Always End on a Laugh

August 30, 2008   

There’s a psychological disorder that afflicts many immigrants. It’s called “Ulysses Syndrome” and it’s characterized a sense of rootlessness, purposelessness, floating forever at sea, never finding your home. I’m not sure if what I had was Ulysses Syndrome or just plain depression, but after my first year living in Spain, I felt cut off from everything and completely lost. I felt like I had ruined my life.

Me, shortly after arriving in Barcelona, 2004.

To combat the sense of loneliness and loss, I created a monthly show called “Festival Open Mic” at the Llantiol Theater, where I was already doing my comedy show. It was just a simple open mic in a beautiful cabaret theater, but in Spain there aren’t really open mics. So I called it a “Festival”, hoping that it would somehow indicate that this was a show and people would be curious and show up.

For those who don’t know what an “open mic night” is, the “open microphone night” is an opportunity for anyone to get onstage and perform for a few minutes, regardless of their talent or connections. Open mic nights are the “university” of countless comedians, musicians and poets. Go to any major North American city and you’ll surely find a few open mic nights. They may be comedy open mics, poetry open mics, or open mics for singer-songwriters.

Festival Open Mic was the precursor to my other show, Anti-Karaoke. Like Anti-Karaoke, Festival Open Mic was a three-hour show that depended on audience participation to function. Unlike Anti-Karaoke, however, the participants could perform in any style: singing, dancing, monologues, poetry, mime, et cetera. Although there were no restrictions on the type of performance, there was a strict six-minute time limit for each act so that everyone could have a chance onstage.

All sorts of people participated in the Festival Open Mic: drag queens, mimes, musicians, comedians — even a “Pakistani showman”, a street vendor that sang Pakistani popular songs a cappella, clapping his hands to the beat. For a year, it was enormously successful, filling the Llantiol Theater to capacity and depleting its beer stock midway through the show, forcing the manager to run to neighboring bars to buy more. But in a city like Barcelona, which lacks an entertainment industry — and the thousands of hungry artists that go with it — it became increasingly difficult to find people willing to perform in the show, and I got tired of looking for participants.

In the meantime, I’d also started another show at the Llantiol called “Anti-Karaoke”, which was rising as fast as the Festival Open Mic was sinking. So I closed down the Open Mic and continued with Anti-Karaoke.

Still, it was sad closing down the Festival Open Mic. It felt like the end of an era, for open mics have marked the important moments of my life.

The first time I ever did stand-up comedy was at an open mic in Austin (at the Velveeta Room, a former strip club turned into a comedy club – but the floor-to-ceiling poles were still there). When I left Austin for New York City, where I didn’t know a soul, my first contacts with the people who would later become my closest friends and colleagues were at an open mic (Rebar, on 8th Avenue).

The original Collective:Unconscious in Brooklyn. 

I met my first husband, an evilly funny spoken word artist named Bob, at a New York open mic (the brilliant Reverend Jen’s Anti-Slam at Collective:Unconscious on Ludlow Street). Two years later, we were married at the bar next door. Aside from our family members, all the guests at our wedding were performers from Reverend Jen’s open mic — including Reverend Jen, who showed up wearing her customary elf ears.

Saint Reverend Jen. Picture taken from her website.

One of our friends, a 19-year-old comic, thought the announcement of our “wedding” was just a gimmick for some new show we were doing. He showed up to the ceremony late and without a gift, in the same shorts and dirty t-shirt he’d worn to sleep, hoping for five minutes to try out new jokes. I felt bad for disappointing him by having a real wedding, but in all fairness, he did have an opportunity to try a few zingers at the reception.

When you form part of a community of comedians, you start to develop what could either be defined as an awful sickness or a brilliant coping mechanism, depending on your point of view: the compulsion for converting everything into entertainment.

Everything is an excuse for a joke. Everything can be made entertaining: in fact, it must be. Even the deepest tragedy becomes an excuse to get a laugh. A relative’s suicide, the Holocaust, September 11th, your own rape – all are potential sources of explosive laughter.

For example, a few days after watching the World Trade Center towers crumble to the ground on September 11th, 2001, I forced myself to go to an open mic. I had already turned into a sobbing blob of tears and mucus at my neighborhood grocery store the day before, when the kindly Black cashier finished ringing up my items, looked into my eyes, and asked me the same question every stranger in America was asking each other that week: You doin’ all right?

When I got to the open mic, nearly all the comedians except for the more sociopathic ones among us were dazed and in shock, unsure of what was funny anymore. That night, a brilliant comedian from Texas named Charlie Shannon got onstage and said, “I was watching King Kong last night. It made me mad. Of all of the times for our country not to have a giant ape on the Empire State Building, swatting airplanes out of the sky.” The room exploded in cathartic laughter.

When Bob and I decided to move from New York to L.A., the first place we went to look for new friends, naturally, was an open mic: Vance Sander’s Open Mic of Love on the U.C.L.A. campus.

When our marriage fell apart two years later, we announced our separation at the same open mic, to a room full of people who had become our dearest friends. Faithful to the spirit of entertainment, we both got onstage together to deliver the speech we had prepared.

“Children, your mother and I have some sad news to announce,” said Bob. “This is not a joke. We hate to do this in the middle of a show, but it’s the only way to let all of you know.

“Our marriage has not worked out. We are getting a divorce.”

Shocked gasps filled the room. Some people held their hands to their mouths. A few eyes filled with tears. Then it was my turn to speak.

“I know this is very difficult for you. But there’s one thing that your father and I, from the bottom of our hearts, need to make perfectly clear to each and every one of you.

“It’s all your fault.”

Dedicated to Charlie Shannon, 1959-2003. Pics are from his MySpace page.