Gethard - Lose Well

T he best advice I ever received came from my shrink, which is good since I pay her a lot of money.

By 2007 Id been doing comedy for seven years, which felt like forever. Now Im seventeen years in and feel like Im still just getting started. Seven years of hard work is nothing. I didnt know that then. I thought I was striking out, that Id missed my chance. I was twenty-six years old and I was over the hill.

It sounds ridiculous now, but back then those feelings were very, very real. Stress wasnt a faraway concern. It was a minute-by-minute reality. I couldnt sleep. I couldnt think straight. I couldnt make decisions. My anxiety was way beyond normal. At the start of any idea, any venture of any kind, I was paralyzed with fear.

One Friday night I arrived at the UCB Theatre, where I was scheduled to perform with the Stepfathers, an esteemed improv group Id helped found years earlier. We were all sitting backstage getting ready to go on, just like every week. Joking around. Then the house manager told us it was showtime and everyone stood up. But I... couldnt. I dont know how to explain it except to say that my body refused to stand up. Fear stabbed me in the gut, twisting the knife around until the tears came. My teammates asked me what was wrong. I shrugged. No words came. I couldnt explain. Nothing was wrong, but everything was wrong.

They went onstage. What else could they do? I sat in the back, feeling all the bad feelings Id felt prior to now with the added guilt that Id let down my friends. Staff from the theater asked me questions I couldnt answer. I couldnt speak. The only thing I could do was make eye contact through a torrent of tears, hoping it was enough that theyd read in my eyes the words I DONT KNOW WHATS GOING ON BUT ITS BAD .

I felt broken.

Eventually, people shuffled me off to a back room. Someone put my coat over my shoulders. I heard whispers on the other side of the door as everyone debated what they should do. I heard the word hospital , which struck me as a good idea. Then someone said, I have his brothers number, and the next thing I knew my friend Justin snuck me out the back door and walked me to his place a few blocks away, where I sat motionless, in complete silence until my brother showed up. On zero notice, he had driven up from Philly. I dont remember what we did. I think he took me back to my place. All I know for sure was that he saved me.

That was the final breaking point at the end of a long line of incidents that led me back into the care of a psychiatric professional, the one who would soon give me the best advice I ever received, which again, Im psyched about because I paid a pretty penny for it.

At the start of one session, my therapist told me, Give yourself no other option.

It came out of nowhere.

Whats that mean? I asked.

You seem to think the thing thats killing you is the potential for failure. It s not. Its that you dont know. You think you can be a comedian, a writer, an actor. You think you have what it takes. But youre not sure. Thats the issue here. Youll be fine if it turns out youre a failure. Its living like this, where youre half in, half out, not sure. Thats whats causing all this.

Okay...

So give yourself no other option. If you think this is something you can really do, go do it. Dont accept money for anything thats not the things you want to do. No more teaching classes. No more freelance magazine writing. You take money for getting onstage, for writing comedy, for acting. Thats it. No other option.

Thats a horrible idea.

Why?

I have rent to pay. And bills and stuff.

Yeah, I know.

But... you dont seem to... I pay my rent with the teaching and magazine stuff.

Yeah, stop that.

But

Look, shit or get off the pot. Stop taking money for all those things today. And go see if you can get money for the other stuff. And if you can, great, you were right. A lot of this will go away. And if you cant, youll know that. Not everybody has what it takes. I think you could make it if you really go for it. But you might not. Trust me, youll like knowing you fell on your face and can move on, versus this floating-in-the-middle-ground nonsense.

And so I did. I gave myself no other option. I set aside $2,000 as my break glass in case of emergency money. I lived off the rest of my savings and whatever else I could scratch together from gigs, just enough to pay my rent and bills and eat for a month. At the very least, if I ever had to scramble and find a nine-to-five, I always knew I had that two grand to pay my rent and hold me over until I did. I decided that when that $2,000 was all I had left, I would officially pronounce my dream over. At that point, I would have to move on.

The next year was terrifying. I watched my savings account tick away like a doomsday clock. Every once in a while Id land an unexpected job that added a few more seconds back to the clock. These jobs were always weird.

I once booked a stand-up gig at a festival. Sounds cool, right? Festival dates are usually fun. You get to see bands, and people walk around naked, and because the comedy tent is one of the only air-conditioned places at a festival its always full and the crowds are always grateful to be there.

This was not one of those festival gigs. I hosted a side stage for a car company. This side stage was not advertised in any of the festival literature, so no one knew it existed.

My job was to do crowd work in between the bands to ensure fans stuck around throughout the day. Im guessing the car companys idea was that, somehow, these drug-addled millennials would say to themselves, You know what? I came here for the music, but I think at this point Ill purchase an automobile.

Occasionally a handful of people would stick around and watch in confusion as I took the stage and told jokes, only to wander away when they realized the next band wasnt coming on any time soon. The first time the crowd bottomed out I walked offstage. The guy who booked me ran up in a panic.

What are you doing? Get back out there!

But... theres no one there.

But theyll come. Thats the whole point! If youre doing stuff, theyll stop; theyll come!

Now I know this guy was just trying to save his own neck, but I had to explain the situation to him. Thats not how this works, man, I said. To do crowd work, you need... a crowd.

We arent paying you if you dont do what youre contracted to do, which is perform between bands.

I proceeded to do ninety minutes of crowd work to an entirely empty field.

Those years were fun, frustrating, confusing, uncertain, humiliating, and everything Id ever wanted my life to be. One of the adjectives that this stretch definitely wasnt was easy. These money gigs I found were sometimes simple (Come do improv at a restaurant on the Jersey Shore and well give you three hundred dollars and as much seafood as you can eat.), sometimes infuriating (Hey, Animal Planet wants to expand into scripted comedy. I know, its going to surprise everyone. Anyway, were shooting a spec script. Will you do it for free? It shoots on Christmas Eve.), and sometimes just bizarre (MTV is doing a show about trucks. Can you write jokes for it? You know, trucks. Garbage trucks, fire trucks, trucks. No, I dont know what that has to do with MTV.).

But they were jobs, small things that let me keep pursuing my dream. Little embers lit up, there for me to fan them. It was exciting to realize that all over this city were odd jobs that might allow me to cobble together an existence and a career in comedy. They werent always aboveboard, many of them werent great for the ego, and sometimes Id get stiffed on the cash... but they were out there.