Use EVERYTHING!!! Mic #23
February 19, 2015
2/19/2015
Yesterday morning I had a verbal altercation during my morning commute-specifically, during my transfer from the cattle car that is the L train to the downtown 1 line. Needless to say, I was not dealing with a gentleman, and he really brought out the growling tiger in me.
Most of my day was spent nursing an emotional hangover from the incident, but then a friend gave me the following suggestion: “See the gift in it.”
“What?”
“Seriously. Marinate on it, maybe you’ll get some material out of it.”
“That’s stupid ” was my immediate thought, and then it came to me, “YES! I can make a joke out of this d^os%$#bag. I can use this experience!” Suddenly, his euphoric “Stupid B&*!H” grunt became something of value. Pure alchemy. Thank you, d*&kwad, wherever you are!
The best thing about starting off my 5 min slot with this is that it really focused my energy, and gave me something to be excited about. I was the second to the last person to go up — 1.5 hour mic — super low energy. The comic before me had actually started belittling the audience because we weren’t laughing at their jokes.
C-mon.
All the while, my stomach churned and I felt like I wanted to retch, but I’d already overcome a day’s worth of resistance, and bailing out was no longer an option.
So I went for silly, and when my name was called, bounced up to the stage and started making wacky sound effects as my introduction, then I jumped into the bit about my morning. Totally loosened me up, and it seemed to pick up the energy in the room as well. I got some laughs, and one guy near the front appeared to be nearly choked with laughter.
YIPPIE!
Then a bizarre thing started happening — I found myself wishing they’d cut their laughter shorter—so I could get on with telling the story I wanted to tell —similar to the experience at Naked Angels when I read the story about my visit to Dr. Applebee, my proctologist.
xoxo
KK