by Laura Clery
But four years later, I was very sober and desperately needing a creative outlet. Too sober, one could say! I was pacing my apartment anxiously. I left and came back with a bottle of vodka. I stared at it. Either I go to an open mic, or I drink. I stared at the bottle. I was so scared to try comedy again, but the alternative was staring me in the face. I do my art or I drink.
I opened the bottle and smelled it, the harsh smell that brought with it flashes of bad memories from nights that I blacked out. I poured it down the drain, grabbed my keys, and left.
I drove deep into the valley to a random bar. I walked inside. This bar was the definition of depressing. It was western-themed, complete with bartenders in cowboy hats. I asked for a cup of water. There were four people in the audience—all of them were sad, struggling comedians waiting for their turn on the mic. None of them laughed at the guy telling jokes onstage. The better his joke, the less the audience wanted to give him the laughs. It was kind of awful.
When it was finally my turn, I walked up onstage, thankfully without the thick-rimmed glasses and monotone voice. I just told the story of my sandwich phase. You know, the phase we all go through where we get obsessed with buying homeless people sandwiches? No? Just me? Okay. When I was getting sober, it became part of my daily routine. Every day around noon, I’d find a new homeless person near my local Subway and say “Hey, can I get you a sandwich?” It wasn’t normal. I did it so often that the employees would wince every time they saw me come in.
There was one especially shy homeless guy who I had to coax into the store. I asked him if I could get him a five-dollar foot-long and he was like, “No . . . no, it’s okay.”
“Come on, seriously, it’s fine.”
“I’m not hungry.”
“Your sign literally says that you’re hungry. What can I get you?”
“Okay fine. Just a chicken sandwich.”
I walked inside, ordered, and got out my wallet to pay. The employee looked at me. “Anything else?”
The homeless guy stepped closer. “Actually yeah, can I get extra chicken, extra tomatoes, extra spinach, a side of bacon, and can you put chips on it?”
Cool, I guess he had finally come out of his shell. Now the five-dollar foot-long came to fourteen dollars.
Up onstage, I finished my story and heard laughter ring out. Holy fuck! I did WELL. For the first time! And the sweetest part was that I was just being me. I was telling the most-me story I had. One of the other comics came up afterward and said, “If you keep going, you’re going to be huge. You’ve got it.”
Holy shit, I can do this! I started doing open mics all the time. I was newly sober and just fucking doing it. I wasn’t letting fear run my life anymore. I became part of this total grind of going to bars late at night, staying until like two a.m. and performing for six other bitter comedians, honing our craft together and working our asses off. After about four months of stand-up, my agent got me a spot at The Comedy Store on a show with Natasha Leggero and some other really funny comics. Holy fuck, there I was in the place that first tore me down. But I was a lot stronger now. My sponsor came to this one. It was amazing. I did a five-minute set about this yoga instructor I had once, who called everything delicious. She even referred to her friend’s baby as “delicious.” It was weird. As I told the joke onstage, I became her as a character. I was integrating my strengths: storytelling, characters, and comedy. It worked! Someone from the TV show The League was in the audience that night, saw my character, and realized I would be great for the part of a yoga instructor on their show. They straight-up offered me the role that night. It was incredible.
But stand-up wasn’t exactly the right fit for me. It felt . . . lonely. To make matters worse, it was really difficult for me to be around all the alcohol. I had to put my sobriety first. No matter how much I liked getting laughs, stand-up wasn’t for me. There had to be another way.
Also . . . the grind takes years and it turns out, I’m not very patient. I typed into my Facebook status: There has to be a way I can reach MORE people more quickly!
One day, I was on my way home from a pilot audition and I got the call to let me know that they offered the role to Mandy Moore. Like, good for Mandy Moore. But also, why even bring me in and waste my time? I was so done with this shit. I didn’t want to be strung along. I didn’t want to be a random face they brought in to an audition to prove to Mandy Moore that this role was in high demand. I was done.
But what else could I do? I racked my brain while I walked. I remembered this girl, Porsche, who I met at a Capital One commercial. She had hit me up afterward, asking if I wanted to make something with her. I had brushed it off, not really knowing what a web series even entailed. But you know what? I wanted to create and make my own destiny.
I called her. “Hey Porsche. I’m in.”
“Hey Laura. In what?”
“Oh sorry, in the web series thing.”
“Oh right! Cool babe, let’s do it.”
Porsche is a beautiful, stunning black model who I met on a shoot where neither of us had lines. We both played runway models. I didn’t know how well we worked together or whether she was a good writer or even a sane person! I did know that I didn’t want to audition anymore—I wanted to create.
I smiled. “Fuck yeah. Come over tomorrow and we’ll write it.”
The next day she came over to our apartment.
“I had this idea to write a web series about how absurd the modeling industry is. Laura, it’s so funny.”
Ideas just started flowing. Without moving from the couch, we wrote a pilot that day. We came up with this series called Hungry about two aging, struggling models who were incredibly underqualified to do anything else. They were figuratively and literally hungry. It was the first script I finished since getting sober, and it felt so good. We pitched the show to Russell Simmons’s production company, All Def Digital, and they greenlit it. They loved it!
Russell gave us our first show. I wrote, produced, and starred in the whole first season alongside Porsche. All of a sudden I was on the other side of the casting table. I was auditioning people, and I LIKED it. This was where I wanted to be, dude. I get to create the characters and write and act? I’m never doing that other bullshit again. I felt like a fish in water. We got King Bach to direct. At the time, he was this up-and-coming YouTuber with fifty thousand followers! (Now he has like twenty million.) After it was posted, we had an automatic reach to All Def’s one-hundred-thousand subscribers.
It was my first taste of making something and having it SEEN.
It was weird. I went from network TV to YouTube. It wasn’t glamorous and the money definitely wasn’t there, but I didn’t care. I was finally doing what I wanted to be doing. To make things better, it was received well. Before, I had wanted more than anything to be on the next Friends, but now . . . I was doing YouTube. And I felt so fulfilled.
My goals had shifted. I didn’t feel the need to be on a sitcom anymore. I just wanted to make as many people laugh as possible. THAT was my goal. I wanted to be creative and have my creativity bring other people joy.
I pulled out my laptop and the camera that Stephen bought me. My next project would be called “Product of a Sperm Donor.” The premise was this: A man had donated his sperm 173 times and he had 173 children all over the world. I wanted to interview them all. Each video was going to be an interview between me and one of the half siblings.
First of all, why 173? I chose a really high goal for my first project. It should have been thirty, tops. I think I made twelve and then I was like . . . okay, that’s enough. The twelve interviews were cool, though. Since they were half siblings, they could all look similar and I could play them all. But they could also be from different countries and I could try out a wide range of characters.
It was the first thing I ever posted online. And no one watched it. I think the one comment was from my mom: “Great job, honey!”
I kept posting videos . . . and then deleting them. I was
afraid of putting myself out there. Sure I had acted a thousand times on TV and in commercials and I had done Hungry, which was seen by a hundred thousand people, but all of those things were under other people’s names. I had never spoken for myself before. I had never built my own brand. What if people hated it?
That morning I called my sponsor, Kristal.
“I’m really scared. I’m scared to build my own brand. What if people hate me? What if they hate what I have to say? Or worse, what if they don’t care?”
Kristal sighed. “Laura. You’re an artist. You make art. Stay in the action and out of the results.”
It just clicked for me when she said that. I needed to do what I believed to be my purpose on this earth. I needed to create. It wasn’t about the results. It was about the action!
I called my agents and told them to stop sending me out on auditions. I was done. They had been sending me out all the time for pilots, movies, and guest spots. It was taking too much energy from me, and 90% of the time I wouldn’t get anything. Why not take all that time and create content my own way? From there, I just shot and shot and shot. I kept posting new characters and new ideas. Who cared if no one was watching? I was walking through my fear—this fear that I carried with me for my entire life. Stephen started to get involved too. He was scoring Transformers AND my Instagram videos. I would ask him to be in my videos and he would. He was so supportive. He would get into character without fear and took direction so well. We would just shoot and laugh. I posted a video a day for a year. I was throwing everything at the wall and seeing what stuck.
This was the time when Vine and fifteen-second Instagram videos were the language of the internet. I kept posting and posting to build that muscle and figure out what people wanted to see and what worked. I just had an idea and posted it. I was obsessed, but thankfully at the time, Stephen’s career was taking off as well. He was making enough money that I could create without worrying about the next bill. I was so grateful for this freedom.
As I stopped worrying and started putting my true self online . . . people started to take notice, and my following grew a bit. Having a small following is like having a few trading cards in your pocket. I started to put myself around other content creators and collaborate with them. We would feature each other’s work or shoot with each other to expand our followings and get our names out there.
I noticed that all the creators at All Def were collabing with each other, so I inserted myself among them. It was so fun. Every day was just shooting videos and hanging out.
“I’ll shoot your video if you shoot mine!”
“I’ll shout you out if you shout me out.”
The best part of creating videos and film in general is that you truly can’t do it alone. You need other people to act and populate the world you’re creating. At the very least, you need someone to hold the camera and press record for you. Collabing helped us all build our followings.
At the end of my year of posting one video a day, things slowed down a little for me. My following stayed consistent, but it wasn’t growing anymore. Collabing started to be less effective because all the creators I knew were already in the same circles, sharing the same following.
Something needed to change. For some reason, I felt like the change had to come from within me.
I grew up with the mindset that there was never enough, life was hard, and you took what you could get. That mindset stayed with me, and I had been so negatively focused for a long time. I constantly thought about losing what I had. What ifs filled my mind. What if I lost my job? What if no one watched this video? What if I wasn’t funny? I’d had positive goals in the past, but they were so mundane: I hope that I can make rent this month. I hope that I can book at least a commercial this week. Whatever I focused on I could achieve, but I was consistently focusing on the bare minimum I needed to survive. What if I thought bigger?
I started getting into the Law of Attraction. All the aspects of the Law of Attraction are pretty far out there, but what I took from it is this: rather than focusing on what you don’t want, focus on what you do want. Don’t be afraid to dream as big as you want. What you are thinking, what you tell yourself, can manifest. The concept was so mind-blowing to me, I started saying affirmations to myself every morning:
I am going to make millions of people laugh around the world on a consistent basis. I am going to have a successful career.
Then I took it further. I wasn’t “going” to have these things. I wanted them to exist in the present:
I am so happy and grateful that I am making millions of people laugh with my videos.
I tried to shift my perception of myself as well:
I am smart. I am perfect as I am. I am enough. I am worthy.
It sounds cheesy, I know, but I had to do it. I had been depressed and thinking negatively of myself for as long as I could remember. Before this, I was writing in my journal, “I’m nothing. I should die. I don’t deserve to live.” These were the things that I thought about myself enough to actually write them down repeatedly in the yellow spiral notebook. Why the hell was I putting energy into that? Before I didn’t know how to stop, but now I had figured it out. I spoke to myself every day to retrain my brain:
I am no better and no worse than anyone else. I am worthy. I am happy.
With a new sense of self underway, I honed in on my goal. I wanted to make millions of people laugh all around the world. That was my new affirmation:
I’m making millions of people laugh all around the world.
I would picture people from all over the world watching my videos and laughing and feeling good because of something I did. It started to change the way I looked at my purpose, because I could give something to people. They might be anxious or depressed, and I could give them some goofy videos and make them laugh for a minute. For that one minute, they could forget their problems. I think that is amazing!
My affirmation was the first thing I would say in the morning, every single day. On the tenth day of saying that . . . I had my first viral video. The view count went up and up and up . . . until it was getting millions of views . . . being shared all over the world! I was literally making millions of people laugh all around the world. The video was of my Ivy character speaking to the camera in a breathy voice:
“Hey guys, it’s me. Just wanted to remind you to never give up on your dreams. Like even if you want to. Just don’t.”
I thought it was so funny to have this out-of-touch character be the one trying to motivate people. The only problem was that in my affirmation, I didn’t specify that the world would know who I was. The video was disconnected from me, reposted, and shared by millions of people who thought this character was a real person. I was honored! My performance was believable!
One morning I sprang out of bed with an idea. I nudged Stephen awake.
“Stephen. I have an idea. Will you film me cooking breakfast?”
Stephen was barely awake. “Who? What?”
I stared down at him intensely, amped up on ideas. “If I throw toast at you, just keep filming, okay?”
Stephen rubbed his eyes and rolled out of bed. “All right.”
We walked into the kitchen and I did this repressed Southern housewife character who has a cooking show but can’t stand her husband who’s filming it. She’s trying to teach the audience how to cook avocado toast, and meanwhile is bordering on killing her husband. This was the birth of my Pamela Pumpkin character. I showed it to a big YouTube-based production company and they picked it up as a series. I got to write, produce, and act in my second show. It was an incredible time of creative growth. I was trusting my intuition and shooting whatever I could think of. Four years earlier, this idea would have just died a lonely death in one of my journals next to the words: “I’m a piece of shit.”
Now I was no longer afraid to fail. I realized that people liked what I had to offer and I wasn’t delusional. I had something to give and I wanted to keep giving.
It
was incredible to look out and see what I had accomplished. When I was doing stand-up open mics, I was reaching six people every time I performed. With digital content, I could reach hundreds of thousands of people, and I didn’t even have to put on pants! If I framed the shot right, I didn’t have to wear clothes at all! I didn’t have to stay up until two a.m. every night at bars across Los Angeles; I didn’t have to be around tons of drunk people and alcohol and drugs.
If stand-up had been the only way to be a creator, if there were no social media or online video sharing, I would have stuck with it. But I found this softer way to do what I love, which I happen to be good at. It just makes sense. This is right for me.
I kept growing, and I got a DM from the head of Kevin Hart’s production company.
“Kevin Hart’s a big fan. He wants you to create content for him.”
Um, what? Kevin Hart knows who I am?
“Come in for a meeting!”
Um, WHAT? Okay! A few days later I went to his production company and Kevin Hart was standing there. “You’re hilarious. I love your work. I’m creating a comedy app and I want you to create sketches for me.”
*Screams into the abyss*
UM WHAAAAATTTTTT—
I wrote, directed, produced, and starred in thirty sketches for him. It wasn’t much money, but it didn’t matter. It was Kevin-fucking-Hart. He was a fan of mine? It gave me so much confidence.
After that, opportunities started knocking at my door. Brands were asking me to promote their products, and I finally started making steady money from my art. I would get new opportunities here and there. I finally knew who I was and I was solid. I had fully transitioned from actor to content creator.
It really sounds cheesy but those affirmations are what lifted me over the edge. I swear by them. I had such a rigid self-image before, and the only things that could break the cycle of self-hate were intentional, affirming statements. I’ve been depressed, anxious, and suicidal for much of my life, and this is what has turned it around for me. My brain has said so many mean things to me. I never want my brain to talk to me in THAT TONE AGAIN. You hear me, Brain?