Boy, did I bomb today at Rotary! My face is still red, and I have a powerful urge (an instinct left over from early childhood, I believe) to lay my head down and pretend to take a nap, but in the interest of the no-holds-barred ethic of blogging, I come here to confess my failure to you, o my brothers (and sisters).
I agreed to do another year on the Health and Happiness committee of the Columbia Rotary. I did this because it is a form of "service" that does not require attending meetings. All you have to do is show up about once a quarter, step up in front of the largest civic organization in South Carolina (more than 300 members), and try to be funny.
This is especially difficult, because it has to be clean and wholesome — suitable for all audiences. The kind of stuff that may crack us up in an editorial board meeting, or in the State House lobby, won’t work. It has to be everyone-will-laugh-and-no-one-will-feel-bad humor, which is a tough destination.
The thing is, I’ve done this with success in the past — compared to today, wild success. I step down off the podium, and collect handshakes and grins all the way to the back of the room. This track record builds upon itself, because such positive feedback creates confidence, and confidence is essential to getting a big crowd of nice people to crack up over fairly bland fare. Well, I’ll be in the hole, confidence-wise, next time I get up in front of this crowd.
That confidence, I believe, was my undoing, because it led me to step boldly to the lectern with what I knew was sorry material, believing that I could sell it with my delivery, no matter how bad it was. And then, when I saw it wasn’t working, I just totally fell to pieces. In the world of comedy, there’s nothing worse than bad material, badly delivered.
How bad was the material? Well, if you demand it, I’ll send you the full routine as I had it written out before me. But believe me, you don’t want to suffer that much. Basically, it was one extended bad joke — which meant I had nothing to fall back on once it started going bad. Real high-wire stuff, but I was so cocky I thought I could carry it off.
The joke was, I know y’all are tired of all these people running for president (got a little applause on that), so I’m going to save you from choosing from all those people by running myself.
I had thought about being halfway serious and pushing either the Energy Party or the UnParty, but decided to be completely (and, I hoped, obviously) satirical, as follows:
I am seeking the nomination of the Birthday Party. Elect me, and every day will be just like your birthday. And that’s not just because after I finish raising taxes on you, all you’ll have left is your birthday suit…
Yes, it was that bad. In fact, that was probably the height of it. But as bad as it was, I still might have sold it, but I just wasn’t feeling right. I think I was just a tad over-caffeinated or something. (Or it might have been an attack of conscience — I was bothered a bit by the fact that the "humor" depending upon trashing the world of politics, and I feel like we media types have done too much to give public service a bad name. I had tried to brush this off by thinking, "They’ll all know it’s a joke," but I had qualms all the same.) Anyway, I had a very negative attitude from almost the first line, and the dead silence with which I was greeted shattered what ability I might have had to salvage it with a sterling delivery. I fell to pieces. I started just reading, rather than riffing, not looking people in the eye, and racing through it as fast as possible to get it over with. Once that happens, you’re dying a thousand deaths, and it gets worse with each second. Talk about your cold sweats.
Fortunately, this is a very polite crowd, so there were no spoiled vegetables flung at me. But the silence was just as bad. And it was all my fault. These are people who want to laugh, and will meet you more than halfway. When you bomb with these folks, you’ve really bombed.
When I got down, someone brushed past me and said — in order to have something nice to say — that he liked my column Sunday. Wow. Then Dr. Sorensen, who was our main speaker, set up something he was saying by mentioning my "Birthday Party," and adding only "As Forrest Gump would say, ‘That’s all I have to say about that.’"
Ow. Et tu, Andrew?
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If you’re going to make jokes that don’t offend anyone, stay away from sex, politics, religion, and ethnicity. Of course, once you stay away from all that, you by and large have to stay away from everything…jokes about the weather are probably ok.
Sorry, Brad, but I have to go there again.
“What would you do if I sang out of tune?
“Would you stand up and walk out on me?”
— “A Little Help From My Friends,” Lennon-McCartney
Originally, the second line was “Would you throw tomatoes at me?” ‘Twas an ugly image from the Beatles’ days in Hamburg.
Ringo refused to sing that, substituted the familiar line, and there lives a lesson in teamwork.
Nevertheless, even the Beatles could bomb, so take heart. Beware taking your act to Germany, however.