Make 'em Laugh

Comedy class took place in 2 1/2 hour sessions over five weeks, culminating in a graduation comedy show. The class consisted of twelve men between the ages of 18 and middle 40's and me. Professor Matarese, as he likes to be called, is a friendly guy from Cherry Hill, New Jersey whose star is rising as a national headliner and he's appeared several times as a guest on Chelsea Lately. He also has a radio podcast called Fixin' Joe; the premise is that he is a nervous, neurotic community college grad married to a Ph.D in Psychology and he lives in fear that he can't live up to his imagined expectations as  husband, father and family provider. He poses a question every week concerning his personal life, ie. whether he is he capable of caring for a second child (his son, Luke is three or four) and asks listeners to call in and propose how to "fix" him.  His comebacks are swift and self-effacing.

The first few minutes of the first class were as uncomfortable as any class where perfect strangers come together; this one may have been even more uncomfortable since we were asserting tacitly that we had it in us to make other people laugh. We knew that each of us would be the judge of that since we were required to perform on stage in class every week. During the first session, we practiced disconnecting the microphone from the stand, moving the stand aside and speaking into the microphone so that our voices would come across with the right volume and clarity. Joe called us up one by one and asked us questions about ourselves; he was trying to sense what made each of us tick, how we articulated that information and whether we, in fact, were funny.

I've never minded talking about myself and, after so many years as an attorney, I was confident I would be comfortable on a stage. But it's not the story you tell; it's the way you tell it. I knew I could tell an amusing tale, but a comedian has to make the audience laugh or he (or in this case, she) is dead on the vine. At this point, though, we weren't going for the guffaw. Joe listened.  After listening to me, Joe thought my best approach was misdirection--leading the audience to think that my story was going in one direction and then veering in another. I left the class with confidence that I could do this if I figured out how to make 'em laugh.

Joe expected us to go home and write material, bring it in and perform it every week.  Joe did not teach joke writing in class; he gave private lessons for that. Rather, he taught us to improve on the material we had.  We had to be speak for five minutes and listen to him and the other class members' critique our writing and performances.  The comments always were kind and constructive; not once was "Go home, you suck" uttered although there was good reason to say it and better reason to hear it.  We practiced the same material week after week, tweaking punch lines, adding tag lines, eliminating a lot of garbage but keeping some of the black banana peels.

Profanity is pervasive in comedy because curse words are verboten in polite society.  The extremes of word usage are how you speak in court and what you say on stage at a comedy club. Some comedians work "clean" but it is very hard and hardly heard.  On a scale from 1 to 10 for your average 55 year old  white female,  with 1 a bespectacled nun and 10  your average girl truckdriver, I put myself at a solid 6 in my day-to-day parlance.  On some days, when I stub my toe, forget a doctor's appointment
or step on the scale after eating a six slices of pizza, I am an undisputed 10.  My first jokes were laced with "fuck" and all of it's various permutations and my stories came straight from my dirty mind ; I knew I could get a laugh if I made myself a slut to bad language and venal thoughts.  The guys in the class, including Joe,  ate it up and encouraged me to continue in that vein. When I tried to do the same jokes without profanity one week, everyone insisted that I put it back in.  I prepared for graduation, the topic of my next entry.