Stand-Up: How I Started... And the George Carlin Connection

When people find out that I do stand-up comedy, the first thing they usually ask me is, "What's wrong with your face? Has it always been like that?"

And the second thing they ask me is, "How did you get started?"

Today I'm gonna answer the second thing, and then whenever someone asks me that question in the future, I'll just hand them a slip of paper with this URL on it so that I don't have to talk to them.

As with most comedians, the seed was planted early. When I was a little kid, I used to kill a lot of time listening to the modest collection of vinyl albums that my family had stored in a wooden record thingy in our tiny dining room. Why were the albums and the record player located in the dining room? Probably for the same reason my mom used to give perms in the kitchen.

It was in that tiny dining room where I first realized my mom was a little nuts because she had some Slim Whitman and Boxcar Willie records and she wasn't ashamed of them. These weirdo records were mixed in with other records that belonged to my brothers. It wasn't their music albums that I was really drawn to; it was the comedy albums. There weren't a lot a lot of them, but enough to get me hooked. Bill Cosby, Cheech & Chong, George Carlin. Those are the albums that I listened to over and over until I could recite them from memory.

The Bill Cosby albums were amazing... Cosby making the sound of a Cessna engine in a car for a driving test... Noah building his ark in a guy's driveway... The coin flip at a football game, turning into a coin flip between General Custer and the Indians... Everything was hilarious no matter how many times I heard it. And I didn't have to worry about my parents knowing I was listening to it.

Cheech & Chong were so funny and unique, exposing me to an entire world of weed and cholos that I never would have known about unless Carlos Mencia had been around at that time to steal their material... Forgetting about the guys in their trunk at the drive-in... Earache my eye... Dave's not here... No way in hell would my dad want me listening to it. But I did. And early in my comedy career I actually had the opportunity to open for Tommy Chong, which was surreal. To perform with and introduce the guy who was the voice of Blind Melon Chitlin that I used to listen to in our dining room was both exciting and weird, kind of like when you're just sure that you're all out of peanut butter but then you look in the pantry and there's a new bottle. Exciting and weird, just like that. 

But for me, George Carlin was the guy. He's the one I identified with most... Catholic kids listening to each other's confessions and assigning penance... Class clown... And of course, seven words you can never say on television... That's one that I definitely would never have been allowed to listen to without being executed by my dad with a belt. 

Maybe my dad never knew about the Cheech & Chong and George Carlin albums, or what was on them. Because I can't imagine him allowing me to even be in the same house with them. But there they were, and I listened to all of them, time and time again.

If my dad was in the house at the same time, here's what I would do... I would put on a George Carlin record and turn the volume way down, so that I had to put my ear up next to the speaker. And I would sit there with the Bill Cosby album on my lap, in case he came in and asked me what I was listening to. A plan so brilliantly retarded that it always worked.

So the seed was there very early, but I could never imagine that one could actually "choose" stand-up comedy as a career path. And besides, I was too much of a coward to even entertain the idea. I was destined to make safe choices for awhile.

I would say that my first real experience with writing and performing original comedy material came in college, even though you couldn't really call it stand-up comedy. A small radio station in my hometown had a segment each afternoon where one DJ would watch "Days of Our Lives" and then call the on-air DJ to give his report and make fun of the show. One day the first DJ left the station, but they wanted to keep that segment going, so they openly asked the audience for a volunteer to be a replacement. And I was just stupid enough to respond. So for a few months, I would skip class, watch "Days of Our Lives," write smart ass material making fun of the show and its characters, and call the DJ to give my on-air report. The segments never lasted more than 5 or 10 minutes, but what a rush. The whole idea was so stupid that it was actually a lot of fun. And I can remember moments when both the DJ and I were laughing so hard on-air at the stupidity of it all that neither one of us could talk for large chunks of time. The segment was a hit with the audience, which probably consisted of tens of people. But after awhile, the coward in me emerged, and afraid of failing the class that I had been skipping, I quit the segment and returned to class to salvage my grade.

In a profession where most successful comedians begin in their teens or early 20s and it takes years and years to find your voice, I was a dinosaur by comparison when I started. I was about 30. The idea had been messing with my mind for 20 years, and I finally got to a point where I had to at least try it or I wouldn't be able to live with myself.

But how do you start? I didn't have the first clue.

At the time I was living in St. Louis, so I got out a phone book and found a Funny Bone comedy club listed. You wouldn't believe the amount of nerve I had to gather just to call the phone number just to ask my dumb question. But finally I did.

"Funny Bone."

"Yeah, uh, so, uh, if a guy... uh... let's say that... uh... Okay. Um, so, yeah, new comedians... So what I wanted to know..."

"Open mic is on Tuesday nights. Call the Sunday before to sign up." Click.

I didn't know what the hell an open mic was. And this was in the days before Google, so I had to really do my homework to figure it out.

Even after I discovered what an open mic was, I still didn't call back for a long time. That's not my personality. I'm not one of those guys that just drinks a bunch of whiskey or smokes a bunch of pot and then goes on stage to act like an ass. And yes, believe me, there are people who do it that way. Years later I found out that my personality actually was a lot like George Carlin's in terms of preparation. I had to write and re-write and re-write and re-write and prepare and re-write, and then I was ready to begin just thinking about getting on stage with the material.

After several weeks I had my material all written and ready to go.

I picked up the phone. I signed up for the next open mic.

On the night of the show I grabbed my horrible material and left for the club with my wife Jodi and my little brother.

My stomach was in knots all day, and I ran through the material in my act over and over and over. Every time someone tried to talk to me that day, they interrupted my thought process and I wanted to kill them.

While Jodi and my brother sat in the audience with the other five or six people, I stayed in the back of the room to stand with the other open mic comedians. And like most open mics I would do over the next several years, we comedians would easily outnumber the audience. But a brand new comedian doesn't think, "This sucks!" A brand new comedian thinks, "People! People are here! This is so awesome!"

A local headliner with a mustache gathered all of us "comedians" into a huddle in the back of the room and explained that we each had 5 minutes on stage. And when we had a minute left, he would shine a flashlight for us to let us know we needed to wrap it up and get off stage. Later I was to find out that going over your time on stage (especially if you are an open mic comedian) is one of the worst things you can do. In civilian terms, it's like stalking and raping an entire preschool. It's that bad.

The show started, and I watched a few of the others take their turn on stage. But I couldn't really concentrate on their acts, because I was far too busy running my material through my head for the billionth time.

Finally it was my turn. The mustached host guy didn't know my last name, so he just introduced me as Paul, which sounded really lame. "And now, coming to the stage... Paul!"

I ran to the stage. That's right. I ran... I ran to the stage. What can I say? I was nervous. I ran to the stage.

Later, after the show, when Jodi was assuring me that I did just fine despite the long periods of silence from the "crowd," she said to me, "Yeah, you know that part where you ran to the stage at the beginning?"

"Uh huh."

"Yeah... Don't do that again."

Once I was on stage, I fumbled with the microphone and began racing through my script. I don't even remember any of the material. I think part of it had to do with politics and part of it had to do with names for hurricanes. But what I do remember is the silence coming back at me.

Except for one small part. There was one line where I received an actual laugh from the people in the audience. It didn't last long, but it was a laugh. A bona fide laugh. In retrospect it was pretty similar to my wedding night.

And that laugh is to blame. That laugh is the thing that hooked me and kept me coming back to the next open mic, and then the next one, and then to the next one...

After I had been on stage for four minutes, I saw the light from the back of the room. But I still had about three minutes of material left in my script. So what did I do? That's right, I started to talk really fast. And the closer I came to the end, the faster I talked. Eventually the guy with the mustache was jumping around in the back, trying to get me to shut up and leave the stage. But I wasn't to the end of the script. So I talked really really really fast. Until I was finished. 

Not exactly a performance worthy of Carnegie Hall, but I had that one laugh to occupy my brain for awhile. 

Fast forward several years to a few weeks ago. Earlier this month I performed several shows over a weekend in Indianapolis. The guy performing with me was Dennis Blair. You might not know him, but he's a fantastic comedian. Great musician. And for 18 years he was the opener for someone named George Carlin. 

And Dennis was kind enough to share many behind-the-scenes George Carlin stories with me. Not big things. Little things. The details. The kind of things that make you feel like you almost knew the man. And it reminded me of those long days back in our tiny dining room, with my ear up next to the speaker, and why I started doing all of this nonsense in the first place.