Tragedy Plus Time

by Adam Cayton-Holland

  Our respective friends arrived, but before we parted ways that night, Ben told me about a dive bar down the street that hosted a comedy open mic on Monday nights.

  “It’s called the Lion’s Lair,” he said. “You should check it out.”

  The next Monday I was there, saddled up to the bar alongside a handful of career alcoholics. The open mic was supposed to start at ten. It was ten thirty. No sign of comedy anywhere. Just a bartender who wordlessly slammed your drink down in front of you and a Galaga machine that hadn’t worked since 1981. The windows were so thick with show posters you couldn’t see outside, and the effect was suffocating, like a black hole. This was the place where all things vanished. In time I would come to love the bar for just that: a dingy refuge where the only thing that mattered was what was going on inside those very walls. That night, it just felt like somewhere I shouldn’t be. I nursed my beer and stared at a velvet painting of a topless brunette wondering if I had made a mistake. Then a skinny guy in a baseball cap walked through the door and the room came alive. He started the jukebox up, got himself a Miller High Life, and began setting up the mic stand while fucking with everyone within earshot: Troy Baxley, local legend, unapologetic weirdo of the night. One by one comics began trickling in, signing up with Troy. After another half hour we were off and running.

  Troy was phenomenal. So odd, so completely comfortable in his own skin. His material felt like those bizarre private gags you have with close friends, strange premises and scenarios capable of sending you into hysterics, but bits that sounded stupid when you tried to explain them to anyone else. Except with Troy they didn’t sound stupid. They were hilarious. He was telling inside jokes and yet somehow everyone was in on them. It reminded me of how I riffed with Lydia.

  I watched a cavalcade of comics take the mic and while there were a handful of truly funny ones—including Ben Roy—what struck me was how awful most of the comics were. How awkward and nervous and not funny. It made my skin itch. Who were these sad people? Where did they come from, and why were they doing this to themselves? What oversupportive peer group had allowed them to think this was something they were ever capable of? What middle school bullies dropped the ball? I watched three comics have good sets that night, and watched twelve others eat shit. I left that evening sure of one thing: I was way funnier than most of those assholes.

  The next Monday I was back with jokes, terrified. I sat at the bar nervously sucking down PBRs. I had memorized my material so as not to appear amateurish but I was worried I was going to forget everything so I kept running it in my head, over and over, mouthing the words like a street-fanatic stuck on a particular psalm. I thought about leaving several times. Finally, Troy tapped me on the shoulder, snapping me out of my reverie.

  “You’re up next,” he said. “Try to keep it to four minutes.”

  There was no turning back now.

  The comic before me limped to the finish and Troy took the mic. “This next comic is what open mic night is all about!” Troy said. “It’s this guy’s first time onstage, so be nice. It’s fun to kick a puppy but it’s just wrong.”

  I slinked up to the stage, took the microphone out of the stand, and promptly blacked the fuck out. It was a legitimate out-of-body experience. I remember feeling the heat of the lights on my face. I know that time passed. I know that I shared some lame observations about having a hyphenated last name, closed with a bit about how every actor reaches a point in their career where they feel they have to play a mentally disabled person, but I only know that because I had memorized the bits. I wasn’t conscious of performing them. It was like I had time traveled. The black hole of the Lion’s Lair swallowed me and spat me out four long minutes later. And in this new future I was putting the microphone back into the stand while the audience laughed and applauded.

  I felt like I had seen Jesus in a tortilla.

  It was so immediate. So thrilling. I wanted more. I wanted back on that stage. I was like the kid who gets off the roller coaster then immediately sprints to get back in line. Or maybe I was like a junkie, feening for that next little taste of attention, of approval. I didn’t know what I was. And I didn’t care. I just knew I wanted that feeling forever.

  “That was your first time?” Troy asked me into the mic as I exited stage. “Christ, man! Great job!”

  I became something new that night on Colfax, Denver’s famed boulevard of broken dreams. I became part of something bigger than myself. As comic after comic took the stage after me, I inhaled drinks in a dazed euphoria, shit-eating grin tattooed across my baby-face. This was what I had been looking for. The humor writing in high school and college, the shitty screenplays and poetry and short stories, it was all leading up to this moment, this feeling. And all of it paled in comparison.

  Some of the other comics complimented my set; they told me about other open mics I should check out, told me I should call down to the Comedy Works downtown and sign up for New Talent Night. Suddenly this entire new world was opening up to me. The week previous I had watched a couple of other first-timers eat shit onstage, then watched as they were promptly shunned by the regulars at the mic. And yet here I was, being welcomed into the fold. Not the most exclusive club in the world, but laughter was the price of entry. And I had gotten laughs. Like that, I was a stand-up comic. I was born again. I never sought out to become a comedian. I just became one.

  I was twenty-three.

  In my experience, stand-up comedy either takes hold of you completely, or it doesn’t. I’ve seen many a performer so initially possessed by the comedy demon fizzle out after a couple of months, their passion for the craft exorcised by the realities of the profession. But for me there was no turning back. The first time I told jokes on a stage I knew I would continue to do so for the rest of my life. It was a full-on conversion.

  I continued along the path toward writer. I got a full-time gig at Westword, campaigned my way into a weekly humor column called “What’s So Funny.” I wrote cover stories where I shadowed gypsy cab drivers and mom-and-pop burrito peddlers; I smoked cigarettes with the food editor and music critic in the alley and bitched about all the transplants ruining our city. I was never not asking questions. I played the part of journalist. But it was all a front. I was just killing time until I could do comedy. I was paying the bills through my day job so I could come to life at night.

  Comedy Works was the real prize, the vaunted stage looming on the horizon of my comedy future, so close you could taste it. It was the holy grail of the Denver comedy scene, the place where I would sneak in on weekends to watch Dave Chappelle and Greg Giraldo and Bill Burr, the place where I could have my mind blown watching the modern masters. It was where professional comedy actually happened, every night of the week, and I wanted nothing more than to join its storied ranks. But that was still way in my future. You didn’t just get on that stage. You had to earn it. You had to grind it out for free, for years. Us rookies weren’t even allowed to flirt with that stage, except for New Talent Night on Tuesdays. But that wasn’t enough. So my buddy Greg Baumhauer started another open mic at the Squire Lounge, just down the street from the Lion’s Lair. And we got to work.

  The Squire was truly depraved. It opened at 9:00 a.m. It reeked of Jim Beam and vomit; the doors were ripped off all the bathroom stalls. Fruit flies were endemic. I once saw the drunk-tank drop a guy off at the Squire. Vagabond alcoholics frequented the place with whatever money they could scrounge up: $1.25 a draft, a buck provided they didn’t start any trouble. Which was never the case. Not a night went by that some drunk asshole wasn’t eighty-sixed for trying to start a fight with a broken bottle or grabbing some girl’s ass or puking in one of the ripped-up pleather booths. It was disgusting, but we loved it. The juke was good, the bartenders had senses of humor, and the PA system sort of worked. It was perfect.

  The tenor of Greg’s open mic matched the surroundings in which it was born. Or maybe it matched Greg. Hard to say. Chicken/egg kind of thing. Greg was one of us, a Lion
’s Lair standout with a filthy sense of humor. The bluer the better. He had the most sordid past—full of horrific teenage-runaway tales, and his weekend gig as a drag queen waitress at the Bump & Grind kept him flush with ridiculous anecdotes. Greg’s style of comedy was shock and awe, and the Squire took on his persona. It was ruthless, cruel, and unusual. Greg quickly christened the place “The Meanest Mic in America,” and he made sure that tone was set comic after comic. Bomb onstage? Greg would rip you apart after. Kill up there? Greg would rip you apart. One had to mine the muck just to stay afloat. Fortunately, we were more than up to the task.

  Every week we found new ways of grabbing eyes and ears, typically through the crassest means possible, the riskier the better. Incest, AIDS, abortion, eating disorders, suicide—we joked about them freely, unfortunate forays made by many an open-micer who fashion themselves edgy, eager to test the boundaries and see what they’re able to get away with. Were we to come up ten years later, in 2014 as opposed to 2004, we would have been HuffPo’d into shamed silence. A bunch of foul-mouthed white guys perpetuating the patriarchy. As it was, no one was paying attention. We were young comics far from Chicago or Los Angeles or New York, far from any industry or opportunity besides the promise of one-nighters in Wyoming and Utah, so we howled lewd jokes into the void on Tuesday nights to an audience on welfare. We were developing our own signature, throat-grabbing Denver comedy sound, one born out of necessity, a style that assumed indifference and responded with preemptive aggression.

  Call it middle-kid comedy.

  It would have been easy for us to stop there, to rest on our dick-joke laurels and become career bar comics, because yelling “Where my drinkers at?!” always worked and who wanted to work all that hard anyway? But a miraculous thing happened there at the Squire Lounge on Tuesday nights. We did. We wanted to work that hard. Because we wanted more. Whether we were bored with cheap sensationalism or we were just reaching the next inevitable stages of that elusive comedy concept of finding your voice, one by one, we all started turning corners. The Squire made us all deft in the various ways we would grab an audience’s attention, but soon we were able to hold it. With jokes. Well-written, good jokes. It seemed every week we would trade off winning the $25 bar tab handed out for the best comic of the evening: Ben Kronberg, myself, the various pros like Chuck Roy and Louis Johnson who would drop in to see what the young bucks were up to. We started sharpening one another. And we started getting really competitive.

  Though Greg started the Squire as a place where we could do whatever we wanted onstage in relative obscurity, with little risk of failure, soon it became a show we took as seriously as any showcase or Comedy Works set, and soon enough, so did other people. Greg christened his little empire Wrist Deep Productions, and that became the unfortunate moniker under which we all labored, at the Squire and beyond. Greg and I started putting on shows constantly, wherever we could. But the Squire remained our favorite. Word about the wild, free, funny time was getting out, and after a little while, actual comedy fans began showing up: musicians and hipsters and cute girls and cynical dudes eager to get drunk for cheap and laugh. For every crackhead tweaking at the corner of the bar by the porno match-game, there were three newbies there for the comedy. Newspapers began writing about the Squire’s comedy night. The bar would go from completely dead at nine to one-in, one-out by ten. Suddenly our little shit show was a hot spot. We had a real winner on our hands.

  It was time for something more.

  At work the music editor had thrown one of the many promotional CDs he got in the mail on my desk. It was a double CD called Invite Them Up, a compilation of some of the best performances from the beloved NYC indie-comedy fixture hosted by Eugene Mirman and Bobby Tisdale. I gave it a listen and had one of those clichéd movie moments where the younger brother has his lid flipped by Zeppelin or Pink Floyd or the Who or whatever album he stole from his older brother. You know the scene I’m talking about. The kid puts the vinyl on the turntable in his bedroom, places the massive earphones over his cool seventies haircut, then lies down on his bed with his eyes closed and is taken away to that special place, where everything else drifts away.

  Like that, but with comedy.

  I slid that CD into my work computer, popped my earbuds in, and I nearly fell out of my rolling chair. I listened to Demetri Martin and Mike Birbiglia, I inhaled hilarious, nonsense sketches by Michael Showalter and David Wain, and I laughed so hard my coworkers grew concerned. It was so weird and free and dumb, and yet at the same time, hyperintelligent. This, I thought. This is exactly what I want to try and do.

  Los Comicos Super Hilariosos was my attempt.

  I recruited Andrew Orvedahl and we set out to make the show unique from any other show in town, not just stand-up, but sketches and videos. A real comedy experience. Our first show culminated in a sketch that involved suits, theme music, a PowerPoint presentation, KFC Bowls, and a defibrillator. We were swinging for the fences. The eleven people in attendance—mostly my older sister Anna and her friends—loved it. But the next month there were twenty people there. Then forty-five. Soon we outgrew the place and the boyfriend of a coworker invited us to come perform at his art gallery down on Larimer Street. So we moved over to the Orange Cat, where things really took off.

  Something about the space complemented our show perfectly. It was rough, but beautiful. Obscure, but ambitious. Walking down the desolate streets of a Denver that doesn’t exist anymore, audience members wondered if they had the right address. Then they opened the door into the beautiful turn-of-the-century space, with its exposed brick and fading, hand-painted ads from when it was once a grocer, and they were immediately proud of themselves for knowing about something so cool. The Orange Cat was like you were in on a secret. And for one night a month we were that secret. It became our comedy clubhouse. The proprietor, Sean, turned over the keys and let us pop in at all hours to rehearse, to set up elaborate gimmicks long before the show started. I brought on Greg Baumhauer and added Jim Hickox, who was hilarious and knew how to make videos. Ben Roy eventually folded into the mix. We pooled all our meager fan bases and people began showing up in droves. Our efforts coincided nicely with the national rise of alt-comedy as a coveted cultural source, the phenomenon of podcasts and “Lazy Sunday” and comics gaining credibility with appearances on Wait Wait . . . Don’t Tell Me! In Denver, we were the faces of that, the alt kids. We began selling out every month, lines literally around the block.

  “If comedy is the new punk-rock, Wrist Deep is the new Black Flag,” the Denver Post gushed.

  We practically jerked off to that quote.

  We put on Los Comicos Super Hilariosos for four years straight, Denver’s reliable alt-comedy fix the last Friday of every month. And when we weren’t thinking about the show we were expanding our own comedy horizons. We were no dummies. We knew that however loudly we were howling in Denver, we were howling into a relative void. The big markets were in LA and New York. So we hit them as hard as we could. We worked our connections, got on the best shows that would have us and tried to get noticed, to stand out. Ben Roy punched his way into the New Faces at the Just for Laughs comedy festival in Montreal, an honor akin to being drafted by the comedy world at large. He was on the radar.

  I opened for Tig Notaro and she was gracious enough to invite me to a comedy festival she was putting on in Washington, DC. I did well enough there to score an invite to the Bridgetown Comedy Festival in Portland, Oregon, the mecca of alt-comedy at the time. Which led to invites to perform at cool shows in LA and New York. Which I followed up on. I saved up money and days off from work and started making trips to New York and LA regularly. Eventually I got a manager in LA. I was staring to get noticed. He told me that there would come a time when I would have to move to LA, and he’d let me know when he thought that time was, but for now it was totally cool to stay in Denver and keep doing what I was doing.

  I was more than happy to. I was always looking to shift the comedy spotlight back ho
me, we all were. We loved what we had going on. We invited every funny comic we encountered to come perform on our monthly Los Comicos baby, or reached out to them when they were passing through Denver for other shows. Los Comicos hosted Tig Notaro, Maria Bamford, Greg Proops, Moshe Kasher, the Sklar Brothers, Natasha Leggero, Arj Barker, Kyle Kinane, many, many others. We became the show you had to do if you were passing through town, this little off-the-beaten-path gem.

  Meanwhile we were climbing the local ranks, fast. From the time Los Comicos started to the time it ended, myself, Ben, and Andrew all went from open-micers to headliners at Comedy Works. We became big dogs in the Denver comedy scene. Troy Baxley, our hero who hosted the Lion’s Lair, was asking us for time on Los Comicos. We had become big fishes in a small pond, but we were desperate for more water. We were ready to do comedy for a living. Fuck day jobs, just comedy. The dream started to seem achievable.

  GUITAR HERO GRANDE DAME

  Sometimes I wonder how differently things would have gone if Lydia had never come home from Ecuador. She was thriving there; she seemed so content and healthy, so sane. What if she had just stayed? Sometimes I indulge my fantasy fully. I imagine that she’s decamped from the big city of Quito to Cuenca, a high-mountain, colonial gem. She’s married a little indigenous man with a mustache. He makes hats. He loves her and treats her well. They have fresh fruit on their kitchen table and Guayasamín prints on their walls. They eat lots of quinoa. They have a couple of kids who speak this weird hybrid of English and Spanish and Quechua. It’s hilarious on its own, but Lydia’s taught them all to speak backwards too, just like she was able to. They sound like adorable little aliens. They do it easily, of course; they all have nimble minds, just like their mom, the beautiful woman from America. So they speak backwards whenever she asks them to and they don’t mind doing it because it means they get to see their mom come unglued, every single time. They perform for her and she lights up and laughs and laughs. They get to see their mother experience such pure joy. She loves them so much.