by Jessica Pan
Clearly, I feel that my telling jokes onstage is a direct violation of the social code and will possibly lead to total anarchy.
“Do you think 50 percent of comedy is just performance: a funny voice or like a silly, apt expression?” I ask Sam after class one night after we watch a John Mulaney comedy special.
“Yes. Would you do a funny voice?” he asks. I get embarrassed when I slip into baby talk when I’m petting a dog. Even when it’s only me and the dog in the room. So, no, I’m not doing a funny voice.
I’d rather just tell my stories onstage in a normal tone of voice. No dramatic pauses, no funny expressions.
“That way if I fail and no one laughs, then it’s OK, because I didn’t humiliate myself by really putting myself out there and performing it earnestly,” I say to Sam.
“That makes no sense! You’re far more likely to fail if you don’t perform,” Sam says. “You’re just setting yourself up for failure.”
Yes, but to me, the failure is much more embarrassing if you try.
✽ ✽ ✽
“All right, guys, it’s time for the talent show!” Kate shouts, clapping her hands together. What? I look around, confused, as the rest of the class begins moving their chairs to the back of the room. I’d missed the previous class and thus had also missed our homework assignment: prepare for the talent contest.
Kate does not care that I have nothing prepared.
“I don’t care whether your talent is impressive or whether you’re just messing around. But no matter what, I want you to sell it to me like it’s amazing. You know what I mean?” she says.
She stands up and uses her stage voice to shout, “Ladies and gentlemen! You’re gonna want to tell your grandchildren about the things you’re about to witness today! Note the date so that you can say that you saw the world’s greatest on this very day!”
I’m going up third. I inhale sharply.
“Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the top talent competition! Please welcome the first contestant of the evening—Vivian!” Kate shouts. I know that Vivian, having also missed the previous class, hasn’t prepared to perform, either. Will she make an excuse? She seems a little shy, like me, but as soon as Kate says her name, she takes off to the front of the room.
“Thank you, good evening! Today I’m going to show you something incredible! I’m gonna recite the alphabet but . . . I will recite it in the medium of sign. That’s right! Sign language! At lightning fast speed. You will never see sign language at this speed!”
Vivian pauses dramatically. She closes her eyes and takes a deep breath. And then suddenly she starts moving her hands in rapid succession for five seconds.
“Done!” she exclaims before making an elaborate bow.
I am in awe. She managed to make something up on the spot.
But now it’s one person closer to my turn. Anthony, who writes an infamous blog about the gay scene in London and is arguably the most naturally funny person in our group, leaps up. As he’s performing his talent, a dance called the Dutty Wine (I don’t know what this is, but it looks very hard), with his neck and legs circling in two different directions, I sit on my hands, panicking. What is my talent? I can’t sing. I can’t juggle. I can’t do the splits. I have nothing.
Anthony’s hips are winding down, and now he’s on the floor gyrating. I stare at his ass, willing it to give me some ideas. I can’t say “Pick me later!” or “Pass!” It’s not an option. Anthony takes his seat. Decide to do it and just do it.
“Please welcome Jess P., contestant number three!” Kate calls out. I have nothing. Just start talking. Something will come. I walk up and stand in front of the class. I look at their expectant faces. Sell it. You don’t know what “it” is yet, but sell it anyway. You did improv. Something will come to you.
“My talent is . . . really important. It is very . . . valuable. Today, yes, this very day . . . I will be able to . . .”
Shit. Shit. Shit.
“Look at you . . .” I stare at them. “And psychically tell you . . .”
Come on, brain. What have you got?
“Your favorite Matt Damon movie! Here we go!”
I run over to the closest person and lock eyes with an Indian woman named Sohini.
“THE BOURNE IDENTITY!” I shout in her face. She cowers. I rapidly move on to the next person.
It’s Noel, the handsome idiot who is an Aston Villa fan who drinks beer. “Ocean’s Eleven!” I scamper over and stare into the dark eyes of Alexandros, a well-traveled, highly groomed man from Greece with enviably slender ankles. “The Talented Mr. Ripley!”
I keep moving, faster and faster. I stare into our teacher’s eyes.
“Good Will Hunting!” I shout in her face.
“Yes!” she says, stunned.
“Rounders!” I say, triumphant to have remembered it, to a girl named Allison. “I’ve never seen it,” says Allison.
Commit hard.
“You’ll love it!” I say.
I rapidly run through the rest of my class audience staring into their eyes. “The Martian! The Bourne Supremacy! The Departed! The Bourne Ultimatum! Saving Private Ryan!” I run over to my final classmate. Have I named every single Matt Damon movie? Are they any left?
“We Bought a Zoo!” I yell triumphantly, my hands in the air. My classmates look doubtful at this final title. Look, it is a movie. No, you’re right, no one has ever seen it. Look it up!
And then I take a bow and take my seat, spent. The group looks stunned, either from my psychic ability or from my shouting in their faces. I’m rather stunned myself. I’m not shaking, I don’t feel too weird or vulnerable, and I don’t really understand why.
The talent show continues. A guy named Tom juggles. Another guy does a push-up with a glass of water on his head. Then, one of the quietest people in the entire group, Allison, is up. She takes a deep breath. Pauses. And then she opens her mouth. She belts out the most soul-shaking rendition of Boyz II Men’s “I’ll Make Love to You.” By the end of it, the rest of us are swaying in our seats and slow-clapping to the beat.
I’m shocked, not just by how good she was but by how much she had gone for it. Of everyone in the class, Allison is the most shy. She always breaks eye contact and tries to make her body smaller with her posture, as if she can curl herself into a ball and disappear. But tonight she’d transformed into a sensitive nineties R&B crooner for a few brief moments.
At the end of class, Kate says, “I hope after this exercise that you notice that everyone loves it when you say things like, ‘This is going to be amazing. Omigod, you guys, prepare for this!’ We love to watch someone give it 100 percent, even if they’re bad. What we can’t bear to watch is someone give it 10 percent,” Kate says. “Then we’re thinking, Why should I watch you?”
Don’t you hate it when your husband’s right?
“When we watch The X Factor,” Kate goes on, “what we love the best are the people who are really shit. Right? We love that. When they’re great, it’s good, too, but what’s great about them being shit is not that they’re shit but that they’re trying really hard and then they’re shit,” Kate says emphatically. “That’s what so great about it. Someone being shit at being shit is just shit. But someone trying really hard and then being shit is amazing,” she says.
I write down in my notebook, “Someone being shit at being shit is just shit.”
I don’t want to be shit. And I certainly don’t want to be shit at being shit.
✽ ✽ ✽
Our comedy showcase is two weeks away, and I haven’t actually written any material. Every time I’ve tried, I’ve been seized with terror and immediately given up.
Instead, for the past month, I have kept a list in my phone of funny thoughts I’ve had. I’ve added to it a few times a day, anything that raised an internal titter, but I can never bear to read over it
again. I’ve been holding out hope that they would be brilliant and I’d just string them together with some transitions and be golden. Most of them occur to me as I’m falling asleep. I reach for my phone, waking up Sam in the process, and type into the Notes app, and then I go to sleep, hoping the comedy gods do their work.
I finally consult the list and wonder whether a demented elf has snuck in during the night and put this together. None of it makes sense. “Kale cigarette” I have written. Is this how I discover I have multiple personalities? “Darcy emojis” I have underneath it. Oh . . . had I imagined Mr. Darcy from Pride and Prejudice had his own . . . emoji set? Very niche, but I would be interested in that product.
I also have written, “I am the only adult I know who takes naps. Is this self-care?” and beneath that, “In your act, sing ‘A Whole New World’ from Aladdin when I got my UK passport and went through the fast-track immigration line. Could add choreography?”
I also have a long, rambling description of a dream where I stole two black Labradors and a cherry pie, both from the Queen, with the note “best dream ever.”
End of list.
This is bad. Very bad. Not even a funny voice could save this routine.
I confess my lack of decent comedy material to Lily, Vivian, and Toni, three women from class whom I now meet every week for drinks before class (I asked them to meet for drinks after we’d first met, and we’ve now been doing this before class every week). We’re all panicking about the showcase and arrange to meet up on Sunday at a pub for a writing workshop (on the weekend! Like real friends!) with a few others from class.
Toni, a twenty-two-year-old actress, and I arrive at the pub at the same time. She orders a beer, and I grab a cider. We sit across from each other in a booth, and Toni asks me what my comedy routine is about.
When I first moved to London, I’d discovered that there was a hit song called “(Is This the Way to) Amarillo.” It was, oddly, the UK’s best-selling single of 2005. In it, a man croons on and on about trying to get to Amarillo (and every night he’s hugging his pillow) where his “sweet Marie” waits for him. Given that I was actually from Amarillo, I thought I could maybe get a few jokes out of it.
“I think I might do a bit about where I’m from—Amarillo, Texas. Do you know the song ‘(Is This the Way to) Amarillo’?”
“No,” Toni says.
“No?” I ask.
“Literally never heard of it.”
“Oh, OK. Never mind, then.”
I’m back to nothing.
Lily and Vivian arrive, and we decide to go around the table to share our material. Except none of us wants to go first. We clutch our notebooks to our chests.
“I don’t want to . . . this isn’t a joke . . . this isn’t anything,” I mutter, looking down.
“Yeah, I don’t have anything good either,” Lily says. The group falls silent.
Vivian finally breaks the imposter syndrome apology routine that we’re all bandying around. She normally has a gentle demeanor, but right now she is yelling at me, “JUST SAY IT. JUST READ IT. IT’S FINE. Read what you have. Right now.”
I nod, more scared of her than of sharing my material.
“Well, I want to talk about being from Texas. Maybe something about guns . . . how if they don’t like my act, I’ll . . . kill them? Shit. That’s not it. That’s not edgy; it’s terrible . . .” I say, trailing off.
The girls are looking at me blankly. Kind but pitying. I go on with a bit about how I recently visited Lancaster, a small town in the north of England. I called it the “Paris” of England.
“Oh. You guys aren’t laughing,” I say.
“But we’re smiling,” Lily says. “We like what you’re saying, but . . .”
“But the point of comedy is to make people laugh . . .” I say.
“Just push it further,” Lily says. “What part of Texas are you from?”
“Amarillo,” I say.
“Wait. Wait, wait, wait—you’re from Amarillo?”
“Yeah.”
“You HAVE to talk about that song!”
“But Toni didn’t know it.”
“Toni is Australian!”
I turn to Toni. “What?”
Toni smiles and nods, while sipping her beer. I’m terrible at recognizing accents, but I should have known that Toni was far too loud and smiley to be British. And, apparently, this song is only famous in the UK.
“You should break down that song and what it really means as a person from Amarillo,” Lily says.
I make a few notes on my paper and look through the rest of my jokes.
“And I want to talk about English soccer matches. Because where I’m from in America, people yell nice things, and there, they yell things like, ‘Get on with it, you bunch of useless assholes!’ What do you think about applying this to real life? Like say you’re cheering on your boss at the London marathon, and instead of your sign saying, ‘You can do it, Linda!’ you write something like ‘Come on, you stupid loser!’”
“Yes!” they exclaim.
“Or how about, ‘Come on, Linda, you slow, lazy bitch!’” Lily suggests.
Perfect.
I head home with some semblance of what I might write about. I feel safe with these women. We are all scared out of our minds, and our WhatsApp group has descended into a chaos of workshopping punch lines and encouraging notes. We’re fast friends on this treacherous journey because we have to be to survive.
✽ ✽ ✽
Later that week, I stay up late trying to write my material, but I keep second-guessing myself. I think it’s time to admit to myself that I may need professional help. Again. I once saw Rob Delaney running in my neighborhood, but it didn’t seem like I could assume we were friends based on that. British comedian Sara Pascoe says no but sends her best wishes. I try to attend a Rhod Gilbert gig and accost him afterward, but he’s sold out until the end of time. And at a book signing, I muster the courage to ask the British actor and comedian Robert Webb whether he is an introvert or an extrovert, and he waves me away, saying, “Oh, I don’t know!”
I keep looking. When I share some of my material about being half Chinese with Lily, she says that I should check out a comedian named Phil Wang.
I go home and watch a clip of him on TV and instantly like him: he’s goofy, he’s witty, and he talks about race in an accessible, funny way.
“Could you be my mentor?” I ask his clip.
I contact him on Twitter, and he says he can briefly meet for coffee that week. He’s just got back from tour and is about to go on vacation.
“Do you workshop your comedy with other writers?” I ask Phil, immediately trying to get my questions in fast. We are sitting in a small boat on a canal near Paddington Station.
“No, because I’ve done that before, and when they never find a particular joke funny, then I lose faith in the joke,” he says.
“Do you think if your friends don’t like the joke then it isn’t funny, or do you think they just didn’t get it?”
“I think they don’t get it in the context of a comedy club or within the rest of the set. So now I don’t do it anymore. I trust my own taste.”
I constantly doubt my own taste, but I know that I need to start believing in it if I was going to be able to do this.
“What do you do to prep before a gig?” My questions are rapid-fire, as are Phil’s answers.
“I meditate for fifteen minutes every day with an app, and I try to meditate for five minutes before. And I try to do power poses. Which help a lot.”
“Like what?”
“Like trying to make yourself bigger.” He puts out his arms like he’s trying to intimidate a bear. I can’t imagine doing that. That feels ridiculous.
I ask him about bombing onstage.
“There are things wrong with certain rooms, but
if you bomb, it’s probably your fault. What separates the real comedians is that the real comedians are the ones who can bounce back after bombing,” he says.
We walk together back to Paddington Station, and I tell Phil a little bit about the year I’ve had trying to extrovert.
“I hate hanging out in big groups of people,” he says. “How are you supposed to know whose turn it is to talk?”
It’s something I worry about, too.
We briefly hug as we separate at Paddington Station, headed in opposite directions.
I’d talked to a professional and taken a class, and now it was time to start writing. Showtime was creeping up, and the terror loomed large.
✽ ✽ ✽
I finally hunker down one night and write my set. I write a bit about the Tony Christie song and explain how his beloved “sweet” Marie is from Amarillo and how she went to my high school and how she was less sweet and more of a subtle racist. Then I try to make a few notes about what it was like to be Chinese in small-town Texas, including a particularly haunting experience about learning the phrase “yellow fever” when I was twelve. By the time it’s 4 a.m., I have a full five minutes.
Does it work? I have no idea. But it’s what I have.
When I think of performing it, I feel sick. I wish public speaking was a dragon you only had to slay once, but it just keeps coming back. I’d performed at The Moth, I’d survived, and yet I was still fearful. But The Moth had shown me I could do this. I was capable. Why was this still so hard for me? And weren’t there bigger things to worry about?
A few months earlier, sitting with my father in the ICU in LA, I’d had the most intense weeks of my life—so why didn’t this feel easy in comparison? Most people who go through emotional upheaval and survive end up saying things like, “But now I can do anything!”
Not me. Earlier this year, I’d seen my father pull through life-threatening surgery, and I was still being a neurotic shit about this?
Apparently so. I’m learning this is how life works: we nearly die, and ten minutes later we’re throwing tantrums about getting a speeding ticket on our way back from the hospital.