A Comic Bomb

Or in this case, a top-two (or bottom-two) of the very worst performances of my life as a comedian.

Every comedian has a bombing story, and I’m going to tell you two of mine.

In stand up comedy, “bombing” means to do poorly. You can bomb in silence, you can bomb with people loudly hating you, but ultimately, “bombing” means that things did not go how you intended.

Some comics think they’ve never bombed. They are delusional. They have either blamed every crowd for every show that’s gone badly, or they simply cannot hear when they are sucking. In many cases, they’re comics who have never actually done well. These comics will walk off stage after eating a dick and when you ask (politely pretending not to know) “how was it?” they say, “Great.” And they mean it! It must be very peaceful to be built like that.

There is another kind of comic who thinks they’ve basically always bombed, and cannot hear when it goes well, even when it does. They are also delusional, and a bit of a bummer, but I probably prefer this type to the other.

On the spectrum of comics I likely grade out pretty self-aware, which isn’t the best thing to be, career-wise. Sheer, confident delusion is probably the best for the day-to-day of this business. But it does mean that I know when I’ve killed, I know when I’ve done just fine, and I know when it goes…well, like this.

Bomb One: October 24, 2008

Apparently, this was also the day of the historic 2008 stock market crash, so I wasn’t the only one who biffed it that day.

This was my first full “feature” weekend on the road, at a club called the Comedy Caravan in Louisville, Kentucky. In a standard comedy show, the “feature” is the middle of three comics on the lineup. There was an emcee (local, I have no memory of this person) who would do 10-15 minutes, then the feature (me) would go up and do 25, and the headliner (a comic from Seattle named David Crowe) would do 45 minutes to close.

My Wednesday show was good, and the Thursday show was great, to the point where I had that thought comics get every so often: “Oh, I guess I just figured out comedy.” Usually when you have that thought, the next night is a fistfight. There were two shows Friday 10/24, and the first was fine. The second is still one of the two worst shows I ever had, and I have no idea why.

The emcee didn’t do well, but I wasn’t worried about it.

Then I got up, and the first joke: just silence.

Next joke: silence.

No one heckled, no one was causing a commotion. It was like they imported a crowd of people who didn’t speak English. It felt like they had all just gotten terrible news about someone they loved. Like the audience was doing some sort of performance art. Maybe they were all really heavy into the Dow Jones and had just heard the day’s numbers.

And it didn’t get better! I continued to say everything that had worked all week and killed the previous day. This same material had even done fine two hours earlier at the first Friday show. I do not remember a single audible reaction of any kind, at any moment, in this late Friday show. Straight up, uninterrupted silence, for 25 minutes.

When I walked offstage, I was so stunned I didn’t even physically make it out of the room. I walked about 15 yards into the audience and just sat at an empty table. It was like I decided “welp, I guess I’ve been demoted to audience member.” It wasn’t until a few minutes later that I realized I was still in the room, came to, and was like, “I gotta get the fuck outta here,” and went into the lobby.

When David Crowe followed me onstage, it was a really weird energy and he knew it. So he took the mic, didn’t say hello, just picked up a woman’s animal print purse and said “...a giraffe’s, ballsack.” I believe that got a laugh, although I was in a failure-induced trance so I can’t really be trusted on the facts beyond my own set.

Making things even worse was that one of my best friends from college was there with his wife, and while he saw me host a college TV show a bunch back at Ball State University, he had never seen me do stand up in a club before.

This is why in most situations you don’t want your friends at your stand up shows. If it’s a special show, sure, let’s get in some allies. Album or special recordings, absolutely. But for just a random show in a random place on a random night, you want a room full of strangers (or fans). That’s the most pure way to do stand up, for one, but also it means that if shit gets weird, it doesn’t follow you the rest of your life.

If a friend is there to see a night like my 10/24/08, it feels like you can’t look at them the same anymore. You don’t want them to think that’s what every show is like, but how could they think anything else? That’s all they’ve seen.

Getting a drink afterward, his wife kindly but unhelpfully said “I don’t know why nobody was laughing! I thought it was funny!” (Note: she also was not laughing. Which I don’t blame her for! No one else in the audience had ever heard such a sound, it would have felt crazy to be the first in that room to bust out anything resembling a “haha.”)

I didn’t pretend it didn't happen. I told them, you know, I’ve been doing stand up about a year and a half, and that’s by far the worst it’s ever gone. They were very nice, they didn’t care, but I sure did. I went to bed at the hotel that night in a white t-shirt which I remember because when I woke up, I had lost a decent amount of black hair, presumably just from stress overnight, which now really popped on the white of my shirt. I’ve never had anything like that happen before or since.

While I still don’t understand what happened that day, it must have been partly my fault. The next worst bomb, I take less blame for…but still plenty.

Bomb Two: October 6, 2011

While that first awful bomb was in my first professional road-working weekend as a real newbie, this other one was after I was very mildly established. I was about four years into standup, but I had started headlining clubs, and I was a regular on a show called “truTV’s World’s Dumbest.”

In 2011 I was somehow nominated for a National Lampoon Twitter Award. Which begs a few questions:

1) Was National Lampoon still a thing at that point? Answer: not really!

And,

2) If it’s an award for Twitter, why are we even doing actual stand up at the show? Answer: still waiting.

Nonetheless, as a New York-based comic, I thought it was at least an excuse to go do some other good shows in LA, and I did one great one right before the awards show. This smaller one was at a great spot called Bar Lubitsch, the lineup was peak 2011 LA comedy, and I went up in between Sarah Silverman and Mark Maron.

I had never met Sarah before but obviously she was hilarious, and very nice after my set. She was also listed on the lineup for the Twitter Awards, so when I said bye, I also said “I guess I’ll see you at that Twitter show later.” She seemed shocked, and said “oh I’m not doing that, that’s going to be a nightmare.”

I thought, huh. Okay. Well…I’m sure it will be fine!

I’m an idiot.

A very funny comic named Eddie Pepitone was the emcee of the awards show at the West Hollywood Improv. I was the first comic up in the lineup, and the crowd was packed. A sold out crowd of comedy fans would be good, but this crowd was entirely “Twitter famous” people – many of whom were nominated, but wouldn’t be performing anything. Turns out, that’s the perfect combo for the Twitter famous: just talking shit about other people, semi-anonymously, from a phone. It’s the same as today, basically, but back then there were less Nazis tweeting.

In fact, what I didn’t realize until after I went up: all these Twitter people were there to livetweet about you during your set, projected on a screen I didn’t know was there. This awards show would function as a place to let the professional trolls come out in semi-public for the night, with new live acts to tweet about. Like they were all passing notes in high school during your presentation. One guy – a TV writer who is most well-known on Twitter for getting dunked on by The Band’s Robbie Robertson – tweeted “Bomb Hanks” before I even told a joke.

Kevin circa 2011 in his “Hanks” era

(For context: people used to say I looked like a young Tom Hanks. “Tom” sounds like “bomb,” which is the kind of keen wit you need to become a legendary joke writer for cartoons. It’s also funny to talk about that guy in a piece about bombing, considering his own tweets about the topic.)

There was also a comic who I’ve only seen underwhelm (and who currently has zero upcoming dates listed on her calendar) who was tweeting weird shit about me that night, and if you ask me I’ll gladly tell you her name.

My first joke went well, the last joke went well, and the middle was so bad that I went home to my friend’s West Hollywood apartment and couldn’t even bring myself to open my bottle of whiskey. Some people are in real mental/emotional trouble when they drink too much. I’m in a bad place if I can’t.

When I found out everyone was tweeting about the comics while they were onstage, everything made more sense, but I didn’t know it was happening at the time. Sometimes a bomb feels like the audience has an inside joke together, or that they’ve all been talking about you behind your back. In this case: THAT WAS LITERALLY THE DEAL.

If you would like to see my set, go here.

JK! THANK GOD for websites who don’t pay to keep videos up.

No actual comedy went well that night, but I do remember Andy Dick getting a reaction for rushing the stage and licking people. The Tweeters seemed to enjoy that.

Also: 90% of what I did at the Improv ended up being the set I killed with on Letterman the following year. And yes, this is me proving I am the type of comic who can also recognize when it goes well.

So clearly, the bomb wasn’t about the material at this particular show in West Hollywood. This bomb started ticking the minute I – unlike a much smarter Sarah Silverman – said yes to the gig.