By Claire McFadden
It started off as all bits do, by tossing flaming shit into a void to see what blows back up in your face.
Trying stand up emerged as a vague, idealistic notion in my early twenties. I enjoyed reading and writing humor essays, but sharing my bits out loud rather than from behind the comfort of my pencil seemed an endeavor for a grander and wiser fabrication of my future self. Stand up seemed out of reach, although it was and had always been, resting on a nearby shelf.
The night I met him, I sat below in the dark swamp of the crowd. He stood on the stage, bathed in eyes and light. He made me laugh, along with the rest of the room.
He was a stand up comic, and I was infatuated. After a few Instagram DMs I hung out with him. However, it didn’t take long to realize it wasn’t him I found mesmerizing, but rather the road he tread upon.
It kept me up at night; the vision of a path paved by stand up comedy gigs, howling crowds, late nights, and chaotic stories.
But that couldn’t possibly be waiting down my path, could it? To hold the presence of a room… surely it would slip through my shaking hands, and shatter upon the floor in a dramatic fashion after I attempted to lift it up for others to see.
A growing resentment for my newfound comedian friend didn’t come without reason. He treated me like a groupie. Due to the way we met, I felt hesitant to rummage around my thoughts and grasp onto indignance.
“You’re my little slut,” he’d jeer during sex. Hours later, wrapped in the blanket of my own bed, I’d curl my knees to my chest and hold them close with arms that trembled from the bone cold realization that he meant it. I’d stare at the blank wall and project a kafkaesque kaleidoscope of self belief that I was good for one thing and one thing only.
Blame it on the patriarchy, Disney Princess movies, the Barbie franchise, my catholic upbringing, or a hodgepodge of the above, but I internalized the notion that as a woman my appearance and bottomless ability to appease others is my rightful place while entering any room. I grew to accept my space as reserved for a capacity to nod along and listen with a smile stretched across my (god willing) blemish-less face. The corner of any place was supposed to be for my effortlessly flawless figure to sit there and applaud those who found freedom in motion, spinning circles around the rest of the cavernous room.
Could I dare try stand up comedy, and scrape sharply discrete fingernails against the only grain I’ve ever known?
I saw him perform onstage one time, and left with a flaming little shit of a thought igniting burnt-out wires in my brain.
I think I might be funnier than this guy.
Why the fuck not me? What relief was found in simply allowing those words to billow out in the open air. Individually, those words meant nothing. Strung clumsily together like a kindergartener’s macaroni necklace, they meant everything.
The first time I threw myself off the edge and tried stand up was notable, but I don’t consider it my entrance into comedy. I wasn’t yet ready to make my exit from that which held me back.
The night before my first set, I convinced myself and my friends that came to watch me perform it was all simply an impulsive endeavor to experience everything once.
I practiced all evening in my kitchen, pacing across scuffed up tiles and talking into a wooden spoon.
My first set may as well have occurred in The Truman Show, and passed as a peek into an alternate, made up reality. Six of my friends showed up to support me; it was a parade, a circus! One of us was clowning around for the world to see, or at least twenty people in the world who happened to be in a second floor, dimly lit bar at midnight on a random Thursday night.
All of those childhood years hiding in the Church bathroom while my family sat in the chapel must’ve still brought me enough good graces that my first stand up set was a hit.
I told a story about a tinder date who pretended to try to suck his own dick the first night we went home together. I did a full act out onstage, and laid on the floor to contort myself into a wheelbarrow position that awakened the glazed over eyes of the open mic audience.
I bought a round of shots for my friends afterwards, and the cheap tequila expedited the spread of my accomplishment through my veins. I did it.
For a few months, I hovered around the door of the Philly stand up comedy scene. Every couple of weeks I’d find the mettle to return to an open mic. I’d have to invite a friend ahead of time to join me, in order to hold myself accountable from chickening out.
Then something strange began to happen. At the end of a long work day, I’d find my feet stalling on the walk home. I’d turn around, and head to an open mic.
It was a gradual entrance into a new world of fellow misfit friends, as well as a skittish departure from that confined space in the corner I’d clung to so long. The first couple months of trying stand up comedy, I’d nearly blackout every time onstage from nerves.
The nightcrawler navigating my thoughts pinned my eyes to the floor during my sets, especially in front of other male comedians. I was terrified of looking up and finding myself peering into a mirror through their eyes, and seeing what I couldn’t let go of believing. Who does she think she is?
I knew others wouldn’t fully trust me onstage until I believed they should, but for a while I still couldn’t look up.
Until something caught my attention.
It happened at an open mic that resembled a lopsided middle school dance; thirty male comedians standing with their backs to the wall, and four female comedians sticking together in the corner.
As the show began, the fidgets of my worried hands gave away what the years-forged steel in my eyes would not.
It was a Thursday night, and the audience was drinking. A few comedians riled the room up to the tipping point of a madhouse. The front row seats were occupied by heckling wolves, starving for a fight.
Part of me wanted to run away, and the other part wouldn’t be able to bear it if I did. I watched as five, ten, fifteen male comedians walked up to the stage, did their set, and walked off to get another beer.
About an hour and a half in, the other women in my corner put their heads together.
“That guy went up, and I know I signed up before him… I’ve never even seen him at an open mic before,” a well regarded comedian said.
There is the understood rule in stand up that comics who’ve put in the time and established their name often get bumped up in the line up ahead of greener performers. Yet, as the mic went on and a random audience member signed up and immediately appeared afterward onstage, it became apparent the female comedians had been repeatedly bumped back.
The nerves previously trickling through my veins were drowned by a flood of rage. The wolves upfront no longer made me want to run away.
Feed me to the fucking wolves, I thought. Even if they tore me to shreds, I’d fall apart standing.
Suddenly, my name was called.
I walked up to the mic, my bated breath cracking my lips with anticipation.
I dove into my set, and looked up the entire time. I looked at the straggling couple of male comedians left in the back. I looked at the female comics in the corner. I watched the bartenders stack end-of-night glasses. I looked at the wolves in the front.
And I watched them laugh.
“My name’s Claire McFadden, thanks so much!” I put the mic back in the stand at the end of my time.
The other female comedians had migrated to an empty table in the middle of the room. I walked to sit down next to them.
I looked up to the corner of the room. It was empty.
Leave a comment