Comedians are Mean and Ugly

Because people laugh at everything hot ppl say

I’m producing a comedy show in San Francisco on March 26. Link for tickets.

I was sitting at a bar in the SoMa neighborhood sipping Diet Coke and eating $2 chicken wings. I had my joke notebook open and I was scribbling down ideas for punchlines.

Less than 24 hours prior, down the street from this bar, a fatal shooting occurred. Me and the rest of the comics were unbothered; the only bars that allow open mic nights are ones struggling to get people through the door. The shooting, while tragic, is the only reason we are allowed to tell jokes here.

The comics around me are familiar faces. Burnt out tech bros, cancer survivors, alcoholics, all participating in a nightly humiliation ritual hoping to get a few laughs.

And then a really attractive girl in her mid twenties walks in. She signs up to do a set and hovers around the rest of the us. I almost feel bad for her, she’s sticking out like a sore thumb. There are 12 guys, one fat lesbian, and this chick at the mic.

I go up, tell my jokes and get between 0-3 laughs. But I’m unbothered. I’ve done this 100s of times and this set is nothing more than a data point.

The hot girl goes up next and starts talking about her dad. From what I could gather, it’s deeply personal. She does a long lead up into a joke about an immigrant parent being frugal, and while funny, it was highly predictable. And unfortunately, predictable jokes don’t get laughs.

You could tell how hard she worked on the jokes, how she told her friends these same lines at the bar and they all fell out of their chairs laughing. “You gotta do an open mic girl, you would kill it”. But it didn’t kill. Not because she isn’t funny, but because open mics just kinda suck. She ends her set and sits back down.

As usual, one of the drunk comics complements her set, hits on her, and stumbles out of the bar when turned down.

Her face wore a look of embarrassment, she was unable to make this group of societal losers laugh. In that moment I felt a great deal of empathy. She wanted to try out something new, she’s probably the funniest out her friends, and she got 0 laughs at this mic.

And the truth is that she probably is quite funny, and she could be really good at comedy. It’s just that the comedy is set up in a bad way. It’s set up in a way that doesn’t encourage newcomers, but rather puts them down. Even more so if they don’t fit the “comic” look. It’s tribal, in the worst way possible.

And the problem with hot girls is that people laugh at their jokes even when they aren’t funny. Open mics are the mirror opposite, nobody laughs at your jokes even if they are.

So next time you go to an open mic and see someone that doesn’t belong there. Go watch their set and fake laugh as realistically as you can. Because all they need is a little bit of encouragement, because then, they may try again next week.

That’s my daily reminder to myself as a comic: I’m not funny, just persistent.

-raj