by Katie Henry
THE BOUNCER AT the Forest is only there on Friday and Saturday nights, Mo explains. Any other day, you can walk right in and not be bothered, especially if the owner knows you. So today, Sunday, I meet her and Jonah at the bar, and she introduces me to the owner, Colin, an older and extremely Chicago guy with a bushy gray mustache and a faded, holey ’85 Bears sweatshirt.
Mo buys herself and Jonah a beer to share, and I go for a Coke. When we sit down at the least sticky table we can find, Mo takes a thin binder out of her bag, and presents it to me.
“What is it?” I ask, staring at the blank cover.
“A gift,” she says. “To start your brand-new life.”
“Like the wise men gave to baby Jesus,” Jonah says.
“Don’t get too excited,” Mo warns me. “It’s not that good.”
“Anything’s better than myrrh.”
I flip it open to read the title at the top of the first page.
HOW TO WRITE A JOKE
THAT MIGHT NOT SUCK
A Non-Comprehensive Guide by Mozhgan “Mo” Irani
Mo leans across the table. “I didn’t make up the method. It’s from this comedy book I have. I tailored it for you, though.”
“This is amazing,” I tell her. “Does it really work?”
“It’s a guideline. It won’t write the jokes for you, but it’s the building blocks of comedy,” she says. “Target, Hostility, Realism, Emotion, Exaggeration, and Surprise.”
“The biggest surprise is how hard it is,” Jonah says. “Everyone’s sure they’re funny until they actually try to write a joke, and then—”
Mo glares at him. He shuts up.
As I’m skimming through the pages, Mo drops the bomb: she wants me to go up with my new set at the Forest next Monday. Just six days from today.
“Next Monday?” I say. “I’m not going to be ready by then.”
“You’ll never really be ready,” Mo says with a toss of her head. “You have to try it anyway. It’s the only way you’re going to learn.”
“Mo. That’s not enough time.”
“We’ll all work with you,” she assures me. “We’ll help you come up with something.”
Mo flips me back to the first page of the guide. “But before we even get to a joke, let’s figure out how you’re going to start.”
“I won’t start with a joke?”
“You want to introduce yourself,” Mo says. “Well, the emcee will say your name—”
“Does he have to?” I interrupt. “I mean, say my real name.”
Jonah leans forward, his chin in his hand. “What’s wrong with your real name?”
“Nothing,” I say, avoiding his eyes. “I just thought people picked new ones.”
“Maybe if they’re hiding something.”
I hold my breath for a moment, still keeping my eyes on the blank page in front of me, but Mo shakes off his comment like it’s nothing.
“Would you stop?” she says to Jonah. “I go by Mo, it doesn’t mean I’m on the lam.”
Jonah doesn’t say anything, but also doesn’t look convinced. Mo turns back to me.
“You start by welcoming the audience. Getting them comfortable.” She taps on my notebook. “Maybe you say—”
“Thank you. It’s so good to be here tonight.”
I wonder if I’ll say this every time, not just this first time. Even if I’m in places it’s not as good to be.
Keep going, I have to keep going, Mo said pace is important right up front.
“I was born here.” I rest for a half-second pause. “I mean, not in this bar, that would be . . . unfortunate.” I lean forward, as if I’m having a conversation with someone in the audience, but I forget to make eye contact, like I’m supposed to. “‘Oh, you were born at Northwestern?’” I nod. “‘Cool. I was born on the floor at the Forest.’” I nod again. “‘Yeah, thanks, I did immediately contract hep C.’”
And there it is, the first laugh. Low and short, but there. A laugh. I straighten up and call out to the bar area, a little sheepishly: “Sorry, Colin.”
“The first thing you’ve got to do is pick a victim,” Mo says. “A target.”
“Shouldn’t be tough for you, Murder Girl.”
“Jonah, if you’re not going to be helpful, you can go.”
“Helpful is in the eye of the beholder.”
“I’m going to behold you over the train tracks pretty soon.”
“See, in that instance,” Jonah says to me, “I’m the target.”
“There are a lot of common comedy targets,” Mo says. “Girlfriends, sex, airplane food—”
“Politicians, public transportation—” Jonah adds.
“But the important thing is to punch up, not down,” Mo says.
“What if I just don’t punch anyone?” I suggest. “I don’t really know how.”
“When I say punch up, I mean choose the right target. Look, comedy is just like being in kindergarten—”
“Yes,” Jonah agrees. “Eat lots of glue, take lots of naps, and cry when anything goes wrong.”
“You have to pick on someone your own size,” Mo says to me, ignoring him. “Someone who can take it, not the weird kid in the corner who still wets the bed.”
“This metaphor is losing me,” I tell her.
“Don’t make fun of people the world is already beating down. Save your jokes for the people and the groups that have power. Punch up.”
“Is making fun of my family punching up?” I ask.
“You’re really making fun of yourself, not your family.”
“So what’s that?”
“Masochism?” Jonah suggests.
“So, anyway—” I shift on my feet. Whoops. I can’t see Mo, but I can almost hear her, reminding me to plant myself. I try to imagine my legs like roots, tethering and steady. “I was raised here,” I continue, “in Chicago, as an only child.” I pause. “My siblings were super uncool about it.”
A longer pause, here, giving people time to get it. It takes a split second before I get the second laugh. But I don’t rest on it. Mo told me I’m not allowed to rest on the laugh. I have to keep going. “No, actually, my brother and sister are way closer to my parents than I am,” I tell the audience. “Or at least, they’re way more similar to my parents than I am.” I use my hands to show the distance between us, weigh the differences.
“They’re all really athletic.” A beat. “The strongest thing about me is my password.” A laugh.
“They’re super sociable.” A beat. “My Wi-Fi goes out more than I do.” Another laugh. “Basically, they’re all extroverted. As I’m sure you know, that just means they have a hard outer shell protecting their internal organs.”
No laughs there. Not even one. Mo said it wouldn’t land. I cringe, and die, and then breathe, and keep going.
We’re all together after a Wednesday open mic. The three of them critiqued each other’s performances first, but then the topic of conversation turned to me, and my half-written bit about me and my extrovert family.
“The internal organs thing isn’t going to land,” Mo says, and reaches to cross it out.
I frown. “But you get it, right? It’s an exoskeleton.”
“We all get it,” Will says. “Doesn’t mean people are going to laugh.”
Mo pulls her pencil back, holding her hand up in surrender. “Try it and see. That’s the only way you’ll know.”
“I think you need an anecdote now,” Will decides, and the other two nod.
“An anecdote?” I ask.
“Like a story,” Jonah says.
“Like a representative story,” Mo adds. “About you and your family.”
“I’m worried this is getting too . . . real.” I put down my pen. “If I tell a story, does it have to be a true one?”
Everyone looks at each other.
“Good comedy is real,” Mo says. “Even if it’s exaggerated, it sounds real, it feels real, that’s what makes it funny. Otherwise it’s just . . . fa
ntasy.”
“People like fantasy. Haven’t you ever seen pictures of Comic Con?”
“Please,” Will says. “I have been to Comic Con.”
I turn back to Mo. “See?”
She shakes her head, not buying it. “You’re braver than you’re acting. So what’s going on? What’s stopping you?”
I hesitate. “I’m not sure I should tell them this.”
“Who’s them?”
“The audience.”
“And why?”
“Because it is real,” I say. “This is my actual family, and my actual life, and I don’t know, it just seems so . . . personal.”
“That’s why it’ll work,” Will says gently.
Mo puts her hand on top of mine. “It took me a long time to figure this out but trust me: you can tell them anything.” I open my mouth to object, because anything? But she stops me. “Anything. All you have to do is make it funny.”
I shake my head. “I don’t even want to tell them my name.”
“Why not?” She wrinkles her forehead. “What’s your last name?”
I can’t tell her my real one. What if she looks me up? Thanks to my complete lack of extracurriculars, there aren’t any track and field scores or debate wins floating around on the internet, but still.
“Um. Van . . . Tassel.”
“Like in ‘Sleepy Hollow’?” Jonah asks slowly.
My heart skips a beat. “What?”
“Van Tassel,” he says, even more slowly. “Isn’t that the name of the lady in ‘Sleepy Hollow’?”
I gulp, because yes, that is the name of the girl in ‘The Legend of Sleepy Hollow.’ I really did just name myself after the lady who wouldn’t fuck Ichabod Crane.
“Uh . . . yeah,” I say, trying to play off my terror as vague embarrassment. “Um. The story’s fiction—I mean, obviously, but—it’s a real last name.” Which is true. Some of the Van Tassels still live in the Hudson Valley. My grandma even knows them. “My family’s been in America a really long time,” I add, which is also true, though not technically relevant. “But it doesn’t seem like a stand-up’s name, you know?”
“Isabel Van Tassel.” Mo thinks this over. “It does sound like you’re an heiress with a closet full of mink coats and three husbands who died under mysterious circumstances.”
“It sounds like you’re the villain in an eighties workplace drama,” Will says.
“It sounds like you’re a passenger on the Mayflower who later gets accused of witchcraft for cursing the neighborhood cows,” Jonah says.
I point at Mo. “Winner.”
Jonah is unwilling to accept this. “Mayflower was better.”
“What about Izzy?” Mo suggests. “Just Izzy?”
“I was kind of thinking . . .” I take a breath. “Izzy V. So it’s me, but it’s not . . . all of me.”
“Izzy V.” Mo smiles. “I love it.”
“No, obviously, my family are not insects,” I say, aware of the nervousness creeping into my voice. I’m trying to recover, but I’m just sounding panicked. “They’re more like a pack of very beautiful, very lovable golden retrievers. Except they have more than four brain cells between them.”
A small laugh. More a chuckle. But it’s not nothing, and I cling on to it.
“Like golden retrievers, they’re energetic and outgoing and they always want to be your friend.” I wait a beat, letting them know a story is coming. “My mom met her best friend on a nonstop flight from New York to San Francisco.” I wait another, letting them know they should find this as ridiculous as I do. “That’s right. A woman talked to my mom on an airplane for six straight hours, and that lady became her best friend.” I lean in, conspiratorially. “If someone tried to talk to me on a plane for six hours, that person would become my next murder victim.”
A bigger laugh, a better laugh. I don’t crack a smile, though I want to. I just nod. “Yes. I said my next murder victim.” I shrug, step back. “So, you know. Watch out.”
“When you’re performing,” Mo tells me. “Try to count those laughs, if you can.”
“Count them?”
“Not if it distracts you too much, but a five-minute set goes by like a blur. You’re aiming for about five laughs a minute, so twenty-five laughs total.”
“A laugh per minute rate,” I say. “Very scientific.”
“It’s just one metric. But try for five. Five is great.”
“Honestly, Mo, it’s all personal preference, but—” Jonah holds his hands about five inches apart. “Five is extremely average.”
“I swear to God, Jonah,” Mo says. “The only reason you do stand-up is because you get to say shit up there no one would ever tolerate if you said it on the street.”
“Oh, okay.” Jonah holds his palms up as if he’s offended, but his grin gives it away. “You want to go there?”
“Bring it,” she says.
“You only do stand-up because you’re a theater kid who couldn’t dance well enough to be on Broadway.”
“Glass houses, you dick,” she says. “I’ve seen you try to dance.”
“And Will only does it because he wants to make people happy, just like he did as the golden boy of Dental Floss, Illinois.”
“Flossmoor,” Will corrects him wearily. “You know it’s called Flossmoor.”
“I like Dental Floss better.”
“So I like to make people happy,” Will concedes. “So what? It’s nice. You should try it occasionally.”
“What about me?” I ask. All four of them turn in my direction, but no one gives an answer.
“I mean, I know I haven’t really done it a lot,” I add, feeling embarrassed for even asking. Of course no one has an answer, they’ve been friends for years and I just got here, but I wanted to feel like I was part of the group. Not an intruder, not a project, but a friend.
“You do it for the audience,” Mo says. And then leaves it there, like that tells me all it needs to.
“Doesn’t everyone?”
“Yeah, but for you . . .” She goes quiet for a moment, as if she’s trying to find just the right words.
“For me . . . ,” I prompt her.
“I think you do stand-up”—when Mo smiles, there’s a little bit of sadness in it—“because you just want to be loved.”
“I was not born a golden retriever,” I admit. “It’s kind of like—do you ever watch those videos, on the internet with unlikely animal friends?”
It’s a rhetorical question, but I act like I can see them nod, hear them say yes. “Yeah, right? Like a kitten and penguin, or a bunny and a frog, or a sloth and a . . . I don’t know, marmoset.”
I put the mic back on its stand, because I need both my hands for the next bit. “But then there’s this other subtype,” I explain, “which is animals raised by unlikely parents. You’ll see them give, like, a dog mom one miniature piglet to raise, in her litter. And then the pig grows up surrounded by dogs, so they think that’s how they’re supposed to act, too.”
I point at myself, with both thumbs. “That’s me. I’m the miniature pig.” They laugh, and so do I, because this part has to be upbeat. I have to laugh at myself so they’ll be comfortable doing it, too.
“Just like, trotting behind my majestic golden retriever family on my stubby little hooves.” I make my hand into approximate hooves and mime the stubby walk. “Just trying super hard to be a dog, even though it’s obviously not in the cards. Like—” I put on a higher-pitched, faux-enthusiastic voice. “‘Yeah, this is fun, you guys. So much fun! I love barking and fetching and running and dog stuff.’”
I pause there and, still in character as the miniature pig, hold one stubby hoof up. “‘Hey, wild thought, though: what if we just lay down in this mud for like eight hours and didn’t move at all?’” I pause, for the laugh. “‘You know, just for a change of pace?’”
“I think this is working,” Mo says as we sit on the bed in her dorm together on a rainy Saturday afternoon, and she looks over what I�
��ve written between Wednesday and now. “But you should practice, before Monday.”
“I have been practicing,” I promise her. “And watching all those comedy clips you sent me.”
“That’s great. But I meant more.” She reaches into her bag and pulls out a beaten-up mic. “With this.”
“Did you steal it from the Forest?” I ask, but accept it when she holds it out to me.
“I borrowed it from Will so you can practice holding it.”
I grip it with both hands. “I think I’m okay.”
“See, you say that, but”—she reaches over and removes my left hand—“one-handed. Not so tight. It’s an extension of you.”
But it feels cold and heavy and not like me at all. None of this is like me at all. And everyone’s going to be able to tell.
“What if I look weird?” I say. “What if I don’t do it right? What if—” I hesitate, because Mo’s going to think I’m ridiculous. Performing is as natural as breathing to her. “What if I can’t do it?”
She frowns. “What do you mean?”
I think about all the times I’ve been called on in class and froze. All the times I tried to speak at the dinner table and was talked over. All the times I’ve wanted to disagree with Alex but swallowed the words.
What if I go onstage, and I’m the same as I’ve always been?
“Sometimes I . . . clam up,” I tell Mo. “When I’m nervous. Or, I don’t know, sometimes it’s just hard to talk, and what if that happens during my set, what if I get the mic in my hand and can’t do it?”
“Breathe,” she says.
“I am.”
“No,” she says. “I mean, if that happens, onstage. Breathe. In through your nose.” Mo’s shoulder’s hitch as she takes in the air, slowly holding up one, two, then three fingers. She releases it just as gradually, removing one finger each second. “And then out, just like that. Try.”
I try. Three seconds of oxygen in, three seconds of dioxide out. My mind feels steadier. Calmer.
“If you focus on the count, you can’t worry about anything else. And then you dive right in, while you’re still feeling that release.”
“And everyone watching is perfectly aware this pig is not a dog, and so it’s that fun mixture of sweet and super pathetic. Everyone’s like”—I go for a condescending, singsong voice here—‘“Aw, look how hard she’s trying. Do you think she knows how much she doesn’t belong with them? So cute. She is going to make the most adorable sausage links.’”