But I Did the Thing

Comedy, creativity, and navigating whatever the hell this is now

Uh oh, SINCERITY ALERT THIS WEEK!!!!!!!! [SFX: air horn; VO: S-S-S-S-S-INCERITY ALERT]

Nothing too crazy here, but I have been thinking a lot about comedy and entertainment and art and all that crap because it’s my job. But I have some thoughts. They aren’t even all bad!

For the first time in a while, I’m actually feeling weirdly inspired. It’s a good time to be living in my corner of comedy, maybe not on a financial level currently, but at least on a creative one. On Sunday I hosted my annual-ish charity show, Night of Selfless Care, at The Bell House, where we raise money to help people in need access menstrual products. Thank you to everyone who came and supported. I was kind of bummed that advance ticket sales weren’t as good as they have been in other years. I was like oh there’s no big celebrity on the line up which then sent me spiraling that, like, no one wants to see just a good ol’ show anymore.

And yes, it wasn’t as full as it’s been in the past, but the audience was so in and every comic was just so unbelievably funny. I showed up anxious and left elated. Then I continued to be elated at the bar afterwards, and then I got anxious again because a weird drunk guy was bothering everyone and stole Audrey’s raffle win (fancy candles) and then he threw a brick at the back window of the bar and then the bartender left for like 20 minutes with the cops and we all stood around like...hello? Anyway, that’s all another story for another time (though really you have all the info now). All that to say: the show was wonderful and made me love doing stand-up.

Last night I attended DanFest ‘25, my friend and fellow tuxedo cat owner Dan Perlman’s own personal film festival where he screened two of his existing short films he made and then the piece de resistance, his documentary about being a Michael Buble impersonator for the evening last winter. All three films were great, and Dan even had some fun surprises at the screening and the party for everyone to goof off. It was so nice to see someone make something super funny and interesting and truly theirs outside of the rigid institutions of the film and television industry, but also free from the wildly lucrative courtship of incels and the right to fund projects.

Just one of the many perfect nights at Union Hall with the Frankenstein’s Baby crew (photo: Sam Brooks).

I’ve been looking forward to the first and third Monday of each month when my crew hosts Frankenstein’s Baby at Union Hall, a show I’ve mentioned here before, largely in my revelatory post about esoteric emoji use. Years ago if I were part of a show like this and had weeks where I wasn’t doing a spot or hosting, I probably wouldn’t go. I would be off doing other shows, or not really feel like showing up to just watch (just being honest!!!!!!!). But this time and this show and this crew is different. Earlier this month Joyelle and Tyrone were hosting (with our delightful Donwill DJing, of course) and Josh and I got to sit at the corner bar in the back and be Statler and Waldorf, and we were both losing it all night. I love watching our show. It’s honestly more valuable to me as a writer and performer than zipping across town to go do 10 minutes at another show and then bouncing to go home.

My delight in the comedy around me in the last few weeks is cracking a bit of the shell I’ve been in for about two years now. Not that I haven’t done anything in two years and am just starting to again. But stand-up in particular has been on a bit of the back burner for a while, in a way that has been both very conscious and somewhat subconscious.

There’s a good chance that you know me from Oh God, A Show About Abortion, my off-Broadway hour of comedy about having an abortion. Maybe you knew me before that and saw and enjoyed that performance. Maybe you’ve found me here more recently and didn’t get to see that show when it was running. I want to say “And go watch it now, here...” but I can’t. It doesn’t exist. I hoped that at this point it would be out in the world where you could plop on your couch and open up one of the streamers and fire it up for a night. And the fact that you can’t is what made me turn my focus away from writing and performing stand-up much for the last two years.

Welcome to my summer home in 2022.

Not everyone gets a big fancy special, and certainly not everyone deserves one. I don’t even think I’m deserving of it. It’s not about what I was doing every night in comparison to what other comics across the country are doing. What was so hard about reaching the end of an incredibly successful off-Broadway run is that it felt like the next logical thing that happens in this industry is someone buys the show and then you get to tape it and then it goes out into the world for a bigger audience. That didn’t happen for me and I didn’t really ever sort out why.

I was late to stand-up success in my career. I’ve been doing it for almost 15 years, and doing it well for at least the back half of that. I felt that the big wins in my career have largely been in the writing world, mostly television. I’ve been on a lot of line-ups where the other comics’ credits are all Conan or HBO, and mine have been television shows I’ve worked on. That’s not a bad thing! I’m still so proud of that work. But stand-up has always felt like this secondary element of my business even though it’s the thing I was good at that led to me getting the television work that makes up the primary chunk of my business. I always felt late to get things in stand-up. I never got New Faces at JFL. I still haven’t done a late night set or a half hour or put out an album or independently released a special. Some of those things are because I just haven’t, some are because I haven’t been selected. But either way, I have felt like that part of my career didn’t ever take off despite every night feeling like I was doing something right.

Then I wrote what became Oh God and I felt like I had something. I started out in comedy performing by doing storytelling shows, so it was full circle that over a decade in, I’d finally figured out something that clicked by dropping my style of stand-up into a structured story over an hour. I got a run at the legendary Cherry Lane Theatre. And then 10 days into that run, SCOTUS leaked a brief indicating they were going to overturn Roe v. Wade. By opening night of the show, Oh God and I were the talk of the town. I spent my days doing interviews about abortion rights and comedy and my nights doing the show and then fielding dozens of DMs and messages about how funny or cathartic or educational it was. Anna Wintour came once. Cherry Jones bought me a martini. I did a photo shoot in head-to-toe Chanel in Harper’s Bazaar.

And then it just kind of ended. The first ten years I was in this industry all anyone talked about was “heat.” Having heat, getting heat, how someone got heat, what kind of heat. Heat in this case not being a thing I complain about, but being buzz, attention, and adulation in the industry. I remember seeing so many people do the kind of stuff I was doing and they were on a trajectory. I had never had “heat” as a stand-up, and now I finally did. Clearly this run is the path toward this hour of comedy becoming a big fancy special where I’ll get to wear The Row and choose intro music and bask in the big prize you get in stand-up for working an hour out so flawlessly.

Photo of one of my chic fans outside of opening night.

The theater run ended and I had a few exciting touring opportunities, which were fun and necessary to get the show out of New York. But it hasn’t ever been taped. No one made an offer to tape it. It’s impossible to know why that happened, but no one was interested. And it all kind of just evaporated from there. I had done the thing. I did it. I made the thing that people talked about and I happened to have the disgusting luck of the thing I made existing in the world at the time it was (at least until then) the most relevant. And still that didn’t get me over the hump, it didn’t get the institutions I value to value me back as a stand-up.

For months I had the thought, well, if THIS wasn’t enough to land a special somewhere, nothing I do ever will be, because this is the most important and best thing I’ve ever done. I barely did any stand-up after that. I’ve been in what I would un-clinically call a functional depression since early 2023. I’ve done things since! But the dark cloud of this quote-unquote failure has hovered over so much of the work I’ve done since Oh God.

One of the worst parts of having done the thing, is that people who saw it just want to know “what’s next????” I haven’t had an answer. I didn’t have an answer mostly because I didn’t feel like there could be a next when I hadn’t, in my mind, finished the first thing! The earnest answer is I was writing a book of essays (that I know absolutely came to be because of the success of the show), and that work is done in solitary and isn’t very public. I scroll through my own social media and it feels like I’ve been doing jack shit for two years, but I scroll through my desktop folder and know I’ve been writing something I’m excited about that will be out in the world for people to read next year. But it isn’t stand-up.

I love stand-up so much, it is always my first love in making comedy. I’ve worked really hard at it for a long time. But I’ve also put pressure on myself for it to look a certain way because of how I see other people doing it. And in the last few years I’ve felt so left behind by the industry with regards to it. Several times in my head I vowed to stop doing stand-up, and then I’d have a show and ignore that promise and go have a good time, because at the end of the day, I do still love it.

What’s hard about making art right now is that it has changed. To go through traditional pathways is worse than it’s ever been. So few things actually get bought. When they do, the timeline is either incredibly long or incredibly short depending on how much money there is. When something finally does get made and comes out it has to compete with endless scrolling on tiktok, days worth of footage of every podcast (which are mostly non-union television shows....), and, well, the news. And even when something comes out and breaks through and reaches people, it lives such a short life before the next thing comes along and swallows up attention. It’s hard to look at that route and feel like working hard to make something good is worth it.

When it comes to stand-up, that pathway is even darker. You put in all of this work to write these jokes, refine them to as close to perfect as anything can be. And then you do sell a special, or maybe you fund it yourself and release it yourself and you’re still proud of it. But regardless of how, an hour special becomes a farm for clips to use that are the shiniest versions of your best jokes to try and get more followers on social media, so you can sell more tickets on tour, so you can get slightly more money for your next special, which again becomes a clip farm. I look at it and I’m like when can the thing just BE the thing???

I think about Oh God a lot. When people ask about it I always say something to the effect that it was the hardest thing I’ve ever done and also the most fun thing I’ve ever done. That’s true. For several months, every night I got on stage and told the same story to new audiences. It was physically grueling, it was creatively difficult, it was emotionally exhausting. But it was also different every night. It was incredible to get to experiment with comedy in the lab, knowing that jokes were variables but the room and the conditions were constants. A lot of comics never get to do comedy like that. I’m so lucky I did.

I don’t think I’m special for wanting a special. Everyone in comedy wants their HBO or Netflix hour. I thought it would happen for me and it didn’t work out that way, and I was deeply disappointed. But I feel in an era where we project every single emotion, thought, or bodily function on social media for public consumption, being sad that something didn’t work out should be included and rarely is. So here goes:

I’ve been very, very sad for what feels like a very, very long time. I felt on top of the world and then totally alone. I felt emotionally and creatively depleted after emptying the tank on a show that (to me) felt like it amounted to fucking nothing. I felt like I wasn’t a real stand-up because this comedy project didn’t end in a real special. I felt like no one prepared me for what it is like for something like this to end. I felt stupid for not having a “next thing” ready so I could at least capitalize on my fleeting fame, though that felt impossible to have done. I felt angry that I had done everything I was supposed to do, but didn’t feel that everyone else around me did what they were supposed to do. I felt disappointed when I saw specials come out every week on the streamers, thinking, They bought THAT and not mine? I just felt so disappointed in my situation, and then I felt even worse that here I was feeling sorry for myself for a goal I had made up in my head when in reality I had just accomplished something incredible. But I was still so sad for so long.

And I’m actually, finally starting to climb out of it.

Now that I’ve finished my book from the prison of my co-working space where I wrote in almost silence for two years, I’m emerging shockingly inspired. Frankenstein’s Baby, Night of Selfless Care, DanFest have all made me excited about making art again. So has seeing my old producers of Oh God, Mike and Carlee, continue to put up interesting, funny, compelling shows that make me want to write more. So has watching all of my friends who went to Edinburgh Fringe this year come back exhausted but exhilarated.

I think it’s possible that Oh God was the thing, and that thing is over. I also think it’s possible given the way this country is going, that it could have a renaissance against a horrific backdrop of abortion as a political topic again. Or it won’t. Or it will. I don’t know.

I do know that I want to apologize to the lovely fan who came to Night of Selfless Care and chatted with me near the raffle table early in the night. You were so lovely and so complimentary about how much you loved the show and how you took friends and talked about it and it helped you and that you wished you could see it again somewhere, somehow. I hope you didn’t notice I had started crying and kind of ran away before it got worse. You were so nice!!! And it means so much when people say nice things about the show.

I get, like, a person a month mentioning it to me, even now years later, often asking where they can see it online. It’s hard to keep it together and not go off about the industry and misogyny and incels with money and executives without spines. But I try to be a normal person and just be nice. Tearing up on Sunday night at the Bell House kind of came from somewhere else. I mean, I still feel all of those things, but they’re slightly more compartmentalized now. I just started thinking about how much I loved it, how much I love making comedy and creating art and doing things live, and how much I just deeply miss the show. And, honestly, how much I’m ready to try and write more. Maybe even another one.

For the first time in two years I feel ready again. I’m seeing my peers making things that are cool and they are proud of. What sucks is they have been the whole time, but I’ve been too busy looking down and feeling bad to take enough notice to let it spark things in my own brain. And it’s okay if whatever I do next in stand-up isn’t the project that ascends me to greatness or secures me a huge payday and a fancy taping and celebrity fans. I’m kind of just ready to do that kind of work again, and without expectations.

Okay this concludes the SINCERITY ALERT!! [SFX: air horn; VO: S-S-S-S-S-INCERITY ALERT]

MORE STUFF! MORE STUFF!

If you weren’t able to make it to the charity show Sunday, please consider donating to I Support the Girls NYC (or one of the other chapters local to you if you aren’t in New York). They are doing incredible work to get menstrual and hygiene products into schools and shelters. Even a small donation is a huge help!

I’m super pumped that Ashley and Claire from Celebrity Memoir Book Club have launched their new, re-branded podcast, Good Noticings!!

This week on Ruined we cover the super scary The Devil’s Candy.

On Welcome to Talk Town, our buddy James Mattern joins the crew for some wedding chats.

I’m hosting Frankenstein’s Baby on Monday 9/15 and it’s our YEAR ANNIVERSARY and an incredible line-up. And I’m hosting with Tyrone for the first time ever and could not BE more excited!