The summer after my freshman year was difficult for me. I returned home after a year, which made me feel claustrophobic compared to the freedom of RA surveillance. I was lonely, I craved community. All my friends had left me in Denver for their homes in Chicago, Texas, Delaware, you name it. With no one to turn to, I decided to find some group-based hobby. Unfortunately, sports were out of the question, I’m asthmatic.

I have always loved standup, and comedy, in general. Like everyone else, I was in love with Saturday Night Live in middle school. Because of this, I chose to sit in on an open mic at Rise Comedy one Wednesday night—its price, free, was encouraging. I attended open mic night every Wednesday night for the rest of the summer.

Despite watching so (so) many awful (awful) performances, I fell in love with comedy again. People willing to humiliate themselves for minutes at a time for potential crowd validation. The craft is epic. 

I sat in the back of the crowd for a few weeks to observe. After the first show, I knew this was something I wanted to try one day. I wanted to be the guy on stage. Not only did I want to be the guy on stage, I wanted to be the guy everyone laughed with. Not the guy who gets a few pity laughs, not the guy who makes more than one person in the crowd laugh, not the guy who gets laughed at, but the guy who makes the crowd laugh. I sat quietly and observed to figure out how to be that guy.

After nearly two months, I thought I had figured it out. Be a skinny, tall man. Since I was neither and couldn’t seem to figure out a way to make this my reality, I was back at square one. In my defeat, I decided to start preparing material in case I felt courageous one night. In my ideal scenario I get crowd-surfed onto the stage. Some person sitting next to me notices a funny vibe leaking from my pores, they stand up, yell for the attention of some other fellow crowd members, and force me via a sea of hands to the stage. In this scenario, I would have to oblige. It would be undemocratic of me to negate the popular vote. 

But what is the worst that could happen if I were to get on stage? I had previously seen a man ask for a woman’s number on stage, she said no, and he just stood silently on stage for the remainder of his time. There was absolutely no way I could beat that. 

And I was right, but only marginally. On the day of my first performance, August 10, 2022, a man came up to me. I recognized him—I saw him at another venue a few days before. I remembered his skit being odd, and I remember him mentioning he had an 18-year-old daughter. That memory was recalled when he started flirting with my 18-year-old self at the comedy club. Despite his inappropriate advances, we had a good back-and-forth conversation where he ultimately encouraged me to perform the material I had semi-prepared. 

Two hours later, I performed a skit retelling a time I thought I had breast cancer. Honestly, to this day, I will defend the material—it was alright. However, I will never defend that performance. Between my shaking voice, pacing legs, and the two front-row chained-together men dressed in leather dog suits asking me to speak up, the performance was a 2/10. I got some pity laughs that day, but I was not the guy I wanted to be. 

I tried one more time a few weeks later. The skit was about participating in theater in college. Same routine, legs pacing, heart racing, voice shaking, just no men in leather. At that point I decided to quit; I am not a guy of standup comedy.