"You Sure Are Lucky!"

This past February marked my 15th year working the road as a standup comic. In that time, I have met thousands of people in bars, restaurants, airports, stuck elevators... you know, places where nosy people who should have brought a book tend to congregate with nothing better to do but ask annoying, personal questions of innocent bystanders. For the record, I was never one of those people who went around flaunting the fact that he was a standup comic, but if someone asked me point blank what I did for a living, and they didn't appear to be a total whack job, I usually told them the truth.

Strangely enough, the reaction by God knows how many people to my revelation was usually limited to one of three somewhat idiotic replies. Listed below, in no particular order of retardation, are the three said replies, followed by my amazingly pithy comment.

1. "Really? A guy in my office does that."

With all due respect, no, he doesn't. Not even close. I'm a standup comic. It's my job. I sometimes do as many as ten shows a week. I travel at least 50,000 miles a year in the process. I have driven three cars into the ground, and am 80,000 miles deep into number four. I have free frequent flier trips coming on airlines whose names I can't even pronounce. Once I was booed for twenty minutes by 3,000 high school brats when I was stupid enough to open a show for Weird Al Yankovich. Why did I stay up their for twenty minutes when they hated me? Because it was my job. To do twenty minutes, whether the crowd liked me or not, that's my job, that's why. Your friend probably does a few minutes of open stage a couple of nights a month at the local Chuckle Hut. He may even tell a few cornball jokes that he found on the internet when he emcees the company's Christmas party every year. Hell, the guy may even be the second coming of Bob Hope for all I know. But he is not a standup comic. Because, other than the occasional corporate gig, standup comics do not work in offices, they work on stages all around the country and the world. The guy in your office doesn't do that.

2. "Do you write your own stuff?"

No. I walk out to the mailbox every morning, open it up, and voila! Some harp music plays, and there it is; a nice, neat, typed up page of new comedy material just sitting there, waiting for me. Like magic. Of course, I write my own material, nimrod. Why else would I be in this business? Not that I'm totally above not writing my own material. Jay Leno, David Letterman, Dennis Miller, Conan, all those guys have stables of writers, good writers, cranking out funny material on a daily basis. I don't. The truth is, most road comics work any given club, therefore, any given market, once every year or year and a half. If they tell the same joke every night for a year, it doesn't matter. The demand for fresh material isn't quite the same as it is for a guy on TV who works the same market 5 nights a week, 52 weeks a year. Making people laugh with something I thought up in my own mind is why I do standup. But I'm weird like that. Some guys do it for the unlimited free bar pretzels.

For those among us who don't write their own stuff, there are two ways to acquire new material. One way is to buy it. The other way is to steal it. I highly discourage the latter, as it will buy you much ill will in this world, and hopefully even more in the next. Some low-bred slime balls don't see a problem with stealing material. Their reasoning is "Yeah, I stole a bit from you, but I didn't stop you from doing the bit, you didn't know about it, and it didn't cost you anything. So what do you care?" To the joke thief, I would say, look at it from this angle. Let's say every time you left town, I came by your house and carried on a torrid affair with your wife. I always got out before you came home, I didn't prevent you from having access to her, you didn't know about it, and it didn't cost you anything, so I guess that makes it ok, right? Right? Oh, that's different? Because now someone is taking something that is important to you.

Well, here's a little secret. Jokes to a comedian are like wrenches to a mechanic. Truth be told, if all comics had to choose between giving up their spouse or their act, well, the divorce rate among comedians would be close to 100 per cent. Which, come to think about it, is only about three percentage points higher than it is right now.

3. "You sure are lucky!"

Really? When did that start? I never felt lucky those years I was living out of my car on the road. Or when I was driving ten hours between bad one nighters because my car payment was due. Or when my marriage fell apart because I was gone on the road all the time. I doubt I'll feel lucky tomorrow morning when I have to leave my house at 5 AM to go catch a plane. I'd just like to know when the luck part started kicking in. I must have been asleep or in Nebraska or something, because I don't remember it. I remember after years of hard work I started getting better and better gigs, but that didn’t have anything to do with luck.

Usually I hear the "lucky" crack when I'm working at a cool resort, casino, or cruise ship. I'm there, probably on a regular basis, because I'm good enough at what I do to get invited back. The person telling me how lucky I am is usually there because they just happened to be the third caller in some morning radio contest that was giving away a vacation. Yet somehow, of the two of us standing in the same place at he same time, I'm the lucky one. A comedian may be lucky the first time he/she gets to work a sweet, resort type gig. The ninth or tenth time, luck has nothing to do with it.

On second thought, I take some of that back. Yes, a comedian is lucky enough to be born with a marketable sense of humor rather than a marketable ability to mop floors or milk goats. For that we should all be thankful. What we manage to parlay it into during the course of a career is usually of our own doing. So, you, comic, put down the Game Boy, get up off your ass and go make something out of yourself. And if some goofball comes up to you at your HBO comedy special after-party, pushes his way through the protective layer of strippers that are surrounding you to tell you how lucky you are, just take a drag off that big, fat, Cuban Montechristo #2 that you're smoking, blow it in his face and say, "Damn right I am. Cool, huh?"

See ya on the road,

Kid Dave