Make 'Em Laugh

Today I finished the seemingly endless task of cleaning out my Random Stuff closet, which involved looking inside each box of Random Stuff to see if it contained anything I wanted to keep.  I haven't looked in most of these boxes for more than ten years; I inherited them from my parents' basement when I moved into my own place. 

One of the boxes I opened this morning contained reminders of my curious career on the Central Catholic High School speech team in my junior and senior years.  The trophies I won whilst making the speech team circuit were so incredibly ugly that I threw them away soon after acquiring them, but I did keep the medals, and the judges' comment sheets.  I also kept the two speeches with which I won this array of impedimentia. 

Central Catholic High School didn't have a speech team, actually, until I invented it.  I became disenchanted with the drama department after the drama teacher's son was coincidentally cast in the lead role of the school play two years running.  I decided I needed something different to do; preferably something I could do by myself.  As anyone will tell you, only children who don't participate in sports are terrible team players.  A high school drama department is definitely a team-player proposition; hence my dissatisfaction.  My guidance counselor mentioned to me in passing that the school hadn't had a speech team in five years, and that was all the encouragement I needed.  One of the English teachers, Sister Kathleen, needed a student-involvement project to fulfill her quota of extracurricular supervisory activities, and I needed someone to drive me around.  I pitched the idea to her, and she went for it. 

When I won my first district medal, my supposed speech coach had never heard me give the speech . . . I refused to do it for her.  I was performing in an event called "After-Dinner Speaking," which is a polite name for stand-up comedy.  Nobody told me what was considered acceptable subject matter for this event, and if they had, I wouldn't have listened to them anyway.  I knew what I wanted to do, and I knew exactly how to do it.  I wrote a speech about how stupid the first aid training in my sophomore health class had been.  That doesn't sound as if it has much laugh potential, but it did.  I re-read the speech this morning, and it's still funny . . . and I still have a physical memory of what it was like to perform the piece, every breath, every pause, every inflection.  I was amazed to see that neither my sense of humor nor my style of composition has changed much in nineteen years, which goes a long way toward explaining why I didn't have many friends as a kid. 

The material was well-written, but the appeal of the piece, as I knew then and know now, was my style of delivery.  I have an ability to say something utterly ludicrous with an air of sincere conviction, and I have never made the mistake, as a comedian, of looking as though I find myself the least bit entertaining.  I also have the Bob Newhart thing going for me, in that I don't look as though I could ever say anything amusing, so the disparity between my appearance and my sense of humor tends to make anything I say seem funnier than it actually is.  When I was performing, I had an astonishing ability to read the audience, and to immediately refine my delivery and timing based on the almost-imperceptible changes of energy in the room. 

This event isn't an easy one.  The audience is comprised mostly of one's competitors and their supporting teammates, who have a vested interest in not laughing.  The event organizers also deliberately plant two or three people in the audience whose job is to look openly hostile and not react to the performer.  Nobody ever survived my speech with a straight face.  I remember the strange feeling of standing in front of the room, knowing that what I was about to do was completely unexpected and utterly out of the realm of high school speech competitions; and also that it was, for some mysterious reason, irresistible.  I received numerous comments from the judges saying: "I wouldn't have thought anyone could make this topic funny." 

Getting up in front of that room and giving that repeatedly award-winning performance was also one of the worst experiences I've ever had in my life.  I have always been an extremely anxious performer, of the borderline-nervous-collapse variety.  When I was fifteen, my body handled the stress far better than it does now; I've stopped performing because I'm afraid of giving myself a stroke from the ungodly panic I suffer for twenty-four hours before having to do any kind of public speaking.  I had that same degree of fear when I was a teenager, but the long-term consequences of that kind of stress were still unclear to me, and the thrill I had from performing balanced the pain of it.  It wasn't the applause that did it . . . it wasn't even the awards, though they were nice.  The real reward was the feeling of connection I had to every person in the room:  I was like a magician, a mind-reader.  For that brief time, I knew them intimately . . . I knew how to make them laugh.  David Rochester, outcast and ignored by his peers all his life, had a group of them at his absolute mercy, and in the most benevolent way possible.  It was a kind of forgiveness, a kind of generosity . . . a kind of reconciliation between me and the world.

Anyone would think that repeated success would lessen my stage fright, but it never did . . . if anything, it made it worse.  I never knew if I'd be able to repeat the miracle, and each time I did, the bar was raised a little higher, until it reached such a height that I couldn't possibly vault over it.  In my late twenties, my performance anxiety reached the point of total physical collapse.  I don't do comedy anymore -- now I  sing to myself in my living room and in my voice teacher's studio, and politely ignore her pleading with me to perform.  In a way, I wish I could perform again . . . I wish that any of the usual stage fright advice or techniques worked for me, but they don't; nothing works, up to and incuding Valium and hypnotherapy. 

But damn, I was funny while I lasted.