by Guy Branum
The reason for that is that it was not the event that transformed me from a human being to a stand-up comic. I saw the guys around me, guys7 who lived and breathed stand-up. They were real. They might get to be famous. I could not be one of them. There were a number of reasons, mostly that I had to go do responsible, important things. By this point in time, I’d already been accepted to law school. I was going to be a lawyer. Another reason I couldn’t be a stand-up was that my mom wouldn’t let me. I also fundamentally doubted my ability to commit to something. I lived my life in ruts. I had rituals and habits, and in my experience, attempts to shift those habits (lose weight, brush my teeth thrice a day, keep my apartment clean) never worked. One summer, I was delivering pizzas instead of working for my dad, so I asked my mom if I could get a gym membership for the summer. I was going to try to lose weight and be healthier. My mother said, “It is a waste of money, you will never go.” Any time I had a hope or aspiration that required an investment, my mom would assure me I wouldn’t stick with it, and I rarely did.8 I believed this about myself, and believed I did not have the tenacity to really, really be a stand-up comic. I believed I did not have the power to change things.
The summer before I went to law school, I was again living at home, working for my dad. It was a small project at some local schools, and I was assisting him as construction inspector by taking notes and keeping records. One Saturday, I asked if I could go to San Francisco and do comedy. My mother said no. Gas was too expensive. It was a waste of money. It was a waste of time. I made the gentle argument that I was working for my dad without getting paid, and my dad got very angry. “Oh, we owe you money, huh?”
But I loved stand-up, so I gently persisted. Some people, twenty-two-year-old adults, would have just gone and done it. I was not one of those adults. I was a twenty-two-year-old child. A very obedient one at whom my parents still managed to be very angry all the time.
A few times over that summer, I went. I drove the two and a half hours to San Francisco blaring disco music, electrified that I would get to perform. I cannot remember the drives back because I was so, well, delirious with pleasure that I may have technically been intoxicated.
Then I moved to Minnesota and did not get on a stage for three years.
Why didn’t I do a little stand-up in Minnesota? Why didn’t I dip my feet in the water? When your parents forbid you from marrying the woman you love, you don’t periodically smell her hair to be reminded just how deep your longing is. You forget about it, you shut it away, you let it live with the other unrealized desires in the chamber of your heart where they hide.
Then I came out, and a storm of depression and reevaluation followed, as we discussed previously. With a great deal of help, I picked myself up, pulled myself together, learned how to be gay, finished law school while doing nothing to get myself a permanent job, and managed to be a semifunctional human being by the time law school was over.
Through the smoggy night of depression, I had fixed my mind on one thing, the memory of a happiness that felt real. I remembered those nights doing stand-up. “When I am done here, I will do stand-up in San Francisco,” I told myself. “When I no longer have to be around these law students, I will go every night to a place full of people who are, if nothing else, interesting.”
It took nearly six months after my return for me to get on a stage. Part of me expected respectability to leap out from behind a bush and capture me, forcing me into a good job that would pay for the suits I had to wear to the office, and all of it would make my mom happy. This is what I’d been moving toward for so long; could it really be avoided?
Its avoidance was unavoidable. I didn’t care nearly enough about being fancy or making a hundred thousand dollars a year. When I ran into Berkeley friends and they asked me what firm I was at, I was filled with shame, but not enough shame to change me. Shame isn’t good at changing me. Love changes me.
One night in the latter part of 2001, after 9/11 but before my twenty-sixth birthday, I went to an open mic in the Mission District of San Francisco with a word-for-word printout of my set in hand.9 I got up, the room responded, and I felt alive in a way I hadn’t since I’d gone to Minnesota.
That is also not the first time I did stand-up. After the show, an established comic said to me, “You seem like you’d make a really good writer.” Lots of people would say this to me over the course of the following month or two. I got mad. They seemed to be saying that I didn’t seem like a real performer. They were right. Part of me had been fearing such a response. Part of me knew I was fat and not-hot and 227my job was to be behind the scenes and not onstage. What the rest of me wasn’t thinking was that I was essentially just reciting very long, dense sentences onstage very, very quickly so I wouldn’t go over my time. I hadn’t thought about how an audience consumes ideas; I hadn’t thought about how listener cognition works or when laughs come. I was trying to make my material dense so it would seem like smart-people comedy. Like all those years in school, I was making jokes for myself. I still didn’t know how to meet my audience halfway.
The one thing I did was keep at it. The Internet was less sophisticated in those times, so I worked from a rumpled printout of all the open mics and booked shows in the city. I got up once a night, every night, except for Sunday. Sunday was when the showcase for Real Comics was at the Punch Line. Every comic in San Francisco went to the club and hoped they’d get put up. New comics had to go every week for six months to get asked. I didn’t think I was ready to even start waiting. As the Lord intended, on Sunday, I rested.
The thing is, I changed. I stuck with something. I took a thing outside of myself and made it part of myself, and I was really proud of that. Every set taught me a new lesson. It was a roller coaster of emotions, sometimes the purest highs but often crushing anger at myself for some stupid mistake. And I kept it all inside. None of my friends knew I was doing stand-up. I loved it, but I was embarrassed, too.
About three or four months into doing stand-up, I went back to that open mic in the Mission where I’d started back up. It was at a black-box theater called the Marsh. They had a little annex with a tiny stage called the Mock Café because it seemed like a little art café but it didn’t serve coffee. It seated about thirty people, but it always had a good audience, because two or three times a year, Robin Williams would come there and perform.10 People showed up all year long on the outside hope that this would be one of those nights. Most shitty coffeehouse or bar open mics barely had an audience, so the Mock Café always seemed like a jewel in the week. I showed up with the material I was trying to hone into a tight five, certain that this audience would give solid data for how to improve it. While I sat waiting, a heterosexual couple in their late twenties walked in. They were beautiful and exquisitely dressed, and so much of my soul just wanted to talk to them and find out what their deal was.
When my appointed time came and I got up onstage, I did that. I talked to them, they talked back, and I improvised jokes in response. The energy in the room changed. Because I was talking about what was going on in that very room, everyone was engaged. My energy changed. It wasn’t a recitation. There was threat and danger, but I kept it alive. I kept it funny. I told the man his shoes were more expensive than my truck; I told them I wanted them to have a baby so if I were successful in entertainment, it could be my trophy husband in twenty-five years. I was flirty and kind and cutting and mean, and they loved it. When I got offstage, I was changed. That is the first time I really did stand-up.
I do not mean for you to think that when I “just got onstage and talked from my heart,” that’s when it happened. No, no one wants to see that. People at open mics do it all the time, and it’s crap. What I mean is that when I was able to unify the lessons I’d learned from four months of stand-up11 and merge them with what was actually going on around me12 and turn it into real, immediate entertainment, I loved it, and I knew that I had found something I loved enough to be good at. I hoped quite desperately that maybe, jus
t maybe, this could be my profession.
Eddie Murphy: Delirious begins with the exhortation “Faggots are not allowed to look at my ass while I am onstage.” This gets an applause break. It is a joke in and of itself. What follows are four minutes of exhaustive detail about everything that is gross about gay men. He declares that he has nightmares about gay people; he does impressions of popular celebrities, imagining how ridiculous it would be if they were gay. He expresses concern that his girlfriend will “carry AIDS home with her” after a tennis date with a gay man.
I did not remember this. In my head, Eddie Murphy: Delirious was the special that made me fall in love with stand-up, that taught me the language of the art form, and stood as the paragon of what confidence in comedy can and should be. When I naively decided to rewatch Eddie Murphy: Delirious a few years ago, to let its greatness wash over me, I was stunned to discover its beginning was this unrelenting tirade against the ridiculous putrescence of the gays.
I thought back to me, lying on a carpet at nine years old, consuming this work wholly, lapping up Murphy’s every word, intoxicated by the power and humor behind it. I thought about the way I had also consumed ideas that would poison my understanding of myself before I knew they were about me.
I had to confront the very confusing reality that this special that was one of the building blocks of my love of stand-up, that contributed to my understanding of the language of the thing I do professionally, also taught me the building blocks of the homophobia that would keep me closeted and self-hating into my twenties. I was forced to accept that as deeply as my love of stand-up comedy was baked into me, Murphy’s disgusted view of gay men was as deeply in my bones. These things cannot be extricated from each other, and I cannot wholly dismiss or reject Eddie Murphy: Delirious any more than I can wholly dismiss or reject my father. Both of them did things that scarred, abused, created, and nurtured me.
In the special, Murphy says, “I kid the homosexuals a lot, because they homosexuals.” The audience laughs: Faggots deserve what they get, they seem to say. Then he says, “I fuck with everybody, I don’t give a fuck.” This is a common refrain among comics who don’t want to be criticized. The implication is that everyone is a fair target, so everyone gets mocked equally. But do they? Does Murphy take aim at Kazakhs or Methodists or white men or people with over a 750 credit rating? Would he think to? Would he have the capacity to dehumanize these people in the cultural landscape of 1983? Can you ever reduce a white, cisgender, heterosexual man to nonexistence with the completeness that a word like “faggot” so simply, elegantly achieves?
When I was nine, I was pretty certain I was a person, and Eddie Murphy was powerfully, resoundingly telling me that faggots weren’t people. For over a decade afterward, I would solve that equation with the clear answer that I was unequal to the word “faggot.” To quote the West End musical Everybody’s Talking About Jamie, I built a wall in my head. It took years of experiencing my own life as a gay guy to question these terms that had been defined for me.
When I started doing stand-up comedy, I didn’t realize there were no gay men who were nationally headlining comedians. I didn’t think about it. I was used to living in a world without gay people, or where gay people were confined to the cultural spaces defined for them. I never noticed.
As I sat at open mics, I heard comics, mostly straight men, some straight women, using “fag” and “gay” as shorthand, defining themselves away from the danger and disgust of these characters. That’s the thing: Faggots in these comics’ acts were characters, cartoonish caricatures without a soul or identity outside their faggishness. I realized this bogeyman of a fag was able to persist only because it was a space where no fags were actually talking. In stand-up comedy, fags were constantly discussed but never discussing. It became my obsession; my only desire, to get up onstage after one of those perfunctory, half-hearted open-mic fag bashings.
San Francisco was one of the rarest, best places to be a gay stand-up comic in the early 2000s. There were a number of regular shows that catered specifically to gay performers and audiences, an entire separate circuit just for gay comics. In no other city in America could I have done gay comedy for gay audiences with such frequency, but there was a distinct difference from the mainstream comedy scene. There was nowhere for anyone to go. No one succeeded. No one got the big chance. No big names from out of town came, with the exception of a few drag queens and midlevel lesbians.
I wanted to succeed on the big stage, so I worked hard at the mainstream shows and the Punch Line. As my class of comics started getting better, the more established comics from the club started taking them on the road. An absurdist comic took an absurdist comic under his wing, a Latino comic took a Latino comic under his wing, black comic with black comic, dirty comic with dirty comic, but there was essentially no one more established than me doing what I did. The few established gay comics on the San Francisco scene were hitting the ceiling of what was possible for their careers. There was no demand for gay comics in Hollywood or New York—the fame and success they had in San Francisco was all they were going to get. Thus they were territorial about their place in the city, and tended to see new gay comics as threats rather than colleagues. As I looked at stand-up, I saw no clear place for me to go.
There is one good academic work on stand-up comedy. It’s called Stand-Up Comedy in Theory, or, Abjection in America, by John Limon. In it, Limon uses Julia Kristeva’s concept of the abject to explain the role of stand-up as an art. He basically says comics are engaged in a dance of exploration of and distancing from the abject, the aspects of ourselves that remind us of our “corporeal reality.” In Kristeva’s terms, the abject is stuff like poop or cum or even hair clippings that remind you that you are not so far from being a dead object. More broadly, it’s a dance with the things you are potentially most disgusted with in yourself.
In Limon’s work, he repeatedly points to icons of comedy—Richard Pryor, Mel Brooks, Lenny Bruce—and identifies the abjection they’re toying with as being deeply rooted in the fear of the effeminate and homosexual. He then writes an essay on Paula Poundstone and Ellen DeGeneres that centers on their cagey refusals to engage with their sexual identities onstage. In many ways, his arguments about why the past sixty years of stand-up comedy were successful are because no one like me was there.
Let me put this in more immediate terms. In late 2017, the New York Times published an article wherein five women discussed sexual harassment and assault from Louis C.K., and threats of retribution they’d received when they discussed it publicly. I was contacted by New York magazine to write my thoughts on the subject, and I wrote an essay arguing that uniformly portraying heterosexual men as the highest icons of comedy contributed to a culture and power structure of comedy that made exploitation of women easy and common. I used media representations of the comics’ table at the Comedy Cellar, frequently used on the TV show Louie, as a representative image. A lot of people, rightfully so, made the point that this misrepresented the actual comics’ table, at which some women and a few gays are welcome.
What matters is the Comedy Cellar asked me to do their podcast to discuss the article, mostly to tell me that I was wrong and didn’t get it. During the podcast, I talked about the nonpresence of gay men among touring headliners, and Noam Dworman, the owner of the Comedy Cellar, compared me to his experience of seeing John Leguizamo with his wife. Basically, he said that he could never enjoy Leguizamo as much as his wife, because she is Puerto Rican. He said, “Is it possible that if gay men are ten percent or five percent of the population . . . that if you want to have an act about that . . . it’s hard to appeal to the other ninety-five percent who can’t really identify with that.” In a sentence, he academically speculated that my chosen life’s work might be a false premise. Maybe I can never be the comic I hope to be. Maybe there’s no space for that comic to exist. It is a fear that comes to visit me very regularly, even when other people aren’t saying it.
There’s a Mar
garet Atwood poem in which she describes her daughter playing with plastic letters, “learning how to spell / how to make spells.” She talks about women of the past who ignored domestic life to “mainline words,” and punctuates it with “A word after a word after a word is power.”
There are not currently A-list out-of-the-closet gay male stand-up comedians. This is an absence, and it is more. Stand-up comedy is laid thick with spells, spells about faggots and women and Asians and Muslims and airplane food. They are spells that define people as subjects and objects, heroes and monsters, and we cannot, in a field in which the spellcasters are overwhelmingly male and straight, behave as though these spells bind everyone equally or similarly. “I make fun of everyone” doesn’t exonerate anyone, because the issue in the sentence isn’t the object; it’s not “I make fun of homosexuals” or “I make fun of everyone.” The issue is the subject. Who gets to be “I”?
I know this chapter is already too long. I know those first couple of pages about the advent of the VCR in my home were self-indulgent nonsense. I know we’ve already discussed my starting stand-up, Eddie Murphy’s career, a close reading of some Atwood, and some cheeky but thoroughly unacademic winks at the work of Bruno Bettelheim. I know you’re tired, but for me to wrap this up, I’m going to need to go somewhere else. If this chapter is going to shake its defeatist nihilism, we’re going to need some help. I’m going to have to explain to you that you like Ruth Bader Ginsburg for the wrong reasons.
I get it. You like her. She’s liberal. She does the right thing on the Supreme Court. They made that meme. Kate McKinnon gives her a cartoon mouse voice, and it’s funny to think of this very small woman with a severe bun and a doily around her neck taking on the powerful men of the right. You have reasons to like her. That is not why you should like her.