One bi man’s journey into his comedic identity

I’ve always been not so great at beginnings. Whether it’s adapting to a new place, writing a script or starting a new relationship — or as I’ve recently discovered — writing a joke, I struggle to get settled as quickly as I’d like, or immerse my audience into what I describe. But maybe this struggle with setup is a good thing. As I’ve also recently discovered, if one doesn’t know what will come next, it becomes much easier to laugh.

Over the past month, I’ve joined a stand-up comedy club at the University of Michigan, begun working on jokes and am surprised as anyone about it. I’ve enjoyed watching stand-up, albeit casually, since my early days in high school when a friend and aspiring comedian introduced me to 2016 John Mulaney. He was quirky and irreverent. He hated himself. He sometimes took awkwardly long steps and strode dizzyingly across the stage. One thought he might fall off the edge and he’d somehow be even more magnetic if he did. He radiated a nervous energy that was desperate for our approval, yet more than charming enough to receive it. I never thought I’d be like him. Mulaney and every comedian I saw after, usually first at this friend’s house, whether the theatrics of Gabriel Iglesias or Kevin Hart, the contrarianship of Bill Burr or Taylor Tomlinson, the storytelling of Dave Chappelle or Sebastian Maniscolo, or the ideologies of Aziz Ansari or Jerod Carmichael, seemed so big no matter the size of their many stages. They were performers.

I’ve never thought of myself as a performer, or even an un-italicized stylization of the word. I’m pursuing an interdisciplinary theater degree in the School of Music, Theatre and Dance with an emphasis on writing and production. I hate learning lines. I’m usually terrible on the spot. My charisma depends greatly on my comfort. I can be, some might say uncharacteristically, shy. But last semester, for another Daily article on stand-up, Tyler Shotlis — the head of Amateur Hour Stand-Up — mentioned that one needs to be a bit introverted to do stand-up, as so much of the art depends on what you observe (and introverts tend to be quite good at this). This quote didn’t make the article, but it did catch my attention.

As I’ve grown older, I increasingly see my role as a creative writer to be one of an observer, both of self and others. Although I produce fiction, inspiration from the world around me has always been my closest collaborator. For the first time, I saw myself in those performers. The day I wrote my first joke, the lead I crafted was somehow both too labored and entirely missing. It was trying too hard to be clever. It was too daunting a task for the first try. Observing the notion that the United States has always been a country of thoughts and prayers alongside FDR’s government’s decision to turn around boats of Jewish refugees from the Holocaust may be interesting, but it needed significant support to be transformed into a joke.

A semester ended and a new one began. I signed up for Tyler’s club, a space for learning stand-up comedians to practice and perform. I needed a bit more joy and playfulness in my life. I saw one of their shows late in the fall for my article. I remembered it as both so much more than and nothing but a lot of fun, a space dedicated to laughter that seemed entirely wonderful. After seeing that Amateur Hour performance, what I didn’t expect was a club so serious about laughter. Every Wednesday night, few more than 10 people would gather on the third floor of Mason Hall and perform comedy bits for each other. Through every careful listen to another’s joke, every lengthy discussion of delivery, structure and effect, I found a group of people that made being “the class clown” their craft.

In this atmosphere of earnest screwballing, I got to work. What most people ask when I mention that I’ve started doing stand-up is whether it’s nerve-racking. The answer is a resounding yes: It’s terrifying. My throat dries up. I find my gaze fixed on my phone where I’ve written my joke ideas, or toward the back wall. There are many things worse in this world to experience than telling a joke and being met with blank stares, but when you find yourself in that awkward position, it sure doesn’t feel like it. A good stand-up must be comfortable with failure, and remember that there’s always an opportunity with the next joke to leave their audience in stitches.

To write a good joke, one needs to develop an understanding of exactly who’s telling it. Many comedians will call this their “stand-up persona” — the character they present as on stage. Often, this character will be inspired by how the comedian perceives themselves outside of comedy, but will likely not strictly adhere to any one source. If a comedian presented their comedy as purely as themselves, the set would likely be very boring. Not often are people’s lives that original. However, the success of a set relies on the illusion of a truthful comedian. We must buy into the persona, no matter how exaggerated, as genuine — or most of the act risks falling flat.

When one discusses persona, one must also discuss identity. To some extent, a stand-up comedian has an uncommon autonomy over their public image, from positive traits that build relationships with the audience to negative traits to laugh at. From stand-up’s origins in early 20th century Vaudeville, to the emergence of names like Dick Gerggory, Elaine May, Richard Pryor and Joan Rivers, representation has meant more than seeing a greater diversity of faces on stage. Comedians have often brought an aspect of their identities to their material, shifting and commenting on popular understandings of their backgrounds.

Laughter can be a great way to mediate the friction of different perspectives. In my own small way, I subconsciously took after comedy’s histories of perspective. As I wrote my first few jokes for the club, I quickly discovered that in a room of mostly straight, white men, I was drawn to the “queerest,” most flamboyant version of myself as my stand-up persona. I figured that if I was already bold enough to go up in front of near strangers and tell jokes, to be unapologetic in my queerness wouldn’t be all that more overwhelming. Besides, the group needed variety.

Although I identify as bisexual, I often feel a need to both perform both straightness and queerness, depending on context — what I believe to be a common experience among queer identities. As I navigated the pressures around how one presents themselves in straight and gay spaces, I can write with full confidence that I didn’t consider performing an ultra-gay comedy persona of myself in front of a room of straight comedians as any type of release. The most wonderful quality of any artistic performance is the permission to change and change again for an audience. For instance, in one’s everyday life, there are few and far in between reasons to try on different accents. When performing artistically, especially in a genre as fluid as stand-up, one needs reasons to not try as many accents as possible. By playing around with how to present in performance settings, we can feel a greater ease with our presentations of identity in our everyday lives. In this context, I don’t feel the need to worry if I’m “too gay” or “too straight.” By choosing to present as a more stereotypical gay male, I’m reminded that performing can also be a lot of fun as long as I choose the terms of my expectations.

Some may query about the implications in choosing to stylize myself as a persona that plays with a stereotype. Especially given that my primary audience at meetings are straight men, I found myself sitting with questions surrounding my social responsibility to an increasingly vulnerable queer community. Firstly, I observed in myself that nothing felt wrong with my comedy, no matter the persona. Searching deeper through my notes app entry of jokes, most of my queer content subverts the expectations of a feminine man, or finds comedy in digging deeper as to why these tropes exist in the first place. Thus, a somewhat stereotypical queer man acts as both a sensible (and sometimes ironic) figure to impart these jokes onto an audience. The persona informs the comedy while subtly advocating for his right to be all of who he is. But, not everyone can express their queerness for fear of persecution or discrimination.

Unexpectedly, the freedom in my stand-up routine occurs in front of many straight men. While these straight men are perfectly nice, I don’t attribute my lack of inhibition in my stand-up to any of their qualities, or even the culture of the club. Rather, I attribute it to a naughtiness embedded in the history of the craft. Whether it’s Lenny Bruce’s many arrests for “obscene” material in the highly moralistic 1950s and early ’60s, or John Stewart’s often unpopular criticisms of American wars in the Middle East while on “The Daily Show” during the early 2000s, stand-up loves to be a provocateur in the face of a dominant culture. While for some this may seem to be the quickest way to kill a career, Lenny Bruce and John Stewart were widely popular comedians in their prime, and still today keep intact rich legacies as comedians who reshaped the genre. The reality of their comedic style is that, with a clever enough joke, it doesn’t matter for most whether one’s own beliefs are the punchline — especially if the comedian establishes with their audience a little bit of humor can be found in everybody’s life tenets.

The subject of my jokes, as I continue to develop my craft, is not explicitly political enough to provoke. In the subject of my jokes, I do have an inclination to venture into what, for some, is very sensitive. The downside of this comedic style is that the jokes have to be very good to pull it off. If one loses their audience over a sensitive subject, it will be very difficult to pull them back. Often, in navigating sensitivity, I find it best for myself to be the first and last punchline. Besides, my grandmother always said that one of the most important skills in life is to learn to laugh at oneself. She said that humans have a tendency to create a lot of suffering for themselves from an unjustified sense of narcissism.

We are drawn to particular jokes for a reason, both as audience members and writers. Maybe I make fun of myself because of the values my grandmother instilled in me. I think I approach sensitive subjects in my comedy because social causes have always been a part of what I create, from stageplays to Daily articles like this one. I care deeply about the fights against bigotry in our society — thus, it reflects in my work.

In an environment for political discourse as divided as what modern Americans experience, it can be difficult to grasp onto a provocative stance that the other side of the political equation doesn’t find perfectly sound. I recall a bit from Bill Burr that muses on how liberals frame their abortion argument. While he clarifies at the beginning of the bit that he’s always been pro-choice, conservative influencers have spliced up the video and used it to support a legitimate argument to take away abortion rights. In front of a conservative crowd, instead of my budding stand-up persona being read as ironic, I’m afraid it’d be perceived as a representation of a queer person who’s second-class to heterosexuals. I’d be afraid that some portions of my jokes could be repurposed to advocate for ideologies that I don’t believe, some of which I even perceive as dangerous. Context matters greatly for a stand-up set. As clips are put on social media, one loses control over the context of their audience and as a result can lose the intended effect of the bit. Sometimes, the group at Amateur Hour doesn’t match the intended audience for all of my comedy. However, in front of a club of comedians, this aspect of comedy is generally understood.

In an ideal world, now that I’ve sorted out who’s (persona) performing the set about what (subject), I can actually write the jokes. In reality, this process between who, what and actual writing is much more fluid and difficult to untangle. But this article takes place in an ideal world, and so this last section details joke writing. I’ve had the entire room laughing and I’ve also bombed at club meetings. I’ve poorly told a good joke, discovered a joke wasn’t nearly as funny as I thought it was in my head, been surprised as parts of a joke received bigger laughs than I anticipated. Every joke feels like nothing but a concept until the first time it’s told. While a compelling stand-up persona and zany combination of subject matters set up a joke, it’s the punchline that sells it.

Conversely, no punchline can support itself without a persona and a setup of the subject. Drawing on my background as a soccer player, the punchline is the shot that ends the sequence of play. This shot may be saved by the goalkeeper, score a goal or miss the net entirely. Everything leading up to that shot — dribbles, passes, the runs of various teammates — create the setup. Drawing on my background as a musician, the punchline is the note that resolves a musical phrase while the note right before it, typically the note of most tension, works as the tipping point within the setup.

Every joke requires a different amount of setup. If that setup runs too long or too short, one loses the weight of the joke. I found a lot of this work to be intuitive. One can feel when the setup goes on too long. The stand-up becomes boring while the audience waits to laugh. When there’s too little setup, the audience becomes confused. As I’ve begun to learn the craft, I often found my jokes in the former category — I overuse the setup.

To some extent, one can’t judge the punchline of a joke until one finds the right balance within the setup. Regarding punchlines, I’m not entirely sure where they come from and have yet to find any guide on how to write them beyond a few well-meaning generalities. Like many facets of creativity, if one places too many rules on writing punchlines, they will become impossible to write. Generally, the more surprising the punchline, the funnier. One just has to justify its relationship to the setup.

It’s too early in my journey with stand-up to identify whether I’m prone to any particular method of joke writing. Sometimes I’ve written the punchline first and constructed the setup around it. Sometimes I’ve constructed jokes as a stream of consciousness. I keep writing until I reach a punchline. Sometimes multiple possibilities for a direction of a joke jumble into my head as I write. In this situation, usually, I write them all down one after the other and cut later on.

As the punchline releases the setup from the tension it builds, I liken punchlines to a type of healing practice. After all, its clinically proven laughter is the best medicine. As someone who has an inclination to humor that may prickle some sensitivities, I sometimes worry over what that laughter may perpetuate. I’ve found I need an intimate understanding of my joke’s intention and their most likely effects to do stand-up that I can be sure to be proud of.

Maybe the jokes that touch on our sensitivities can be the most healing. As the joke-teller, the permission to be more flamboyant than I ever am — while cracking up at the eccentricities and tightropes that sometimes accompany one’s queer identity — has made me feel more at home in my queerness than any number of “queer firsts” have. It’s been a privilege to laugh, chuckle, snigger, cackle and roar about it. That has been powerful for me. As queer comics become more visible in the stand-up scene, I hope for more queer people to see themselves in the mainstream of laughter and find themselves in on the joke instead of as its outcasts.

Statement Correspondent Nate Sheehan can be reached at nsheehan@umich.edu.

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