on college, comedy, and camaraderie

When I was eighteen I talked myself into going far away for college, to the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. They offered some decent financial aid, and I had romantic notions of reinventing myself whole along with some family history in North Carolina that made it seem like a less drastic step than it was.

But oblivious, I moved into Hinton James Hall and waved goodbye to my parents, my college experience impatiently beckoning. I woke up that first night, oppressively mugged by the lack of air conditioning in late August, at five in the morning in a bed lofted six feet off the ground, and decided to get up for a glass of water. I chose to just hop down instead of climbing, and managed to slip, fall, and fracture my right wrist by way of a pratfall that only gets more hilarious in retrospect.

After a panicked wait and an embarrassing trip to the student health center, I ended up with a cast on my arm for the next month and a half. I went to classes but I couldn't take notes. I became a point of conversation to everyone I met; too guileless to invent a cover story, I had inadvertently reinvented myself as the boy that fell out of bed.

It was too much: I hit the panic button, which for me involved staying in my room for two months, watching a bunch of downloaded Family Guy episodes over and over (this was 2002) and tracking the Pittsburgh Pirates latest doomed season on internet message boards. I wasn't a new person, I was the same kid I had always been, green and afraid and painfully shy, and the visions of academia I had were blinked out of existence. Like Little Nemo, I woke up on the floor in the real world and just wanted to go back to sleep.

So I went home, to Milwaukee, and I went to the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, which is by all accounts a fine school, but not much of a college. There aren't old buildings with stately pillars, sartorially fussy deans shaking their fists at belligerent fraternity members, or even that many dorms and places to sit on the lawn at UWM. I got an education, and I made a few friends, but I never shook the feeling that I had missed out on something.

It's not that I've ever wanted to get drunk on a regular basis, or sing a fight song for some sports team I don't care about, or organize a mass prank, or something. But I had always imagined a sort of middle stage between childhood and adulthood that entailed becoming part of a vague society of the aimlessly enrapt, of being forced into the trenches with my peers and having that post-adolescent confusion in common at the very start.

Obviously I should have gone to a liberal arts college in the middle of nowhere, fallen in love with the wrong girl, spray painted a statue of the school founder, gotten in a mild tussle with some townies once I was drinking age, join several extracurricular groups and get all of my romantic notions and thirst for mild debauchery out of my system, but this was not meant to be.

Instead I found comedy nine years later.

Here is what I do these days, I walk into about a half dozen bars and comedy clubs and sundry venues of other types and I say hello to someone. And the person they're standing next to. And usually the bartender, and three other people over there, and then another person that was facing away when I walked past claps me on the shoulder.

There are a dozen places or so we all do comedy regularly, and different people come to each one. It is not unlike going to different classes within a major. We study the same things, talk about the same concepts, and bitch about the same people and problems. I have made faster friends than ever before, and it's because we all have something in common, and it's the nameless confusion that I expected so long ago, forced into words by a narrow social pool and the compulsion to speak that comics have by nature.

I realized, talking to other comics on Tuesday, that I can count the non-comedy friends I've made here on less than one hand. It's not intentional, but it's as if comedians treat everyone else like the locals that know they'll be gone in a few years. Comedy is like a perpetual college experience, regardless of age or life experience.

Maybe it means none of us have grown up entirely, but I'm starting to think that's a sham proposition in the first place. After dedicating myself to stand up, I found myself all but compelled this time to move somewhere new, but not to reinvent myself so much as expand outward for the first time. It's easy to speak louder and invent faster, to take longer strides with an entire class of peers everywhere I find myself compelled to go.

With any luck, I won't step off the bed and fall back to reality this time.

on madness

Tuesday night someone asked me why I got into stand up in the first place.

It used to be easy to answer that. Making people laugh. Creating something. The challenge, the thrill. But at this point, he may as well have asked why I got into breathing or some such thing.

This is what I do, it's just that simple. It stops mattering why, it stops mattering where and when (as long as it's anywhere and soon), you don't worry about being rewarded financially or emotionally. You just do it.

Comedy is life, and life is hilarious. It's beautiful, and simple, and the rest is a backdrop. I need to sleep more, get a job, communicate better with others, exercise, be a better adult in general. But I've got this thing, these ideas and words and moments I replicate at least five times a week, and if you need to ask why, then it's probably not the thing for you.

This year I've made friends faster than I've ever made friends, because it's easier to talk to people if they live inside the same sort of madness that you do. And Austin, at least for these first six weeks, seems like city that doesn't need to ask me why.

on Austin (month one)

I got here a month and two days ago. Let's bullet point my new life:

-Austin has a lot of comedy. And a lot of comedians. Lots of them are super-talented, nearly all of them are super-nice. There are open mics every night but Sunday, there are showcases all over, there are sketch groups and Improv theaters and underground happenings, and this is all in an incredibly hot July- without the vast majority of the UT-Austin students in town to attend things. I am excited for the future.

-Austin is HOT. This is obvious, I know. But it is extreme. August has come sweltering in at 107 every day.

-Austin is geographically odd- it is kind of a grid, but turned 45 degrees. And there are no hard and fast rules within the grid- the numbered streets are sometimes skipped (and there's random half streets, like "38 1/2"), and are arbitrarily switched from East to West several blocks from I-35. I-35 is nonsensically zippered into an above ground expresslane that does nothing to alleviate rush hour gridlock. Everybody drives everywhere here, and you have to learn to be a lot more agressive.

-I've made 42 new Austin-based facebook friends. I think that is equivalent to at least 7 real-life friends.

-I've been doing so much comedy, I have barely had a chance to get into everything this city has to offer- live music, the natural springs you swim in, bats (apparently). But honestly I'm fine waiting until it's not still 90 degrees at midnight to discover the nightlife.

-August looks to be even better- a solid job prospect, a paying comedy gig (!), and another project on the horizon that cold be the most important thing I've ever been a part of. Sorry to be cryptic, but this is what the internet is for.

on Milwaukee

In August of 1998 I moved to Milwaukee right before my freshman year of high school. The city greeted me with rain- the basement window-wells overflowed and seeped into my new room. My rug was ruined, some of my books, and I was bitter and lonely and anxious about starting over.

High school was a controlled exercise in learning to speak. By senior year I was on yearbook, in clubs, had friends and all. I got a little too confident in my ability to start over, went far away for college, and immediately flamed out.

This city welcomed me back. The Oriental theatre took me to other places, grew my love of film into an obsession. I learned the pot-holes, the freeway exits, the one-way streets, the feeling in the air before the snow, the honest work of shoveling snow, the right times to avoid the lakefront smells.

Milwauke waited patiently for me to lose my way, and find it again in my friends and on comedy stages. I'll always love it, and after being uprooted twice in my earlier years, it's more than earned the right to be the response when people ask me where I'm from.

But the open road awaits, as it always did and always will. I won't miss the winter, and I won't miss the mistakes I made, all the time I spent sitting still.

I'll miss the people, the person I became. I'll miss the mild summers and the rain.

Goodbye.

on renewal

I am on a trip right now. I went to Georgia to watch my cousin get married and then to Austin, to scout it out two weeks before the big move south.

So everything I do seems primed with significance, symbolic in some way. I helped drive down to GA with my parents, but I didn't use cruise control because I don't like what it says about me metaphorically.

Saturday afternoon I sat out by the pool, my eyes readjusting to the light extremely slowly (due to the eighteen months, just ended, working third shift), and I was reminded of myself in the sunshine. I now have, thanks to a pale Irish complexion and a spotty job applying SPF 50, spots of severe sunburn that will soon start to peel, revealing the new me underneath.

I wore one shirt to the wedding itself saturday, changed into a different one for the reception, and finally a t-shirt for the casual, post-reception hour. The bride's side of the family, with only broad visual cues to go on, might've thought that I returned a different person each time.

That's the beauty of being conscious beings, I suppose: we can always reinvent ourselves (ants probably just have to keep being ants). In theory, I can get used to the dry heat (103 F right now) and the one way streets and everything, but I have to avoid old patterns and old cowardice. It's only day one, but I'm still raring to change my diet and cut my hair (soon, I can feel it) and pour myself into a different way of seeing things.

on music

Music is as close to religion as I'll ever get. Those moments, seeing a live band, blasting the speakers in your car, your feet moving on their own, the world narrowing to a sunset or the hand you're holding or the memory that that song takes you back to, those are the best kinds of moments.

I sing constantly, and I hear melodies in my head, but I never had the patience or the self-motivation to learn an instrument. Words are the only thing I can manipulate with any aplomb (landing a line the right way on stage is rapidly nearing a religious experience as well), but it's harder to get that swelling of the score, that cinematic epic profundity that the best songs can instantly lend things.

In less than a month, I'm packing everything I have into my car and taking a two-day drive south, and I'm crossing my fingers that my cd player doesn't malfunction. I think I might waste a little money on CD-Rs and make 24-hours worth of mixes so I don't repeat, each song corresponding to a mile. I'm open to suggestions. Your favorite road trip music.

Because if you want to reach for those moments, you're going to need a soundtrack. I see the entire population of people with earbuds, presumably people who need music as much as I do, but it's only a small percentage that play air guitar and mouth the words and dance as they walk.

Maybe those people have actual religion.

on enthusiasm

I've embraced having fun lately. There was a time that irony, cynicism had a romantic appeal.

But they weren't as much FUN, dammit. For some reason there's a prevalent sentiment in our culture, at least the sort of hipster pop culture to which I ascribe, that associates enjoying oneself with simple-mindedness. The implication is that critical thinking leads directly to disappointment, to the prominent noticing of flaws.

But that's just not true. I got wired back in march and wrote a long thing on facebook about how stand up comedy, for me, became so much more invigorating when I stopped approaching things by saying "you know what I hate?" and went with "you know what's absurd, and thus funny?"- the same is true for EVERYTHING.

I'm not perfect. Far from it. Admitting that makes it hard to hold it against the rest of the world. There are ironies, there's cruelty, there's bleakness and despair. And in a way, kneejerk snarkiness was a way of avoiding those depths for me for a long time.

But that's just treading water to avoid drowning. I'm going to laugh to myself loudly in restaurants, play the air guitar to my earphones in public places, say the first things that come to mind, drink some but not too much, be vulnerable, seek out the people and places that make me happy, make those people laugh and those places feel like home, and I'm only going to go diving to the murky depths of the middle of the loneliest nights when I have to, when it's healthy.

In the meantime, I hope to see you on the shore.

on pop culture

Reference humor is very much like the weather in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. It waltzes capriciously from one extreme to another, it knows no historical precedent. There's no formula to predict it.

I see movies constantly, watch my share of television. I keep abreast of things on the internet, which itself is a more insular place than it seems like from the inside. But there's no way of knowing, even given a crowd's median age, wardrobe, or the venue they inhabit, what avenues of mass media they'll follow you down on any given night.

Case in point- I have a joke, really the only survivor from my early days, which prominently involves Wham! that never seems to be too old for anyone- 80's references in general seem an easier bet than nearly any other decade, seemingly an entire ten years laced with a perfect mix of irony and nostalgia. I was born in 1984 myself, I remember absolutely none of it, pop-culture-wise.

I've worked in libraries and stayed tuned into to bestselling fiction for most of my adult life, thus I have a Nicholas Sparks joke that can be very hit or miss. Sometimes, in the right crowd, I replace it with a Twilight joke which is more universal (but the punchline itself is less biting. It needs work.).

Movies I reference constantly, but even there, even the hugest movies aren't always familiar ground. I had an Avatar joke that never really caught on for me- I think it might be because, despite the big numbers, the majority of people saw it once and moved on with our lives. I do a somewhat involved bit about The Matrix (it's about the déjà vu cat) that does pretty well- because even though it was an R-rated release over a decade ago, everyone's seen it more than twice by now.

It's a challenge that I relish- it makes consuming new art and media exciting. Even if I see a film and find it terrible, it still means I've punched a lottery ticket for my favorite drawing anywhere.

on blank pages and other people

What is it about creativity that makes time mutable? Bursts of productivity seem like they escape my hands as water, and I wake up to deserts of half-formed ideas, the minutes dragging by in chains of frustration.

Something about writing, about starting a sentence or a setup, makes clocks tick louder and the world focus in on your immobile fingers. The background fades away in slow motion and we sit there, alone and helpless.

The answer, for me, is to make the void smaller. I don't do improv, but I envy the group dynamic that it draws its basis of support from- look into the eyes of your partner, and you're never lost.

I've had a lucky three months, the best three months of my life in many ways, of meeting new people and being challenged. My world has gotten bigger as the void shrinks to nothing, and it's only made me hunger for more new things.

Comedy, especially for me, is just having one half of a conversation. Finding it and embracing it has made me regret the parts of my life I thought I could slide by hardly talking to anyone.

on conversation

You are all guinea pigs. I'm sorry, but this is true. Some of you mean a lot to me, I do my best to honestly engage with people, I do, but there is a part of my brain that I cannot stop. It is looking for ideas and phrases and the rhythms of speech that can be divorced from context and filtered through a microphone.

This might make me maddening to have a conversation with, I couldn't particularly say. In the Caste of Killers podcast last week, we touched on this briefly: how people might hear something that came up organically in your act later and feel used. But that's how it is, we don't try to pick the bones of social interaction like scavengers. We're just following instinct at a certain point.

If anything I think it's lead me to value open and honest conversation even more, to realize when I need to be serious, when someone isn't in the mood to be entertained. Now I'm at a point when I look for people to have meaningful debates with- I've even been antagonizing the high schoolers I supervise at my part time job with fundamental debates about the nature of religion and politics.

It's just that, with that part never shutting off, it's the simplest thing to switch from one mode to another, to widen or narrow the mind's lens and dance with my thoughts accordingly. It's the effort to resist being frivolous for the sake of laughter, to cheapen relationships by never really leaving the stage, that I'm hoping I avoid.

Because the meaningful things are often the funniest- it's just that we can't force ourselves to get there. Let's get a drink sometime and just talk instead.

on exhaustion

In my head there are filters. I think about what I say before I say it, and only a fortunate confluence of predisposition and schooling have engendered enough quickness to make myself appear spontaneous.

I think too much about facebook comments, blog posts, greeting cards, phone conversations. I start every sentence several times before it gets enough momentum to reach a predicate. It lends itself well to the crafting, re-crafting, and over-analysis of jokes.

But it doesn't lend itself to telling them. It was beyond me, for a long time, to understand (even as I was compelled myself) how comedians can reconcile the agony of finding the right words with the inexplicable impulse to expose them to many people at once.

And the effort of trying to pit those instincts against one another, the need for expression versus the capacity to filter yourself into silence, ended up making me uneasy and terrified of what I was doing and relieved when it was over.

But then I got tired.

Tired of long days. Tired of worrying, tired of dodging the future. Tired of having potential, tired of marveling at the time going by. Somewhere I decided to talk as much as I can and filter it when it seems like it's becoming unwieldy, to sleep when my eyelids force me to and wake up as soon as I get another idea.

Comedy is about being fed up with absurdity in the world, on the face of it, but it's really about being fed up with a past version of ourselves. And the more exhausted I get it, the more nights I week I shake myself awake and find a stage somewhere, the less I pick and choose words out of fear- now I find new ones out of excitement and variety.

It took a year and a half of third shift to wear me down this much- if I ever spend any time on the road, I might even say things the very instant that I think of them. But as long as I'm weary and well-spoken, as long as I force sleep to catch me after a long footrace, I'll hit the pillow closer to myself than I've ever been.

on friends and sitcoms

I grew up watching television. Everybody did. We all go through times when we scoff at it, we call it an opiate- we might even have a phase when we haughtily claim not to even OWN a television (which is pretentious-code for being poor), but it is a part of us, a small nagging presence or a ubiquitous cultural filter. It's made it hard for me to enjoy the rhythms of adult life.

I grew up on 90s and 00s tv sitcoms- and I'm sure this is true of other decades as well- but these shows spend the majority of every 22 minutes focusing on groups of attractive young adults hanging out socially. Seemingly every night. They have a single, major narrative to their lives each week, and spend no time in the bathroom, at work, at the gym, commuting 45 minutes every day, et cetera.

It's a paradox of relatable glamor, of mundane fantasy. It all has to be entertaining and fun and well-lit and ripe for product placement and studio laughter and quips, but it has to appear to be in our grasp- if we squint our eyes it could be a real coffee shop or bar that just happens to be missing a fourth wall. I think subconsciously I was taken in.

And then I grew up, and here and there I would have groups of friends. Eventually they would splinter at life's natural attrition, people move, people get married, people get new friends. It takes an enormous amount of will and an even bigger amount of favorable circumstance to maintain a group of sitcom friends- with any luck you can find a workplace that vaguely resembles a workplace sitcom instead.

Is it any wonder then, that my new solution is to try and do comedy every night? A group of people compelled to flock to the same places, to find the same laugh-track patterns, to define themselves in terms of a common narrative?

Of course, like my favorite sitcoms, I think it's healthier to work in at least one moment of maudlin sincerity each week. But otherwise I'll keep at it until I don't need a day job to conspicuously fail to mention, until I look at the people on the screen and find them ordinary.

I guess I'll still have to go to the bathroom, but I can edit that out for more local ads once I'm syndicated.

on narcissism

Stand up comedy is inherently contradictory. It's based on the assumption, or the mutual delusion, that an audience on some level needs to hear what a given comedian has to impart. But so often that message is couched in self-deprecation and irony that it passes a point of over-saturated falsity- some crystallized point between Rodney Dangerfield's lack of respect (even as he got rich) and Anthony Dice Clay's manufactured bravado (even as his career cooled considerably).

So where's the line, and how does it end up defining us when the microphone is off?

On Monday I told another comic that I've always been relatively humble (which is a paradoxical thing to claim) and I was met with laughter. I realized that in this context, going out five or six nights of the week and assuming my voice needs to be amplified, assuming my visage needs to be spotlighted, I was letting the specific narcissism of performance inform my personality in a deeper way than I thought.

And honestly? That might be fine. In my experience, unearned cock-sureness might seem just as bad as an aggressive lack of self-esteem, but it gets a hell of a lot more done.

A dash of confidence can work wonders: suddenly the risk of failure is invigorating instead of paralyzing, compliments are rewarding instead of somehow ungainly and inappropriate (is there anything worse than a steadfast refusal to take a compliment? It's a sort of arrogance that takes much more effort to maintain, in its way).

All we can do, I think, is try and keep on the near side of the unknowable line between vanity and determination, and remember the kind words or the laughter or the therapeutic compulsion that put us up there in front of a crowd in the first place.

the first day of the rest of my life

I know, it's a pretty cliché phrase to use. But how many people can pinpoint it? It was February 21st, 2011.

Let's back up. I started doing stand up comedy in 2005. It was the next natural step in a lifelong transformation- from a quiet, reserved kid to an irrepressible loudmouth. I still don't have the vocal chords or vox stamina for the amount of talking I've been doing- I feel like this is a vestige of my reticent childhood, the dust shaking from the remarks I would've kept to myself in the past.

But in '05 I was ready to try and connect with people. It went okay- I was a Creative Writing major at the time, I worked on my material with a vague studiousness. But I wasn't confident about it, I wasn't fearless.

So my life went on. I drifted out of a relationship, I got downsized from a job that might've been a career if I wanted to apply myself. But that's the problem with me, or it always was. A lack of application.

I went a few years without performing, but comedy never left my mind entirely. I worked a third shift job for a year and two months, and then I started to feel an itch. A burning pilot light, maybe.

I scouted out a competition held by the Caste of Killers (veritable heroes of the Milwaukee scene) in January, and the light turned into a small campfire. The last time around I bought a 4-pack of pocket notebooks from a convenience store. I couldn't find the one I was using. I did find an unstarted little green one.

I wrote down some things. On February 21st, I went to Carte Blanche studios and told jokes again.

I know it sounds like I'm romanticizing my struggle or something- it was a much quieter revolution than it seems. It's easier to mark a turning point in your life when you write down the date in a little green notebook, sure, but I can't even tell you how great the sense of 'before' and 'after' is from my point of view.

Because here's the thing: I'm trying now. I'm trying as hard as I can. And even if it takes forever, even if it never goes anywhere or amounts to anything, even as it leaves me weary and sleepless and willing to leave everything behind, it's worth it.

I'm applying myself. It's a first.

So hey, I'm Duncan Carson. I'm a comedian. Nice to meet you.