I just got home from a two week road trip. What an exhausting experience! I hardly felt that anything good would come from it. After the first three days it started to look like the last nail in the coffin for my confidence, career, life…just everything that matters to me. Let me paint a picture for you:
Roswell, Georgia. A comedy club inside of a tri-level arcade the size of a city block. There you go, that’s it.
I’m at the Funny Farm. Go-carts and stand up, what a great idea! Why hasn’t anyone else thought of such a wonderful concept?! Why not put a pinball machine in an art gallery while you’re at it?! Needless to say, immediately upon realizing that I was going to do an entire weekend at this southern fried neon abortion, my heart sank. Great, I’m competing with whacka-mole and I don’t spit out tickets when you hit me.
You know, it’s like I work so hard to get booked at a club and then this is what it turns out to be; a gaudy, tacky, blinking grotto for infantilized adults. And I bet the last thing they want to hear is me making fun of it, which is all I can do. Every single show was a nightmare. I felt like I was in some sort of comedic Gauntanamo Bay. And the audience, more like the CIA, was going to water-board me with their silence until they got to hear what they wanted.
“Where’s all them jokes about Charlie Sheen?! Don’t you think gay people are faggots?! Say it! Say faggot!”
I just can’t, and I just won’t do it. Even if it means never getting booked there again, which is probably the case. I guess it’s my fault for expecting a pit of retarded vipers to lay still while I poke them with a stick of reason. We just don’t share the same sense of humor. I ended up having a conversation with one of the locals. She was this bleached blonde, Coors guzzling, camo wearing, militia klan member, and I am not exaggerating. She wanted to argue about Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged, and how it pertained to health care.
She was like, “The gubment empowers the weak and weakens the strong!”
I was like, “Stop reading. It doesn’t suit you.”
But alas, that’s the kind of crowd you can expect when the club you’re performing at is in an arcade. That is, in fact, the status quo. And not only in Georgia, but most comedy clubs in this country. I think it’s elevator music they want. After four nights of that shit I really began to question things. Do I really have a chance? I mean, I love comedy and I love performing– just not for the typical people who go to comedy shows. I can barely stand to watch a lot of performers, and I certainly can’t handle the comedy on tv. It’s boring, pedantic, and uninspiring. Unfortunately, if you want to do comedy you have to go up in clubs at some point. These clubs and their clientele do to comedy what Christians do to the Bible,…give it a bad name.
I literally said to someone the other day “Mack’s so much smarter than most of his audiences and you can tell he kind of hates them for it.”