Marty Minute
I spent two summers at gifted & talented stand up comedy camp.
Next Wednesday I’m going to tell a small group of (mostly) strangers at a coffee shop in Montclair about the summers I spent at middle school gifted & talented stand up comedy camp. (They still have tickets if you feel like a NJ visit on a Wednesday night).
The theme of the night is “Rebels,” a perfect excuse to tell a story about a creative conflict with my comedy teacher, Mr. O’Connell, a former Borscht-Belt comedian turned driver’s ed instructor. For the final show, he wanted me to tread safe ground and do the same routine I’d done the year before—a middling impression of comedian Emo Philips, the bendy, bowl-cutted comedian with a sing-song voice and jokes about Presbyterianism. I’d told two of Emo’s jokes, the two that worked for a mixed audience of parents and siblings of my comedy classmates. I got laughs but I wonder if they were related to the esoteric punchlines, or the overall impact of a 13-year old girl wearing acid-wash denim overalls saying: '
Oh the weirdest thing happened. I was walking down the street, and said to myself, my my, that’s Jimmy Peterson, I haven’t seen him since third grade. I went up to him and I slapped him on the back and said how’s it going you old Moron, you drunked retrograde and I knocked him down and he started screaming and I realized wait for a second, if that’s Jimmy Peterson, he would have grown up too. Oh boy. -Emo Philips, Live from the Hasty Pudding Theater
Third grade was only three years in the year-review mirror, but I read the joke like a world-weary, 30-year old man. Just like Emo.
But this year I did not want to play it safe. I wanted to write my own material.
I’d spent the past 12 months watching and studying Robin Williams, Eddie Murphy, and Roseanne Barr on rented VHS tapes. I took notes on a yellow legal pad with a #2 pencil; transcribing their jokes so I could read them out loud and try to understand how they worked. The work was dead-serious to me; comedy would be my art and my career. I sketched out a rough outline of my life to come—Saturday Night Live, a busy international tour, a book or two. When Letterman interviewed me, he’d pull out a picture of me at stand-up comedy camp. Denim shorts. My favorite t-shirt, a promotional giveaway covered in Tropicana logos and a drawing of a juicy half of an orange.
By the time I returned to camp, at the close of 7th grade, I was cocksure. The year before we’d ripped off a skit from SCTV for the final show. Funny, sure, but lazy. Not this year—I wanted to be the headliner, a headliner with all original material.
What happened next? You’ll have to come out to Montclair—or read the next Marty Minute—to find out.
In Brief
Yes, I haven’t sent this out in a long time.
I finally read Crying at the H Mart and it’s so great. Everyone in the world was right about this one.
This morning I read about this family in Texas who had their newborn taken from them—holy hell, this place we live is broken. The best way to help? Donate to the Afiya Center, they’re doing the work on the ground to reunite the family.
Marty chaser: Here’s his latest portrait, courtesy of Matthew. Sure he chewed through my CPAP tubing this week but LOOK AT THOSE EYES.
