Getting Kicked Out of a Comedy Club

Well. It looks like it’s been over a month since I’ve posted here. Jesus, where do I even start? I got kicked out of a comedy club. I got on the world’s biggest live podcast, Kill Tony. I started going to therapy. I love comedy. I hate comedy. That was so amazing. Holy shit, I bomb so hard sometimes… I’m so happy. I’m so sad. I still have a decent amount of money. Honey bunches of nuts, I’m gonna run out of money. The world is crumbling. Everything is gonna be fine.

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Alright… where do I start? This is a blog. I’m in my room, by myself. I got kicked out of a comedy club. That’s the first thing I listed. I’ll start there, Jimmy Spifferson. Yeah, so I went to this club up north that I’ve gone to a fair amount of open mics at. I’m telling my jokes, having a pretty good set… everything is fine in the world. Everything is absolutely fine. Totally, totally fine. I have a joke where I compare grocery stores to countries. Here, just read the joke. Hold on, let me find it in my jokes document. I said hold on. Sweet Jesus, you’re such a pest, Patricia. (I hope someone named Patricia is reading this.)

My favorite place to do grocery shopping is Costco. Costco is great cause you can walk in needing apples and walk out with a new home entertainment system. If Costco was a country, it would no doubt be the United States. Just way too much of everything. Whole Foods would be Canada. Everyone always talks about how great it is but you still don’t want to go there. HEB would be England. It’s where you go if you can’t get into Costco. And Walmart would be Mexico, because it… has a lot of Mexicans.

Good, solid joke. Comedy! Eat my cheeks. So, I told this joke, which I’ve told approximately 46 times, and some guy in the front got his entitlement card all fumbled in a bundle. He said something dumb to me like “your shoes are from Costco” while I was on stage. I’ll be honest, I didn’t have a good comeback for that because it didn’t make any sense. I just kind of moved on and finished my set. I sat down in the back of the room, watched the next comic, and then stepped outside to hang out with a couple other comedians. A few minutes later, two members of the bar staff come out there and ask for the guy in the blue puma shirt. I, wearing a blue puma PULLOVER (thank you very nice) knew what was happening, yet at the same time I couldn’t believe it was happening.

“Were you the one telling racist jokes on stage?” one of the bartenders asked.

“No. I told a joke that involved race, but it wasn’t racist.” I replied.

“But you told the joke, right?”

“Uh… I guess?”

“We’re gonna have to ask you to leave.”

“I just have to leave, no questions asked?”

“Yeah.”

“No conversation about it? Just gotta go?”

“Yeah, we’re gonna have to ask you to leave.”

“Alrighty, that totally makes sense!”

So, I left. I sat in my car for a few seconds and just kind of laughed to myself. What the butt chunks just happened? I texted a friend about it, like dude you won’t believe this shit! He in fact, did not believe that shit. That shit was not believed. Some might have said it was… unbelievable. Wow! How about that.

I opened my phone a bit later and my friend who was running the open mic had messaged me saying I didn’t do anything wrong. The manager of the club also reached out to me to let me know I didn’t do anything wrong, but that he would have to explain to his boss what had happened. Get this: the bar staff ended up calling the general manager of the bar about it, who called the manager of the comedy club. I really wish I could have been on the line for that call. “Hey, I know you’re not working right now but one of our customers was offended by a joke, and well… we take jokes very seriously here…”

I was mostly taking it pretty lightly, although it does suck to have someone call you a racist when you’re just trying to make people laugh. There’s a huge gap between joking about a group of people and hating a group of people. To assume those two things are one and the same is bananas. Yet, it happens. And not just on the internet. It’s unfortunate, less so for me and more so for people who are victims of actual racism. People aren’t going to take claims of racism as seriously if we try to make everything seem racist, even when it’s not. I notice these articles permeating through media with titles like “the Racist Undertones of Tele Tubbies that You Never Noticed as a Child.”

Seek and you shall find. If all you’re looking for in the world is racism, that’s what you’ll see. It brings me back to college, when I took a Critical Theory class. We would read different texts and then “interpret” them through a defined lens, whether it be postmodernism or feminism or whatever ism you feel like using. I never understood it, because when you choose to do that you’re already making up your mind about the text before you actually read the text. By saying, “I’m going to interpret it through this ideology,” you’ve denied yourself a chance to receive the text as it is. You’re unable to objectively ration what the author was trying to say, and you deny yourself the ability to interpret it through your own perspective.

One of the most interesting things about writing is how people interpret it differently based on their own individual perspective. I remember writing a poem in a workshop class and ten different people have ten different interpretations of the poem. It’s a great way to show how we all live in the same reality and different realities at the same time. Yes, we are all living in this three dimensional world and interacting on earth, but our perceptions are so varied that we’re all living in our own unique realities simultaneously.

That’s what makes life interesting, and why it’s fun to talk to people you disagree with, especially people you really disagree with. Because it’s not just that you have different opinions, it’s that you actually see the world differently. When we truly listen to someone and try to put ourselves in their underwear, it allows us to become more empathetic and less, well… pathetic.

(To be continued. Next I’ll be talking about getting on Kill Tony, getting heckled in front of Lex Fridman at an open mic, and… I don’t know. Maybe Space Cowboys or something.)