by Jessi Klein
Eventually I was promoted, and then promoted again. I sat with Robert Smigel as he pitched TV Funhouse. I accompanied my boss to meetings with Stephen Colbert and Amy Sedaris as they conceived episodes of Strangers with Candy. I brought coffee to a young Amy Poehler and Matt Walsh and Ian Roberts and Matt Besser as they worked on their new Upright Citizens Brigade sketch show. I could not believe this was my life.
But time passed and I started getting used to this being my life, and the more used to it I got, the more I felt small but insistent pangs of wonder about the lives of all the creative people I was meeting, and how they’d gotten to where they were. How were they raised so they could just wake up and do these incredibly free and creative and wild things every day? Did they go to the college their father told them to go to? I spent so many nights sitting in the back of these incredible alt stand-up shows, and in particular a place called Luna Lounge, a dive bar on Ludlow Street with an even divier performance space in the back, which has since been replaced by either a macaron store or a soulless glass condo, or some combination thereof. There I watched many of the same people perform live whom I used to watch on TV while I was dying of fake cervical cancer. I fell into an emotional pattern wherein on nights I saw an amazing comedian perform, I’d feel this longing that this was something I wanted to try; and on nights I saw an amateur flailing, I’d think, Well, I can at least be this bad, right?
This back-and-forth went on in my head for months, and then years. The fear of trying stand-up and the fear of not trying stand-up were locked in an endless stalemate, where both sides made convincing arguments and both sides agreed it would be a good idea if instead of making a decision I just sat on the floor of the crap apartment Pete and I shared and ordered huge amounts of truly terrible Indian food.
But then one night my friend Wendy, who had started taking a stand-up class, told me about an open-mike night where the pressure to have talent was so low as to be nonexistent. She took me to scope out the venue, a place called Surf Reality a block down from Luna Lounge (it is also no longer in existence; I think it has been replaced by one of those mysterious boutiques that just has one $4,000 T-shirt hanging in the window).
Surf Reality was even grimier than Luna Lounge, a hipster lean-to where the black linoleum floor was permanently shellacked with a sticky film of beer. The open mike was run by a waify woman named Reverend Jen who wore elf ears. Her system was that you paid $3 up front, and then you’d put your name on a piece of paper into a jar and wait for it to be pulled out, at which point an egg timer would be set to exactly five minutes, during which you could do whatever you wanted. The attendees of this particular open mike took the free-for-all quality of this very seriously. Perhaps because Reverend Jen insisted that every performance be greeted only with positivity, all kinds of psychopathic navel-gazing was permitted. There was an enormous guy called Little Bill who looked like a murderous Bruce Vilanch, who wore all black save for two giant yellow flashlights tucked into his belt and carried a Polaroid camera that he would stick in your face and snap without asking. His time onstage would always be spent scream-reading from a terrifying spiral notebook filled with his sociopathically tiny handwriting. There was a woman who would read poems about her father and always be crying by the end. That kind of thing.
After a few weeks in a row of watching Little Bill primal-scream, I decided that Wendy was right, and even in the event that my jokes did not kill, I would be okay with it since it was mostly an elf-ear kind of crowd and I would never have to see them again. I typed up seven jokes word-for-word and carried the paper in my pocket. I remember one of my jokes was about the subway and how scary it is when you’re in the tunnel and you hear your train honking. Then I’d say, “What’s out there, a DEER?” All of it was very bad. I paid my $3 and then sat shivering, like a small, nervous Chihuahua, until my name was called. When it was my turn, I took the mike from Reverend Jen, a little freaked about how to raise the mike stand (something I’d been studying with great concern from afar), and, shaky hands giving away my nerves, started to read my jokes off the paper. Miraculously, the elves laughed.
7. Dying (Again)
About six months after the first time I did stand-up, Pete and I broke up. Two weeks after we broke up, 9/11 happened. I thought for sure this national tragedy would bring us back together like so many other couples, but he seemed to feel he could weather this global geopolitical shift with the new girl he was fucking. I was subletting my old boss Chris’s one-bedroom apartment in Brooklyn Heights, directly across from the BQE. There was a small, mauve daybed in the living room that was permanently dusted with cat hair from when Chris had lived there with three of them. In this sad little nest, I would order cheap Thai food and watch CNN on the world’s smallest TV while my heartache turned my whole body into a pretzel. My walk to and from the train was long, about fourteen minutes up one of the most beautiful streets in Brooklyn, and often at night on my walk home, passing elegant brownstones with steps lit by old flame lanterns, I would sob.
One night, I was lying on the daybed when I became aware of an odd crawling sensation under the skin covering my right cheekbone, as if there were a worm squirming toward my nose. Soon I felt it on both sides. This sensation was later accompanied by a transient numbing of patches of my face. Back I went to the neurologist, to several neurologists. I memorized and passed their tests—feeling the point of a toothpick on my palms or the coldness of a little metal hammer against my cheek, following their fingers with my eyes to the right, left, and around. When we were done with the toothpicks and hammers, they would usually dismiss me as fine, which should have made me feel better but didn’t. Instead I obsessed over this new illness that would take me down right when I’d lost my partner, and I would die alone, without having a boyfriend to promise, in a whisper, that he would go on and find someone else when I died, because that is what true love is and I am selfless.
In this state, I tried to adapt to the rhythms of single life and failed miserably. This was before absolutely everyone had moved to Brooklyn, and most of my friends still lived in Manhattan. I didn’t know what to do when another person’s movements did not provide the emotional tick-tock of the day’s clock, and I would sometimes wake up and just sit on the edge of my bed staring at nothing, like a sad person on a motel bed in an arty photograph from the 1970s.
The one thing that pulled me out of bed was the growing number of stand-up shows I would do at night, primarily because there was literally nothing else on my dance card. These shows were usually in the basements of bars, or the back rooms of divey restaurants. They would start late at night and go into the wee hours of the morning, and there would inevitably be a moment where I wondered how it was possible my life had led me to sitting on a metal folding chair in a cement-block room at one in the morning while some guy in baggy jeans talked about his dick onstage. When I went up, I was so nervous that I still typed my stand-up word-for-word. But slowly, over time, I started to loosen my grip on predictability. I carried a little spiral notebook in which I would jot one-word ideas—“catcalls”; “turkeyburgers”2—and I became comfortable with the idea that perhaps improvising just a smidge onstage was maybe okay. I transitioned from open mikes to occasionally, every now and then, doing a “booked” show, which meant someone actually invited you to perform and you were not waiting till some crazy witching hour to spew jokes at your fellow open-mikers.
One night I was booked to perform at a show I’d never done before—my understanding was that it was at the gym of an old Children’s Aid Society. I didn’t feel like going to tell jokes. I was miserable. I had run into Pete and his new girlfriend on the subway platform that morning, although technically it was less a “run into” than a “see them from afar, have a near heart attack, duck behind a pole, notice how he impulsively ducks in to kiss her like the love and desire he has for her is more than he can contain, think about staying because you have to get to work and this is your train, and then change your mind and simply le
ave the subway altogether and take a cab.” It had been a gut punch, and all I wanted to do was lie on my daybed couch and breathe in cat hair. But I still had enough type A college student left in me that I couldn’t make a commitment to tell jokes at a gym and not show up, so somehow I pulled myself together and got on the train.
I got to the space, expecting to perform under a ratty basketball hoop to about fifteen people. Instead, the gym was packed with hundreds of guests. People were sitting at cocktail tables with candles on them, like actual human beings instead of just random bar-goers who’d been roped into a comedy show while waiting on line for a piss. My stomach flipped, and for the first time in months it wasn’t because of something I heard Pete did, but because I had never performed in front of this many people before. And the other comedians on the bill were all real comics, people I’d gone to see for my job and whom I respected.
I got onstage and talked. I talked about my life. It was, up to that moment, the best I had ever done. I killed. I got offstage and I did not feel like someone with worms crawling under her eye socket.
I felt alive.
8. Best Week Ever
I was still working at Comedy Central during the day and then doing stand-up at night. I was doing well sometimes and bombing other times, but I felt I was finding something, and that something was pushing me along. One day I got a call from a producer I’d met who was starting a new show at VH1 called Best Week Ever. It would be a topical “talking head” show where comics would riff on pop-culture events of the week. He’d seen me do stand-up and wanted to talk to me about being on it. HOLY FUCK I AM GOING TO BE ON TV, I thought to myself.
Being on Best Week Ever meant that the night before shooting, the producers would email me a packet of over a hundred questions regarding celeb news from the week, with the idea being that you would write jokes as answers to all of the questions. There would always be a lot of questions about Britney Spears’s vagina or Lindsay Lohan’s boobs. I would dutifully try to come up with at least one joke per question. Often I would wake up at five thirty in the morning to finish writing, sprawling on my bed hungover.
Because I had a day job, they accommodated me by always shooting me first thing in the morning, which usually meant arriving at VH1 around eight a.m. I would go into hair and makeup, talk about Lindsay’s pussy for an hour, then do my best to rub off my full face of makeup before literally running the ten blocks back up Broadway to Comedy Central, where my boss, the endlessly patient Lou Wallach, would pretend not to notice that his normally plain-faced and bedraggled employee had mascara all over her eyes and clearly had had her hair done into professionally beachy waves.
Best Week Ever was the first time I was on TV. People talk about getting “big breaks”—this was the teensiest, itsiest, bitsiest of breaks. Aside from getting trolled online for my appearance, people saw me. I was getting paid. It made up for the fact that I was at a period in my domestic life where one morning I made eggs for breakfast, and then was too emotionally checked out to do dishes for a while. When I finally went over to the sink after a few days, I lifted a plate to reveal a nest of newly born maggots, squiggling all over my dirty dishes and in between the tines of my forks.
9. The Leap, Then Infinite Leaps
I lived a double life for more than a year, being at my job by day, and then doing stand-up at night, with occasional early-morning forays into appearing on TV. The quiet little twinge I had felt years before, that maybe what I wanted to do was this unstable and risky thing, was growing louder. I tried to ignore it, the same way I’d tried for years to ignore the call to do stand-up at all. My father had raised me to avoid risk at all costs—his attempt to save us from the fate of his own father, a gambler whose favorite stakes always seemed to be the well-being and stability of his family (and who lost, in spectacular ways, over and over).
One day I got a call from the head writers of the Late Show with David Letterman. They’d seen me on TV and wanted me to submit a writing packet to be considered for a staff writer job. This was a mind-blowing inquiry, seeing as how David Letterman was probably my second biggest comedy crush after Groucho and as a ten-year-old girl I’d had fantasies about meeting him at a party, falling in love, and marrying him. I worked on the packet for weeks, staying at my office till midnight to use the printer, before I finally dropped it off by hand at the Ed Sullivan Theater. I didn’t hear anything for months and forgot about it.
Then one day the phone rang. They wanted me. I would be hired on a thirteen-week contract, which would be renewed for another thirteen weeks if I was doing a good job. This is a standard offer for entry-level television writing.
That night I went to my parents’ house to tell them the good news. My mom was excited, but my father was dubious. He was not a big Letterman fan. Comedically, his taste runs more toward Lenny Bruce. Then I made the mistake of mentioning the thirteen-week contract.
“Thirteen weeks? And then they can just drop ya?” he asked.
“I guess hypothetically, yes.”
And then he said, “Well, that doesn’t sound like much of a job at all.”
And as soon as I heard that, even though I wrestled with it a few more days, I knew I wouldn’t take the offer from Letterman.
I hated myself for not taking it. In the days after I sheepishly called to politely decline, my stomach was in a constant knot. But this time I didn’t think I had cancer, or an appendix that was about to explode. Unlike all the previous moments in my life when a vague illness would present itself as a kind of physical resistance to the option of growing, of changing, this time my body stayed mum. It was not going to provide me with a distraction from looking into the unknown and having a very serious conversation with myself about why I was pussing out on what I wanted to do. I knew that I was the problem.
When the next offer came, I took it: an offer to write on a show in LA. But it was a year later. It took me that full year to gather my confidence enough to leave.
And this is where I come back to Joan, and why she matters so much to me. I saw an interview with her once where she talked about why she felt she was doing her best work at seventy-one years old. “Because I’m not scared anymore,” she said. “There’s nothing they can do to me. They’ve already done all of it. I’ve been through everything and I just have no fear.” I thought of these words recently, clung to them actually, as I sat in a hotel room in Los Angeles. I was in the middle of a series of pitch meetings to try to sell a television show. These meetings, for me anyway, are always fraught with the potential for serious self-loathing. You go from network to network, get offered water by an assistant, take the water, and then do your song and dance about yourself and why your story matters to a room full of often bored, and occasionally boring, executives.
I’d just finished my first meeting and was starting to spiral out about how it went. Hearing myself speaking my ideas out loud had suddenly felt embarrassing. And now I was stewing in my hotel room, forecasting my rejection. But then I thought of Joan, who’d just died a few days before. I thought about how she refused to die before she was dead. I thought about how often throughout my life I’d gone into a deep depression about my imagined imminent death. And it occurred to me that imagining death must have been to me on some level less frightening than imagining living—i.e., going forward into this risky, terrifying unknown despite the possibility of failure.
I thought about Joan, and thought about my fear of telling my story and having no one care, and then I thought, Fuck it. I care. I don’t care if they care. It’s my story. I relaxed and ordered an unnecessary amount of room service before driving to my next meeting.
They bought it.
1 I think he was enamored of the class implied by the “Vassar girl” image as well as the 70:30 female-to-male ratio.
2 These both became terrible jokes, in case that isn’t obvious.
Dogshit
You watch the Emmys and the Oscars your whole life and you think, Oh, this is so glamorous I wa
nt to be a PRINZESS like all these other ladies. Oh, if only I could just walk the red carpet. Oh if only I could just be asked who I am wearing and put my mani in the mani cam and have Ryan Seacrest tell me I look beautiful. I want someone to do my hair so it looks like I just floated across the ocean to Los Angeles via a giant shell. I want to be spray-tanned until I am the color of a just-baked Chips Ahoy cookie, like JLo. I want Giuliana Rancic to ask me how are you in that way where she implies we are friends even though we are not friends. I want to be dripping in sequins and pose with one foot delicately placed in front of the other like I am a perfect little female pony. A golden palomino pony trotting up to the stage to get my golden trophy. Then I would feel amazing, like I am special and an angel, and not be haunted by this frequent feeling that in comparison with them, with the Prinzezzes on the red carpet and in magazines and on billboards, I am dogshit.
These are the feelings I always felt. Then I was nominated for an Emmy.
When we found out we were nominated for best sketch show and best variety writing, for Inside Amy Schumer, we all freaked. Not only did we just finish a critically acclaimed third season, but Amy’s movie Trainwreck had come out over the summer, and she had become very very famous.