The Best Part Of Quitting Comedy

Reflecting on a year offstage

It’s been a year since I quit performing stand-up comedy. In my mind, it feels way longer than that. The psychological distance between who I was as a comedian and who I am now is so vast that whenever I try to recall specific comedy memories, even ones from my final year in 2023, they seem like something I saw on TV, or a story a friend told me. My comedy career is starting to become an alternate timeline, disappearing from a photo like the McFly family in Back To The Future. This is a positive development.

There are a lot of things I don’t miss about comedy, and I’m glad to have removed them from my life. I’m glad I no longer have to be out at all hours of the night, riding the subway to different shows and open mics, attempting to grow and network my way into a functional career. I’m glad to be rid of the constant nagging sense of disappointment that comes with falling short of your goals. I’m glad I no longer have to shamelessly promote myself on social media, dying a little inside every time I press the “Share” button.

But over the past year, one benefit stands out above the rest. Since I stopped doing comedy, not everything needs to be a joke anymore.

Comedians can be a lot of fun to hang out with, but they can also be extremely exhausting. Many of them are incapable of acting normal, and always feel the need to get a laugh. Freddie deBoer summed it up quite nicely in a post from last year, titled “Bring Me Anything But Jokes.”

“When I lived in Chicago in my mid-20s, my best friend there was involved in the Chicago comedy scene. Sometimes he’d bring me along to parties held by people in that world. Some of the individual people I met in that context were smart and cool and legitimately funny. But as an experience, in total, those parties were usually unpleasant, and I say that as a man who loves and misses parties. I would come home afterwards and realize that I was exhausted, not because I had stayed out too late or drank too much but because I had spent the entire evening hearing people’s material. The kind of people who moved to Chicago in an effort to make a name in comedy at places like Second City or Upright Citizens Brigade were the kind of people who were always on. They didn’t know how to be off. I’d go in, I’d meet some people, the next thing you know, someone was saying, “Didja ever notice….,” and suddenly I was a one-man Tonight Show audience. Again, these weren’t bad people, and sometimes they were funny. But they had been so marinated in the culture of being ‘funny’ that I feared they didn’t know what normal, authentic, vulnerable human expression even was.”

This aligns with my experience spending time with most comedians, at least the ones that weren’t close personal friends. They weren’t bad people, and yes they were usually good for a laugh, but that mode of hanging out, where a punchline was always slightly out of frame, ready to be brought in at a moment’s notice, gets tiring very quickly. You need to constantly have your antenna up, searching for the next joke to keep the momentum going.

And let’s not even mention the comedians who were bad people, were not funny, but obsessively joked all the time anyway. The less said about them the better. Luckily, I can’t think of a single example that made it past the open mic level.

The thing is, all the complaints I registered above about comedians constantly trying to be funny - that applied to me as well. I’m sure there are other comics who, when they remember me, think “Why couldn’t that guy just give it a rest?” When you get into a social setting, especially one that’s central to your career ambitions, it’s hard not to get swept up in the current of everyone else’s behavior. So, hand up, I’m totally guilty of that. I’m throwing stones from the roof of my glass house.

Here’s the worst part though. That sense of joking too much, of compulsively looking for the laugh line and not taking anything seriously, that wasn’t just a problem in social settings. It was a personal one as well.

Comedians love to say that “Everything is material.” To them, anything that happens in life is fair game to joke about onstage. They’ll usually point to someone like Richard Pryor, who mined his very real substance abuse issues and turned them into legendary bits. The problem is, most comedians are not Richard Pryor. They don’t have the ability to deftly and thoughtfully navigate their personal demons and come out the other end with a remarkable insight that also happens to be funny. They’ll call their comedy “therapeutic,” but what they’re really doing is using comedy to avoid their issues by taking them too lightly. If comedy is supposed to be therapeutic, why are so many comedians struggling to function as normal human beings?

I look back on certain personal jokes that I told, words I said out loud in front of friends and family (including my in-laws) and I shudder with embarrassment. The jokes were fine enough, and would get a decent laugh most of the time, but I don’t necessarily think the trade off was worth it. I should have kept certain subjects to myself. Sometimes it’s better to handle things in-house rather than in a public forum, especially when you don’t have the ability to do it with grace or tact.

It’s a relief to have this burden off of me now that I’m not doing stand-up anymore. It’s a relief that I don’t have to tell these jokes, and it’s also a relief that I don’t have to go searching for them. When you’re a comedian, your material is your life force. It’s what makes the entire thing go. Because of this, you’re constantly on the lookout for new jokes. Whenever something remotely interesting happened to me, or any little insight flitted across my mind, I would stop and ask “Should I write about that?” It’s a process that always kept me one level removed from the present moment. I would think about an experience in terms of potential material, rather than take it in for what it was.

Comedian

Isabel Hagen

(One of the good and nice ones) wrote about a similar phenomena in a recent piece titled “Should I Post This?”

“When we lament the negative impacts of social media, we often cite things such as how addictive the apps are, how they cause us to despair as we compare our real lives to others’ curated ones, and how they spread misinformation. While all of these things are certainly negative aspects of the various apps to which we now give so much of our time and attention, there is another effect I’ve noticed as a result of my own social media usage that I’d like to identify: the tendency to see everything I do and experience in life as potential content.” [Emphasis hers]

While Isabel is talking about posting to social media, I’d argue that it also applies to jokes. As a comedian, it’s hard not to see everything through the filter of potential material. Your career depends on it. I’m not saying it’s entirely a bad thing either. Without this mindset there would be no stand-up comedy. All of our favorite jokes started out with a comedian saying, “Hey, wait a minute…” I’m simply saying that it can profoundly alter your happiness and outlook if you’re not careful. I didn’t even realize how much it was affecting me until it was no longer a part of my life. I was like the proverbial frog in boiling water, sitting there asking myself, “WHAT’S THE DEAL WITH ALL OF THESE BUBBLES?”

That’s what I’ve enjoyed the most over this past year. I don’t feel a constant need to be on the lookout for the next punchline. I can just sit back, take things as they come, or even let them pass without a second thought. It might not be a “funny” way to live, but it’s certainly a lot more enjoyable.