How many people here have a friend who annoys you so much you don’t know why you continue to let them be your friend? I’ve got this friend who doesn’t like animals but has pets.
“Kelly, why do you have animals?”
“Because I get lonely.”
Okay. She’s got a bird. The bird essentially lives in a cage. She lets him out but he cannot fly because she had his lower wings clipped. Yet she named this bird Freedom. How much “freedom” does this bird have?
She feeds this bird people food. We went shopping once, we were rushing to get home so we went through the drive-through at KFC. We get back to her place and she has the bird on her lap. She always has the bird on her lap and talks baby talk to it.
“Oh, Free Free Free! Oh, Free Free Free!”
Next thing I know, she starts feeding the bird some of her food.
I was like, “Ummmmm, what are you doing?”
“What? I’m feeding my bird.”
“You’re feeding your bird BIRD. This has got to be cruelty to animals.”
“Well, my vet says it’s okay.”
“I don’t want to know what you’re feeding the damn dog!”
Like that little story? Oh good, I’m glad you find it amusing, because I must’ve told it five hundred times. It’s the first comedy bit I ever wrote. I could tell it with my eyes closed. I could tell it in my sleep. I could tell it while in a coma, just blinking my eyes in code like that guy in The Diving Bell and the Butterfly.
Not long after I moved to LA, I was chosen to be on The Jenny Jones Show1 for an all-female stand-up showcase and it landed me a college agent who specialized in booking campus tours across America. It’s the prize every comic wants, to be paid decent money to travel around the country building your brand and a fanbase while working out your material.
For the next two years, I did more than 300 shows. That’s the equivalent of a gig about every other day for my fellow mathletes out there. In reality, I’d get booked for three to five shows per week for several weeks in a row at a bunch of colleges clustered in different regions, then come back to LA for a few days to recoup. I was on the road constantly.
At first, for a Jersey Girl who never went anywhere, I thought it was so cool to travel for work. I’d always been intrigued and impressed with air travel. It felt fancy and important, bourgie even, to be flying to all these places. I felt a sense of pride when telling friends, “I have to go to North Dakota and then South Dakota for work.” And they put you up in hotels. I loved hotels! I loved the idea that I never had to make my bed. I was so high on my jet-set life that I wasn’t even disgusted by the petri dishes known as hotel comforters. I was like, “This is my house for the day!” I really thought traveling businessmen were livin’ the life, just chillin’. They spent their days on airplanes and their nights in Holiday Inns. Who doesn’t want that life?
I quickly found out who. It was me. I didn’t want that life. It was some stressful bullshit. Flying all the time is for the birds, literally (exception: Freedom). And it’s fucking North Dakota. After you start staying at the Super 8 on the regular, you start to hate hotels, on the regular. Eventually, you start noticing how nasty that comforter actually is, along with the carpet and the shower curtains and the floor around the toilet. Ugh, I just gave myself the heebie-jeebies.
What I was doing wasn’t glamorous at all. It was a JOB. But it paid well. For a broke-ass comic, making up to $900 per show was muh-nee. When you’re starting out that is straight baller-baller!
My very first gig, at the University of California, Riverside, was a total mindfuck … because it was AWESOME. I was scared shitless, I had to do an hour of material—which is an eternity—for the first time, but I was confident that 70 percent of my set was strong. I’d killed with most of it before and indeed I did that night. But I think that might have just been beginner’s luck. I wasn’t going to be the next Chris Rock overnight. I’d have to pay my dues just like every other neophyte joke slinger.
I was quickly and unceremoniously inducted into the nooners’ club. Nooners are shows booked at colleges during lunch in the campus cafeteria and they are a nightmare of clanging dishes, stank cafeteria food, and a cacophony of discussions ranging from the agricultural economics of Thailand to the annual Kappa Sig hall crawl. I remember once when I was at Duke, my friends and I got our trays of chicken fingers and onion rings in the freshman dorm, expecting to sit down and do recon on how we were gonna get to the Omega Psi Phi party over at UNC that weekend. Instead, the lights went down and this nerdy Jewish guy with his shirt tucked into his jeans <<gag>> stood on a makeshift stage and started telling corny jokes about his laundry and in particular his socks. We were like, “The fuck is this bullshit?” A year later, I saw the same dorky guy on TV. He had his own sitcom, and his name was Jerry Seinfeld.
Nooners were super depressing and sad. But any show in a room where they were still conducting some kind of business could bring you to a Demi Moore in St. Elmo’s Fire state of mind.
I once had to perform at a school in New York at one of their eateries, which was not only still serving food but had a smoothie bar set up right next to the stage. Right. Next. To. The. STAGE. So they were synthesizing smoothies in a blender throughout my entire set.
“How many of you have a friend…”
VRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRR
“… who annoys you so much…”
VRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRR
“… THAT YOU WANNA SLAM THEM IN THE FACE WITH A BLENDER?!?! Come. On. Really??”
It was a fucking nightmare. Everybody was eating and jibber-jabbering and no one even seemed to know I was on a stage performing comedy, except for one table of girls who were trying to pay attention. I could tell they felt sorry for me because they kept giving me encouraging smiles that said, You can do it. Don’t be afraid, li’l buddy! The “venue”—I hesitate to call it that—had additional seating in an upstairs section, which only made the acoustics even more deafening. It kept getting louder and louder and louder until I finally stopped for a moment, watched the crowd for about twenty seconds and said:
“You know what? I get paid whether you listen to me or not. I just need to sit up here for another twenty minutes.”
Then I heard a lone voice cry out from the balcony.
“That’s the funniest shit you said all night!”
Thank you, sir. I finished my set and cried all the way back to the hotel.
I’ve never really had a plan to deal with hecklers. I still don’t. I probably should. My thing is to just be like, “Okay, you wanna be a part of this show so bad? What do you have to say?” Nine times out of ten they spew some nonsense or talk themselves into a hole and I just give a sad condescending look and move on with the show.
Groups of guys, like frat boys, can be the most annoying. They spend the majority of their days trying to make each other laugh so by the time they get to my show they think they’re the entertainment. Then if one says anything, they all want to chime in. If I clown ’em on how foolish they sound, what comes next is a litany of OHHHHHHHHHHHS and DAAAAAAAAAAMNS and an hour of “Yo, she told you, bro, you gonna take that shit?”
Hey, guys, we’re not having a fight. I didn’t come here to challenge you—I’m at WORK. The fuck?! Then the obvious next statement is, “I don’t come to your job and knock the dicks outta your mouths.” But that just seems lazy and crass, and I like to consider myself a classy bitch.
The most challenging audience I ever had was at a SUNY school, I can’t remember which one. I didn’t know there were this many black people IN upstate New York, let alone at one school. They were mostly city kids and they were raucous or, as they say, “wilin’ out.” I got so nervous because I could tell right away that once they saw a black comedian they were ready for a Def Comedy Jam kind of show and that ain’t what mamma was bringin’. I wasn’t in the mood to battle with my audience. Two guys got escorted out before I even got onstage, and I thought, How am I gonna reel them in?
But I got through it, and it wasn’t that bad. I actually walked offstage proud of how I handled the crowd and dealt with the hecklers. But when I was ready to leave I went to grab my coat … and it was GONE. I had left it in a chair in the front row of the auditorium and someone stole that shit! It was the dead of winter and some ass clown lifted my fucking coat. It was a lime-green wool peacoat and I loved that goddamn coat. The following day, I had to go into New York City for a meeting at Comedy Central. They wondered how I was in New York in the dead of winter without a coat and perhaps for a second pitied me for being a peasant. I told them of my misfortune at SUNY and they kindly offered up a Daily Show with Jon Stewart jacket so that I might survive the rest of my tour without catching pneumonia.
I felt so good winning over that crowd but they sure as shit got the last laugh, sending me out into the tundra with no overcoat. I gotta tell you, New York crowds are no joke. Storytelling the way I do it can be hard there. My bits were long, woven anecdotes about family and friends. Some of my material had social commentary in it and some of it was just shit that annoyed me. But New York crowds were not easily impressed. They would stare up at me like, “What you got next?”
When I first started paying attention to stand-up comedians I noticed that New York comics were often very negative in their comedy and the New York audiences seemed to love it. So when I first started doing stand-up, I thought I had to be negative in order to win them over. I soon realized I wasn’t good at the negative comedy. I made an attempt at “angry comic” but I’m not an angry person (usually). So I abandoned that shit and eventually found my voice.
I needed to be myself for sure, but if I was really gonna make it as a comedian, I’d have to suck it up and find a way to deal with what came at me. Sometimes the audience would be assholes, or the venue would be too loud. Sometimes there wouldn’t even be a stage or a mic, like the time I had to perform in a dorm common area while all the students lay down, lounging around me in their pajamas. Was I supposed to tell jokes? Read them Goodnight Moon? Lead Light as a Feather, Stiff as a Board? What kind of hippie kumbaya shit was this?
Every city, every campus, had its own flavor, its own vibe, and I needed to adapt. I knew the East Coast was cynical because they had robbed me. The South was a little sleepy (that’s my PC way of saying slow movin’), so I’d have to be more animated, which I’m not necessarily. My favorite audiences were in the Pacific Northwest and the Midwest because they liked sitting and listening to stories and they were POLITE and attentive.
But not quite as polite as the Mormons. I got booked at Snow College in Ephraim, Utah, which was so bumfuck nowhere, the directions were to drive two hundred miles straight on some road until you get to the stoplight. Which stoplight? THE stoplight. There was only one.
“We just had a ribbon-cutting ceremony for it,” they told me.
Oh.
So I get to Snow College, and everyone is very nice. There were even parents in the audience who brought their kids. Now, I never tailor my act to a specific audience. I just write what I think is funny, whether you like it or not is your business, not mine. I’ve been doing stand-up for a long time and you hire me based on what you know I do. And I do what I do so if you don’t like it, don’t book me because I’m not changing my set.
But I took one look at my wholesome Mormon hosts and my set flashed through my mind.
• Jokes about a boyfriend named Jesus
• Skinny boyfriend bit, where I describe him being on top
• Lions having sex
Hmm, the lion bit might not go over well here in Utah2:
I recently saw a special on one of those nature channels about the lions of the Serengeti. Does anyone here know how a female lion signals to the male as to the end of a sexual encounter? She attacks him. She viciously swipes at his head and then tries to bite him in the neck. I’m watching this and thinking … what a coincidence because you know I’m the same way! It’s like, alright already, back the hell up! But what’s odd is the male, he’s cool about it. He doesn’t let it bother him. Because he knows in another few minutes she’s gonna want his goods again. How does he know this? Because lions have sex EVERY. TWENTY. MINUTES while the female’s in heat. So, basically, she swings on him, looks at her watch twenty minutes later and is like, Alright, bring ya ass. SEX. Every. Twenty. Minutes. I’m watching this and I’m thinking, What a coincidence, I’m the same way! Okay, so they do the wild thing or the “wild kingdom” thing, as it may be, every twenty minutes while she’s in heat. Let’s say she’s in heat for three days. That is 216 sexual episodes in seventy-two hours. Yet some of you self-proclaimed playas like to brag about doing it twice in an hour before slipping into a coma.
What’s wrong with this picture, ladies? I tend to believe that there will come a day when man- and animal kind dwell together on this planet in harmony. And there will be parties. Perhaps keggers, I don’t know how it’s gonna work. The males will be gathered around the keg talking about their conquests, their escapades, what have you. One guy will be like, Yo, blood, check it out. I hit it twice last night. Yuh. I knocked it out. And the lion’s gonna hear this and be like, What, did it hurt when she smacked you in the head? Is that why you quit? You punk ass? You mama’s boy? You li’l bitch?
But you have to be careful when you’re talking about a man’s performance. Cuz men get their egos bruised. That’s why women have to stroke and massage … the male ego. You know, build it back up. I’m curious as to whether the lioness has to do this. Let’s say her mate only can do it 215 times. Is she like, That’s alright, Bob, it happens to every lion. You’re still the king of my jungle. Perhaps. But once she leaves that den and is hanging out with her girlfriends, it’s a WHOLE different story. 215 times, pshhh, he’s losing it. I think I’m gonna start seeing Tony. You know, the tiger? Girl, I hear he is Grrrrrrrreeeeeat!
Yeah, no.
I couldn’t do anything sex-related or cuss. They were way too conservative. So, in this one case, for these nice people, I changed my set. After the show, I assumed they loved my act because they lined up to give me great big bear hugs good-bye like we were gonna be besties forever. When I got back to my hotel room, I went to take off my coat (a NEW coat) and noticed something in my left pocket. I reached into the pocket and found a Book of Mormon. One of my new “besties” had surreptitiously slipped it in there but not before highlighting several passages.
God bless ’em.
I had so many GTFO moments on the road. Like the time I did a show at a military school in Roswell, New Mexico. The soldiers were a great audience, actually super well-mannered, too (they had to be or they’d have to get down and give me twenty). But anyone who’s ever heard of Roswell knows that its claim to fame is that a UFO supposedly crashed there in 1947. Now I don’t have such a big ego that I think we’re alone in this universe. I guess I believe in extraterrestrials, I can’t say they’ve made it to Earth yet. So, I kinda laughed about the multitude of Martians painted on the glass storefronts all through town. I was like, Wow, they are really committed. Took that alien hook and ran with it. No, what freaked me out more about Roswell was the desolate, barren feel of the place. It felt more likely that I’d find myself kidnapped and forced to make meth in a Breaking Bad RV than abducted and whisked away to planet Caprica where my face and body would be used as the template for the fourteenth cylon humanoid model (waddap, Battlestar Galactica peeps?). Aliens were the least of my problems.
I’ve been everywhere and done stand-up in every state and corner of this country. And this was before iPhones and Siri and the Google map app. Cell phones were just becoming popular and there was barely a single G of service for huge swaths of red states. They’d drop this black girl in the dead of night in the middle of nowhere, with just a cheap rental car—like a purple Ford Aspire—and an Enterprise tear-away map, the real paper kind. Trust me when I say this was terrifying, especially when I was in the Deep South by myself and was too scared to go into a gas station to ask for directions. People would stare at me like they knew I wasn’t from them parts. Those were some scary times.
If I didn’t have my own rental car, sometimes I’d be abandoned at sketchy hotels near six-lane highways and forgotten about until it was time to pick me up for the show. Best-case scenario, the hotel would have a Steak ’n Shake and I’d just eat breakfast, lunch, and dinner3 there until someone came to fetch me. Worst-case scenario, I’d subsist on Pop-Tarts from the vending machine. I remember one particular hotel was so scary, I didn’t even take my shoes off and I slept in my clothes. The door didn’t touch the ground so there was an inch of space through which any number of bugs and critters could crawl and axe murderers could peek through. Or escaped convicts. I turned on the TV and the news actually reported that the local prison had had a breakout and residents shouldn’t answer the door “if you don’t know who it is.” What in the actual fuck?
I stayed in shitty hotels like that a few times. My least favorite was in San Angelo, Texas, “The Place to Come for Good Times.” Or not. Because it was so isolated, there was absolutely nothing to do. So I stayed in my hotel room all day doing absolutely nothing. It was a “No Smoking” room. You know how I knew it was a “No Smoking” room? Because there was an ashtray with a NO SMOKING sticker on the outside bottom of it. If you turned it over, I guess it was a smoking room? There was a light switch on the wall that controlled the air-conditioning. To prevent guests from flipping the switch, they put a Band-Aid on it and wrote in pen, DO NOT TURN OFF/AIR COND. I’m not sure if it was clean or used, I didn’t look, all I know is using a bandage as signage was some raggedy-ass shit. Y’all couldn’t go get some masking tape? Any kind of tape? A Post-it? C’mon.
Most of the time on these road trips, I was all by myself. Which was fine. I wasn’t tryna get drunk with a buncha college students and miss my flight home. I wasn’t Mötley Crüe, partying all night after my shows and hooking up with my groupies and having drug-fueled orgies. I didn’t have any groupies, though one time a fan did find me at my hotel … because it was the only hotel in town.
The only time I ever went out with fans was after a show in the Louisiana bayou. The student programming board member was a cute guy who invited me to hang with his fraternity. So I said fuck it and drove to a crazy country bar to meet up with him and his frat brothers. But they weren’t two-stepping to Garth Brooks in that honky-tonk (more puns!). These boys were singing and dancing to Master P. I hadn’t even heard these songs before. I barely knew who Master P was when they told me what song was playing. I’ve never seen so many white boys feelin’ Southern rap. I mean feeeeeling it, down in their souls. It was fascinating to watch. It was like some kind of bizzaro world in which preppy was all of a sudden thug. I was dying.
Speaking of dying (#terriblesegue), the more I flew, the more I loathed and feared it. I had a few close calls in turboprops so small and sketchy, they felt like the Memphis Belle4 in World War II. Once on a flight out of Sioux Falls, South Dakota, several other passengers and I noticed smoke in the cabin. It was an obscenely early flight so it was still dark outside. The only lights on in the cabin were the overhead lights, and we could see the smoke swirling in the overhead beams. One of my co-passengers went to the cockpit and frantically told the pilots (this was before 9/11, when you could just pop on by and say “What up”).
“Oh yeah, we’re aware of it,” they said nonchalantly, while the rest of us wrote good-bye letters to our families. “It should dissipate soon.” 
I suffered through a fierce wind-shear landing in Chicago that left me in tears and prompted me to call my agent from the terminal and demand that he cancel the rest of my shows. I sat next to a girl on a flight that was so turbulent it caused her and three other passengers to projectile vomit. She was holding the fucking barf bag but didn’t even have time to put it up to her mouth! Yes, some of it got ON me. It was horrifying. I tried to be cool about it because I flew enough to understand her pain, and especially since she apologized profusely, but there was vomit ON MY HAND. It was NOT cool.
I remember the time I ate crab cakes in a landlocked city somewhere in the Midwest (Note to self: Never order crab thousands of miles from the nearest ocean) and I got violent food poisoning. I threw up for hours and had such stomach-wrenching diarrhea that I swore I could see the genesis of abs by morning. I had to get on a flight that morning and I was NOT well. I was pouring sweat and my skin was gray. My flight was delayed and I had to sit at the gate closest to the ladies’ room because … duh. It was utter hell. The delay caused me to miss my connection so I had to stand in line with a slew of other travelers to rebook for the next day and be assigned a hotel room for the night. By the time I got to the front of the line all I could do was cry. I was so pathetic and the ticket agent felt so sorry for me that she gave me a voucher for the Hilton RIGHT in the airport. I continued my dance with the porcelain tureen until the wee hours of the night. I’ve never felt so abused and empty.
I’m sorry. That was a brutal description but it’s necessary to understand why I hate doing stand-up on the road and why I’m not so eager to return to life on the road. It was a Catch-22. I was on the road making money (and at that time in my life it was GOOD money) but I wasn’t in town available to audition and make moves in the direction of where I had planned to go.
Don’t get me wrong. I like making people laugh. That’s what I enjoy. It makes me happy to see people happy and having a good time. But everything else about it made me wanna throw myself off a building. I’d rather walk the Arctic tundra with no water or sustenance in winter without a coat, which I’d have to do anyway since those fuckers at SUNY stole my shit.