Time to Stand-Up (Part 1)

Descending from peak fucks requires us to stand-up. Sometimes, literally.

After spending time in the high altitude air of peak fucks, we get stuck and disoriented. We don’t know which way is up or down. 

And so, we let life happen.

We get the 10-year HR “Employee of Excellence” pin, buy the shiny junk, and get high on one another’s supply. We float somewhere in shameless purgatory—stuck between high school’s peak fucks and elementary’s legion dancing from the soul. 

And it’s not bad.

In fact, the in-between is a fine place to be. It’s comfortable. It’s expected. And it probably makes our 90-year-old Grandma happy. But it doesn't have to be our final destination. 

Listening to the provoking voice that says, “get out”, “quit now” or “you’ve always wanted to take a floral arranging course” is our tiny fork in the road. When we act on it, we take ourselves off autopilot and course correct, stepping into our intuitive unknown.

And as we reject convention and follow our own GPS, we get closer to living our unique brand of shameless—free of someone else’s boring clutter and Ergonomics Training. The more that we do what we want, when we want—whether through bebé steps or a high-risk pivot—the further we get from mid-day tension headaches and uncontrollable eye-rolls.

Note: To prevent an eye-roll at my own damn self, it must be acknowledged that I am not a fully-enlightened, zero fucks gal. I’d like to be. I’m trying to be. But I’m not there yet.

This writing collection is my real-time journey back to shameless. 

And candidly, I worry every week that no one is going to read these posts and dread sharing them due to the *very real* fact that they could garner 6 likes. I’m also afraid that I could throw in the towel on this whole project if it doesn’t take off soon—because hey, we want results like we want our chicken nuggets: immediately and super-sized. 

At the same time, I know that *not* putting this writing out means remaining stagnant and yes, probably enduring some lunchtime Ergonomics Training. So, having this place where I get to be authentic, vulnerable, and potentially rejected, is worth it.

It’s another step into the intuitive unknown. Destination: zero fucks.

My official journey back shameless started shortly after my 26th birthday when I decided to stand-up—literally.

As a kid, I had chosen 26 as the symbolic marker of a mortgaged, womb-occupied, caravan-driving middle-ager. Although I was content to discover that 26 is still very much the “wake up with a garlic dipping sauce container stuck to your ass” phase of life, something had struck a chord.

Tipping into my upper 20’s revealed that things probably weren’t just going to happen for me. The Pamela Anderson show-up-smiling-to-a-sporting-event-and-get-discovered type of passivity wasn’t in the cards. I was going to have to create my own luck. 

So, for reasons too troubling to unpack, I signed-up for a stand-up comedy class.

Note: It must be said that as an adult, taking any beginner level class has the unrivalled ability to make you feel like a total loser. There’s nothing cool about level one, nor publicly sucking at something you’ve admitted to having interest in. 

This truth is exponentially greater when that beginner class is about stand-up comedy.

My lil’ tykes, bhad-bahbie-wanna-be-funny class was held in the basement of Comedy Bar, the independent HQ for stand-up in Toronto. As a whole, comedy attracts people with inflated egos and gross overestimations of ability, and this level one was no exception.

During our first class, we sat in a janky circle and shared why we signed up for the course. I said something deflective like, “I’ve always wanted to try stand-up and finally felt unhinged enough to go for it!” [insert soft, classroom giggle here]. 

The woman next to me shared that while she too loves comedy, she was concerned about balancing life as a touring comic with a husband, young kid, and a 9-5 she was mostly fulfilled by. 

Another classmate responded with an affirming “same”.

Each class we were asked to bring in a premise with some supporting lines. Then, we’d go around the room and read our jokes while our instructor Dawn—a stoner comic with a penchant for hostile in-class encounters—would make live edits.

Dawn’s contempt for the room’s duds was more thinly veiled than the wispy combover of a horror movie groundskeeper. She was brutally honest with what worked and want didn’t, and hated dick jokes. She did however, not shy away from delivering her feedback through bites of Fancy Frank’s hotdog wiener. 

Having grown up around a collection of intense women, I was fuelled by Dawn. The fear of her wienered breath disapproving of my ditties, made me try harder. Plus, she was a wizard at carving out passable comedy nuggets from manic ramblings of over-priced delicatessens, subway rides, and, well, dicks. 

Over the weeks with Dawn’s reworks, I turned my word vomit into early stand-up bits. I had jokes about “using Facebook Marketplace for sport” and “Evel Knievel having a hip replacement” (????). My big closer was that “the eyebrow ring is a silent mating call for bisexuals living in Northern Ontario”.

Note: I still stand by the eyebrow ring bit^.

In our final class, we practiced our hot fives with a real microphone. I was too flustered to pull the mic out of the stand, so just stiffly swayed around it like a bowling pin. My set was verbose, it lacked punchlines, but by Dawn’s reaction, it wasn’t even close to the worst in the class.

I felt the smug reassurance of not sucking the most. 

This confidence was short-lived as I remembered that overcoming this hurdle meant that Mount Everest was imminent: a live performance in front of a real audience.

My vision of the audience was a small selection of our group’s coerced family and friends. And I was scared. After all, we wouldn’t be allowed to read from our notebooks or have Dawn’s commentary break-up awkward silences. We’d have to perform our jokes solo on stage, from memory. 

As we were heading out the door, Dawn casually mentioned, “oh, and tell your friends to get their tickets. It looks like we’re going to sell out the main stage.” 

Sell out the main stage? Were we filling the room with California king beds? Did every seat come with the turning radius of a city bus? Was this some sort of celebrity DisneyLand buy-out scenario?

From the back of the room, a voice called out, “so, how many people are we expecting next week?”.

Dawn replied with, “I dunno, one hundred, maybe one fifty?”.

This was the first and only mic drop of our entire six-week course.

Instantaneously, my inaugural stand-up performance went from a dozen smoke-up-the-ass-blowing adults to a packed house. This was more than I bargained for and I’d already bargained for too much. 

On the walk home, my stomach twirled with anxiety.

What the fuck had I done?

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Next week, Part 2 of “Time to Stand-Up” will drop. Stay tuned! Subscribe below to get these ditties straight to your inbox :)