a little after eight o’clock, late enough to blend in with the rest of the crowd and early enough to get on the list of comedians for that Thursday’s open mike.  With my glasses off and my tie and coat over one arm, I blend in with the regular customers pretty well.  Not that I have anything to worry about, really; my "celebrity" never extended beyond the club scene and I’ve never been mobbed by adoring fans in my life.  Except for a few noteworthy stints on television and a quick minute-long part in a major motion picture, I don’t have much of an acting career to worry about.

My comedy career doesn’t appear to be on much steadier ground, actually.  Sure, I’m always working.  My agent (God bless her!) has kept me employed for over fifteen years doing any number of things, from comedy-related corporate presentations to non-comedy gigs as a hand model.  Kind of a strange thing for a guy to admit to, I know, but when I didn’t traverse the country and present stand-up at colleges and in dinky bars near the highway, I paid the bills by being a hand model.

I used to have these wonderfully-shaped slender fingers, with perfect skin and perfect nails.  It made all my girlfriends jealous as hell.  But those days have passed, as have the rather handsome paychecks that accompanied that line of work.  Maybe it has to do with the amount of alcohol I consume on a disturbingly regular basis, or maybe I get the munchies one too many times after smoking some scooter.  Okay, a lot of scooter.  Either way, the sausage-like appendages on my hands don’t look nearly as attractive as they used to.

Never mind how the rest of my body has blossomed.  I used to look down and see Mr. Winky.  Now I look down and have to find Mr. Winky.

My club routine hasn’t changed.  I still hit the open mike nights during the week.  It keeps my material fresh, just in case I get lucky and land another HBO gig... like I did back in ‘86.  God, it’s funny how the years just tick by like that.  "I was on HBO for seven minutes back in 1986."  When you hit your forties and that’s your big boast of fame, it really makes you ashamed to admit what you do for a living.  I tell people that I’m a motivational speaker.  It seems to garner more respect.

I’m a lot better off than most comedians on the circuit, though.  There’s this one guy from Cleveland-- he’s pretty funny, but nothing spectacular-- who does twice as much traveling as I do, performs three times more a year than me, but who can’t seem to get a break.  He also makes me sick, because he looks like Twiggy compared to me.  He’s the typical hungry comedian, and I’m not just talking hungry for work here.  The man hardly eats, but he can drink me under the table and that’s saying something.  He also wears glasses, but he’s more of a wire-rim guy.  I like plastics.  We have our differences.

For example, I think I’m funnier than him.  I think so, at least.

Maybe my act isn’t Richard Pryor, leave-’em-dying-in-the-aisles funny, but I think I have something to offer an audience.  And isn’t that what stand-up is all about?  Presenting a slightly askew view of the world to a group of people to elicit laughter?  When you’re up there, it’s your time.  You own the stage.  You are THE MAN.

You know, back in college, I used to alternate between improvisation, what the insiders called "improv," and stand-up comedy.  For a while, I had a pretty good thing going with that mixture, but quite frankly, improv don’t pay the bills.  Oh, sure, sometimes the more highly-trained Second City students get lucky and land on "Saturday Night Live" or something, but that’s sketch comedy, not improv.  Improv is making things up on the fly and throwing them out to an audience without having to think, "Hey, what the hell am I doing?"  I use some of that in my act to beat back the hecklers with a verbal broom and keep the crowd in their place, but I’ve let a lot of it slide.  I found it fun for a while, but it’s hard making things up so quickly and after a certain point, when things aren’t flowing, you just feel like an idiot..

At least, that’s how I saw it.  Some guys get lucky and make it work for them.  Second City has their own little touring company which performs at various venues and at the numerous Second City locations in California, Detroit, Canada... all around the country.  They’ve got something like fourteen or fifteen people in the troupe.  Anyway, I go to watch them every now and then.  It’s entertaining.

Some of them can partner up and get a great routine going.  I used to do that with a guy named Mike McShane during my improv days in college, and it’s pretty neat.  After a while, you and your partner are able to anticipate one another’s moves, words and intentions with just a little or even no warning from the other person.  It’s almost a psychic connection or a brotherly kind of relationship, it’s so intimate.

Two guys there are absolutely the best.  One of them is named Ryan, and he used to do stand-up but he couldn’t hack it any more.  He said it depressed him.  I caught his act a couple of times on the circuit.  Pretty raunchy stuff, but hilarious.  He’s got the same problem as that Cleveland comic-- he’s a hungry artist.  Son of a bitch is skinny as hell.  It causes him all kinds of physical problems, because without enough body fat you have a tendency to pull muscles, and improv is 80% physical.  He’s good-looking, but he uses effeminate gestures that make people think he’s gay.  He’s not, I checked.  If anything, he’s a bit egotistical and overly macho to make up for that.

His best friend and partner, Colin, is kind of the opposite, with a healthy pot belly much like mine own, and a bit of a double chin.  He’s not quite as handsome (he’s got a hair loss thing), he is very shy and quiet offstage, but he’s got striking dark eyes and is infinitely more charming than Ryan.  Humor-wise, they’re on the same level.  Their material tends to be a lot cleaner than Ryan’s stand-up act used to be, and that’s kind of a shame.  I mean, if they really wanted to make a name for themselves, they should put it on the line, you know?  Lay your balls on the track and see if you can pull ‘em off before a train comes by.  That’s my motto.

Ah, yes.  Testicles on the tracks.  That’s the secret to my success.  Excuse the sarcasm and time-worn irony, folks.  It comes with the territory.

I can understand Ryan’s depression over the whole stand-up thing.  It’s not the best lifestyle you could choose for yourself.  You spend your days observing people and things in a state of desperation, struggling to come up with new material, and then waste your nights on stage or watching others on stage while you smoke, drink, or do whatever someone puts in front of you or offers you from a baggie.  You’re mixing with a crowd whose highest ambition is to "be funny."  Shit, a lot of people are funny but how many of them are funny enough to be performers?  Very few.

Very few.  And even the ones who are performers don’t necessarily belong there.

I had a one-night gig here in my home city of San Francisco earlier this year.  Met this guy at the club named Brad.  Artist-type guy, college grad, did some improv like myself.  He makes a pretty good living as an actor, but he wanted to try stand-up.  So he came by and watched the usuals several times, worked up his own material, then went out there and bombed.  I mean, he bombed big time.  We gave up what laughs we could to help him out, but it was horrible to watch.  And the weird thing is that on the surface, he had what it takes.  He has a kind of rugged Midwestern look working for him, confident voice, good delivery, good timing...

But he wasn’t funny.

It’s a strange business.  I’m serious.  And it’s not necessarily a humor deficiency.  It’s just that with some people, stand-up doesn’t click.  Goes back to that whole performer thing.  Some people are performers, some people are funny, and a select group have the right mixture of both.  But even with that select group, there aren’t many like myself that can be funny performers in this field of stand-up comedy.

Look at the different forms of performing arts, for example.  Theater performers can deliver a humorous line in a play and make the scene work, but they might not have the slightest clue why the line makes people laugh.  Singers can work comedy into their acts and keep smiling and singing while they do it, but couldn’t present the same material with a straight face if they tried.

Speaking of singers, there’s a musical playing in Chicago with these two guys in it.  One black guy, one white guy.  I remember their names are, uh, Wayne Brady and Charles Esteves.  I checked ‘em out when the company came to San Diego.  The play is kind of a throwback to the old vaudeville routines, and I’ve gotta tell you, these guys are really good.  They can sing, they’re very physical, very handsome, they’ve got strong voices, they work well together, and they have a marvelous sense of humor on top of it.  Keep listening, you’ll hear about them in a couple of years.  These guys can’t help but make it big. 

But you know something?  I don’t think that either of these guys could do what I do for a living.  We’re just cut from a different comedy cloth.

It’s kind of like how men and women in this business are.  There aren’t a lot of stand-up women because-- and this is not my belief at all, you understand, let me make that clear-- audiences don’t believe that women can be as funny.  Personally, I think it’s just a different kind of humor.  I’ve seen some lousy male performers take the stage and get more applause than some really great female comedians.  It’s unfair, I think.

The biggest stumbling block is that women don’t seem to have the confidence level that it takes to be up there, all alone under the spotlight.  A couple of weeks ago, the club declared it "Ladies Night" and brought in as many female stand-ups as they could find-- Rita, Kathy, Andrea, Patty, Karen, Lisa, Caroline.  Some of the women that showed up had never done stand-up before.  Hell, some of ‘em had never even seen it live before.  This did not help matters at all.  Talk about a sorry night.  The few good ones with experience kept the audience from wandering out of the bar altogether on the other ones.  Kudos to the MC that night for keepin’ it alive.

God, I hope I didn’t depress you with all this, huh?  I’m sorry if I did.  I’m just kinda feeling the strain of my profession tonight, that’s all.  Didn’t mean to take it out on you.  How about this?  I’ll make it up to you during my set.  Ah, let’s see.  According to my cheap-ass Timex watch, that’ll be in... one hour and twelve minutes.  If the guy ahead of me doesn’t hog my time, that is.  I’ve got to go and mingle backstage with the others right now, so let’s get together later, okay?  I hope you got some good material for your article, but if you didn’t or if you want me to lighten it up a little, I’ll be funnier after the show.  I always am.