Jason M. Cook

Thanks to Comedy Nerds United who’ve been running these as long as I’ve been writing them. Ya’ll are cool.

I haven’t done comedy in about five months. I moved home, to Cape Cod, tail firmly betwixt legs. I was broke, deep in student debt, and working as a dishwasher to barely make rent.

It was time to go back.

Since, I’ve begun the slow crawl out of debt, have a job at a newspaper (shove it, internet!), and have actual money to spend on things for the first time in maybe a year.

But I am stand-up poor.

See, the median age on Cape Cod is about 45. That lowers after Memorial Day — when the population triples and all manner of rich college kids come stay at their parents’ million dollar beach cottages — but still, the area is not young.

Despite a handful of friends, it’s tough to even find people under 30, much less people who want to bare their souls in dirty dive bars on a Tuesday night.

So I took a few days off to head up to where it all started, Northampton MA.

“You can sleep in my mom’s house,” the voice of a fellow comic who hosts Northampton’s best open mic said. Weird. But I’ll take it. Like that, I was off.

Tuesday night I drove the 45ish (more like an hour because I am an idiot) minutes to Connecticut to partake in a brand new open mic at the Hartford Funny Bone (of course).

I had no idea what to expect and was nearly as nervous as when I first performed more than year ago. I was meeting a few comic friends and knew there would be approximately a thousand familiar faces/names, but still. Nervous.

The club turned out to be the real deal. Brick wall backdrop. Little tables. Waiters bringing you crappy drinks. A stool! A stage! When I went to pee, they had whoever’s set coming through the speakers in the bathroom! Open mic’ing at an actual comedy club is where it’s at.

Thirty-four comedians over a little more than three hours is a lot to ask of an audience. You get a lot thrown at you when it’s about ten comedians an hour. But the room felt great. There were people who weren’t there to support their one friend who was trying this on a lark, they were just there to enjoy the show. Amazing. 

Seventy-five percent of the comics who performed stayed throughout, which was/is always great. Especially when I went 25th. As for me, I felt I did well. I experimented with writing multiple one-liners about one topic (for example: my family selling my sister for $50,000 on Christmas). It was interesting, as I felt I lost some people when I pounded them on one subject, but the laughs built upon one another with a different topic. 

As usual on the East Coast, people loved race jokes. Who knew?

Above all, it felt great to be in a club, watching, laughing, and enjoying comedy with people who are awesome. The brotherhood of comedians is glamorized a lot (by me!), but it’s true. I felt instant bonds with people I met/talked with that night — bonds forged in the fires of dick jokes.

Tonight is my homecoming at the place I first open mic’d at. It’s also my last night in town. I hope this taste of stand-up spurns me on to find something, anything on Cape Cod.

I was at a swanky event where three couples won a trip to Bermuda. It was in a hangar and the people left ten minutes after they were randomly selected (rich people are the worst). I was going to leave early, but thought, “What if the jet explodes before it gets off the ground?” Then I thought about all the “no comments” I’d get and how I’d get to use like “Benefit dinner turns grisly” or something for the headline. 

So I stayed. And nothing happened.

Being a journalist will fuck with your being.

I think a good commercial would be like a guy getting ready to shower. He puts on some new indie flavor of the month on his b-room ipod (Nano, 1st gen) and gets in the shower. Cut to shots of his roommate’s interested faces. When he opens the door to leave the bathroom, they do that sitcom thing where they all come tumbling into the bathroom because they were leaning in, listening intently.

Maybe Spotify?

People I work with were genuinely more upset about that bear who fell out of tree looking all cool died than they were about Adam fucking Yauch dying. Faith in humanity, unrestored.

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