Comedy is like tech support - or - Love the one you're with

I've been suffering from a self-imposed malady lately. It's no surprise - most of my problems are self-inflicted; it comes with the territory when you alternate between solipsism and narcissism.

I get so up in my head about not doing well, I actually paint myself into a mental corner and I've developed a fear of the stage. Stupid (for a comic), I know, but it is what it is. It almost becomes a fetish, and I let the minor fear of not doing well (which is a useful motivator in itself) grow into a disproportionate sense of vertigo, to the point where I'm a mess until I get off stage. This is not how it's supposed to be, my friend. The initial fear of public speaking is supposed to (I am careful when dictating to life how things "should be") peak at some point early on, and then you move past it, and do your thing. At least, that's how a healthy, smart, sane person would do it. And then there's me.

I've been blessed with some smart, helpful guys in my life, and I learn from them whenever I can pull my head out of my ass long enough to do so:

Isaac Ames (and others, to be sure) said something wise recently: "the beast only grows if you feed it." As long as I flinch at the possibility of failure, it will always threaten me. It only has the power that I give it.

Another comic had some strange-sounding advice, and I appreciate it all the more for its bizarreness: "Dude, you've got to love the audience." What? At its first, cynical blush, it sounds like dime store, hippy bullshit, nearly laughable in its affectionate stance. Have you ever been heckled, or simply stared down by a stony-faced gaggle of comedy-watchers? Love these dicks, are you kidding?

But it started to make sense. It sounded a lot like advice I would've given a few years ago, when I was in technical support for an Internet services company, and the two gigs have some very useful parallels:

Both involve an initial element of fear. I still remember taking that first phone call, where some unknown problem waited on the other side of the ringing phone. Having no experience to speak of, the possibility of not having the answer and looking and feeling like a fraud was very real.

Also, you either learn to navigate that fear, or you let it haunt you forever. I took more support calls than everybody else in the office (a statistic which helped me get raises and survive the chopping block despite my otherwise shit attitude at the time), simply because I wasn't afraid to pick up the phone and dig in to whatever ghosts were lurking on the other end of the receiver. Even as lazy as I was, I would pick up the phone while coworkers shrugged at it. "Don't know?" Fuck it! It's better than "don't care!"

I picked up, flirted with callers I liked, pushed my luck with callers I didn't, and often had a ball with people I'd never spoken with before. A good portion of them didn't have any good will for me anyway, but at least I wasn't the run of the mill drone. I had forgotten that part of my life and the similarities that made it more a purgatorial boot camp, excellent training for comedy, than anything else. This is exactly the mindset I should be adopting with stage time.

Another way of saying it is that you must engage the audience, take what they give, give something of your own, and build something from that.