Two Green Comedians Walk into a Café…
By Moreen Littrell
“It just wasn’t funny,” said Sheila, a fellow stand-up comic, when I asked her what she thought of the set I’d performed two days earlier in the Main Room at The World Famous Comedy Store.
It was Friday afternoon and we were sitting on the red velvet couch at Insomnia Café on Melrose, just two green comedians preparing to riff. I had just taken a drag of latte foam when she uttered those Christopher Hitchens-esque words. I hadn’t even secured an outlet yet or hoisted my lowriders. I thought she was kidding, just deadpanning too long.
But she said “no” she was serious, and that there was no time limit on deadpanning anyway. Wednesday’s set was only my third ever. It was the same set I debuted with two months earlier, and while I wouldn’t say I killed it, I didn’t not kill it. As the smoke from the former model’s sorry-not-sorry “truth” bomb wafted, the windows to her soul were still goring into mine.
I lowered my catatonic gaze to my wad of index cards. I had been so excited to try out my new material on her and riff like Wanda and Ellen. Scrawled with a black Sharpie to emulate Kidnapped (a free font), were my top contenders for my next set: Gyno Legal Fund, Pizza Puke, and Facebook Whore. But, if Sheila didn’t think Wednesday’s set was funny (Bedframe, Distress Calls, Prescriptive Facemask), she certainly wasn’t going to think Facebook Whore was. My croissant went down hard. For the next hour, Sheila found nothing of mine funny.
“Really? Not even Twitter Ho?”
“No – ”
“MySpace Tramp?”
“No –”
“iVillage Slut?”
“No –”
And I found nothing of hers funny.
“Kale has been overused. Try iceberg.”
“No – ”
“Then butterhead –”
“No – ”
“Then hydroponic butterhead.”
“No – ”
She didn’t want lettuces. Apparently, kale is not a lettuce but a cabbage and she thought cabbage was funnier (even though everyone pretty much thinks it’s a lettuce). Whatever. Where was the ‘Yes, and…?’ We were at a stalemate.
I cried all weekend. I thought of giving up stand-up. It was supposed to have been my salvation, my ride-or-die, pot of gold, North Star, soft spot to land, my candle in the wind. But every time I considered watching the tape of my performance (that I’d collected on Saturday in what felt like a “drive of shame”), I saw Sheila’s dewy face. Was she born with it?
To stop the negative loop, I turned to a higher altitude perspective: my astrologer, Jonathan Cainer. I played so much digital Tarot (at 6£ a pop), asking pre-recorded Jonathan repeatedly
“Should I give up stand-up?” that I was banned for 24 hours – a “courtesy pause” designed to prevent people like me, tarot-ists, from losing our shirts to astrologers. After screaming at my laptop, “Take it all! Take it all!” I finally got the courage to watch Wednesday’s set. Sheila was right. I was horrible. I wanted to kill myself with a historically important dagger. This is how comics die. Behind every dead comic is a Sheila – or Sheila.
On Sunday night, I fell asleep listening to my past free weekly forecasts. The one at the very beginning of the month was hands-down, the most spectacular prediction I’d ever received in the eight years of my subscription. Cainer predicted with certainty that I was in for a once-in-a-lifetime life-changing event by the end of the month. He said I would be the focus of admiration not unlike a celebrity, influencer or whistleblower.
And Jonathan Cainer, a fine English gent, was not prone to hyperbole nor deceit like TV Guide’s Sally Brompton. I called him the Oprah of Astrology and not because he gave out free Tarot and I Ching tokens. (“You get a token and you get a token” were not words he would use.) But now there were only two more days in the month for his prediction to happen. If I don’t achieve a level of stardom by Tuesday, I’d have to start reading my horoscope with a degree of skepticism.
On Monday, I had a meeting with one of the top comedy management/production companies in the industry – the ones responsible for Dane Cook. I only got the meeting because I had invited seven top comedy agents to my stand-up debut. I knew they wouldn’t come but I thought that I’d get the jump on getting on their radar. One of them — the drunk one eating pizza at a sports bar — responded. He welcomed me to send him a tape of my debut, which I did. He then forwarded it to their A&R who then asked to meet with me.
I anticipated it was just going to be a general meeting where they would just say, “Sheila says you’re not ready, but when Sheila says you are, here’s what we do.” So as I sat there in a conference room as ‘talent,’ thinking that the meeting for a nobody was going longer than expected, the A&R executive pushed over a contract offering to produce my debut comedy album. He told me, “I think you are funny and I think America will think you are funny.”
The morals of the story:
Humor is subjective.
Astrologists are reliable.
Sheilas kill comics.
To be fair, dewy Sheila never said I wasn’t funny only that my performance that Wednesday night wasn’t. And she wasn’t not wrong. Easy peasy, I just stopped performing on Wednesdays. (It’s Hylauronic acid serum by the way.)
As for the contract, I didn’t end up consummating it. Without a following, the kind enjoyed by unpoisoned whistleblowers, I thought it was a bit cart before the horse. For a few months though, I entertained it. I ramped up, trying to perform new material each time (Starbucks Fight, Fluff & Fold, Death by Zumba) so I would accumulate the requisite 40 or so minutes for the album. But I wasn’t killing it. Of course I wasn’t. I had no one to riff with! And it wasn’t like the A&R guy was hunting me down. I figured Sheila stuffed him into a meat locker.
Meanwhile, I haven’t ruled out a killer pandemic album.
—
Moreen Littrell
Author of LOST IN MANHATTAN, a roman a clef Contributing Author to two comedy monologue books www.moreenlittrell.com
LOST IN MANHATTAN
**TOP 10 AMAZON BESTSELLER in Women’s Humorous Fiction and in General Humorous Fiction**
“Zippy and laugh-out-loud hilarious, Lost in Manhattan is a terrific read. In Moreen Littrell’s New York, Jimmy Choos wouldn’t last a day.” – Tish Cohen, bestselling author of The Summer We Lost Her, Town House, Inside-Out Girl, and The Truth About Delilah Blue
ABOUT THE BOOK
What would you do if your life turned upside down in a New York minute?
Pink-slipped at 9 a.m. and hit by a drunk driver by midnight, 24-year-old aspiring actress, Eve Foster, moves to Manhattan where Pavlos (her 38-year-old boyfriend), lives. Just one problem: He doesn’t remember inviting her. He’s been forgetting a lot since the accident. And so, Eve arrives in New York City, ghosted. From the moment she touches down (with a broken wedding ring finger, no less), Eve’s initiation into the City that Never Sleeps is more like a hazing. From the Fashion District to Chelsea to Central Park, Eve’s efforts to make Manhattan her new home are fraught with upending encounters with the vanguard of the city. One in particular, the “Queen of Knitwear,” may just break her.
In a world drawn from Moreen Littrell’s first six months of Manhattan in the mid-1990’s, Lost in Manhattan is a riotous, cautionary tale — and roman à clef — of a wide-eyed heroine thrown into a “Sex and the City” universe. Unlike ‘insider’ Carrie Bradshaw, Eve Foster is an outsider. Eve doesn’t know a Louboutin from a Choo.
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