Learning How to Die

According to urban legend, people’s number one fear is public speaking. Death is number two.¹

I don’t know if it’s true, but if it is, I’d bet that the most dreaded form of public speaking is to stand onstage, alone, attempting to make an audience of strangers laugh. When people say a stand-up comic “died,” they may be understating just how bad it felt.

I’ve been doing open mic nights for a while now, on and off, and I’m here to confirm—as someone terrified of death but not of public speaking—that the form of public speaking that comes closest to eliciting the void is stand-up comedy, performed before a dwindling, disaffected crowd.

I had thought the open mic would be dramatic: you step into the quiet dark alone, towards the spotlight on a microphone, standing at the lip of the stage before an audience, expectant, shadowy and indistinct.

In fact, it’s more like this: you stutter nervously towards an emcee who has mispronounced your name, making the inevitable, awkward coin flip—handshake or fist bump?—before stepping up and fumbling with a mic on a makeshift platform, as the scattered company, mostly thinking of their own five minutes, chatter with indifference.

I’ve had it go better and I’ve had it go worse. You might expect a certain solidarity among the open mic crew: attentive laughter is a winning strategy, in game-theoretic terms. You know your turn will come, as roles reverse and interactions iterate. But would-be comics are a tough crowd: distracted, disaffected, and demanding. I once compared the philosophy colloquium to a stand-up set, only for a reader to complain:

The strict analogy between stand up and a colloquium would be if a stand-up was doing their act for a room full of other stand-ups. … Would any sensible stand-up accept such a gig, let alone have that be the main form of performing their art?

Sensible or not, this is the plight of the open mic comedian.

I’ve been thinking a lot about stand-up and philosophy: about the aspects of professional philosophy that look like stand-up comedy, about the nature of stand-up as a theatrical form, and about its philosophical dimensions.

Stand-up comedy is self-expressive. Stand-ups articulate themselves, exhibiting an outlook on the world. In sharing it, we see things as they do, and so doing, we see them—or the versions of themselves they put on stage. This is how the world can be, for someone; this is how someone can be towards the world. “To do stand-up is to explore one’s temperament”—Iris Murdoch almost wrote—“and yet at the same time to attempt to discover the truth.”

But if stand-ups are philosophers of sorts, the converse does not hold, in general—not just because philosophers aren’t expected to be funny but because they relate to other people in a different way. Stand-up comedy must be live; philosophy not so much. Stand-ups need immediate affirmation; thank God, philosophers do not. Stand-up is an art form of exposure: one faces one’s relation to the audience, alone; philosophers may hide behind the written word.

The host of my first open mic described himself as “looking like a stoned Ashton Kutcher.” There were 28 (!) comics on the bill and in order to keep the show moving, he did very little of his own material: an act of rare self-sacrifice. There were sets about mental illness, a comic who had an idea for addressing anti-Asian hate that came off as simply racist—he was heckled into submission—and an older comic proud of his autistic daughter’s first full sentence, at 11, when he told her not to use her iPad at the dinner table: “I hate you, daddy.” I did a bit about imposter syndrome, therapy, and self-help—not feeling nervous, quite, but so focused on surviving to the end I barely noticed the existence of the audience.

My second open mic was hosted by a mountain man with a lion’s mane and an unstable affect, kicking off with jokes about his father’s suicide; he read sentences of clever wordplay from a journal, vamping self-indulgently between the other acts. Up twelfth, I managed to absorb the presence of the audience a little, with material on chronic pain. It went okay, but I was learning how difficult it is to manage a mental script while reacting to people live—as though one aspires to an out-of-body experience, one’s consciousness ascending to the spotlight to observe oneself, impossibly, from outside.

I didn’t get to follow the light, because the next time I performed, I bombed: four minutes on the last taboo of stand-up comedy—life as a happily married man—delivered to the dregs of an audience, including my wife, on Valentine’s Day. It was clear I had misjudged the moment, but what rankles is my failure to inhabit it, to die my comedic death attentively—instead, I felt a mechanistic panic, generating words by rote. I was an automaton, not learning how to die because I was not actually alive.

The stand-up comedy I most love takes vulnerability as its theme—but not always as its subject. Vulnerability in stand-up is as much about form as about content. Whatever the material of stand-up comedy, the comic’s vulnerability is on display, implicitly acknowledged or denied.

Stand-up may be the form of comedy most suited to redress the pain of failure and fragility because it is the form of comedy most likely to enact it.  

1. This is the set-up for a well-known Jerry Seinfeld bit.