my vocabulary is too small

I grew up watching late night shows in high school, always sacrificing sleep so I could watch Craig Ferguson and Conan O’Brien deliver their daily monologues. As a result, my mother spent much of her 40s catching me sneak in some television past midnight on a school night. Plenty of scoldings. Plenty of tardies to school. Plenty of laughs.

It’s the latter that matters to me the most.

Nearing my high school graduation, I took a trip to New York City and got a chance to be a part of the Conan O’Brien audience, an opportunity that may have been my first “real” exposure to live comedy. Fall of that same year, I attended my first comedy club show at the Comic Strip as a freshman in college. Hours passed with shitty amateur comedians doing dick and fart jokes, but I didn’t care – I was low brow and new to the scene. Decaying floorboards and the damp smell of cigarettes stirred with cheap alcohol exposed me to a brand new buzz.

Yet performing stand-up comedy didn’t cross my mind until November 2006, when I went to Comix to see my first live sketch comedy group: The Whitest Kids U’ Know. A girl I met pointedly asked me if I performed. Her brother was a fledgling comedian, and I somehow gave her a feeling I was the type who would do it. No joke, no hint of sarcasm. Just a straightforward question that challenged me to dig up a reason for why I never considered performing. No shovel was big enough, and I stood awkwardly in a self-dug hole that made me realize I brainlessly dismissed all thoughts of performing comedy as absurd. I ended the night volunteering for a WKUK sketch, and Trevor Moore pulled me in to his second grade army to battle Zach Cregger and the third graders. Absurdity got his finger cut that fateful evening.

I spent the next two years talking. Talking about writing a movie. Talking about writing comedy sketches. These two years culminated in the most bullshit a human being has ever hurled on the face of mother earth.

In April 2008, with a new found perspective on life, I started a screenplay, chronicled by rants and observations. Ironically, the screenplay never fully solidified, but the blog caught some positive reviews. My comedic notes for my screenplay evolved into sketches. I went to watch my first comedy competition and thought I could have taken the gold. During the drive home, all those notes evolved into jokes.

On September 14, 2008, those jokes found their first audience. Absurdity better watch his bitch-ass out.