A Long-Lost Soul Gets Last Laugh

We all have an if only side of ourselves. The person we would be if things had been different. If only I had been bolder, if only I’d started earlier. If only I had practiced. I might have become the artist, performer, lawyer I’m not today.

I might have become a stand-up comic.

The ingredients were there. I had Angst worthy of Woody Allen, an offbeat sense of humor, a misfit history of never quite fitting in and quirks too numerous to mention.

Yet I’d never tried stand-up because, I figured, why bother? Everyone in my New York hometown became lawyers, doctors or business people. Becoming a writer--which I did--was bad enough.

At 35, I had no desire to change careers. Still, I could no longer resist the yearning to glimpse my long-lost self.

And so I enrolled in UCLA Extension’s introductory course in stand-up comedy.

I looked forward to the comic relief. I couldn’t think of when I’d last had a reallygood laugh--the kind that brings the milk back up your nose. Finally, I thought, a chance to get silly.

At our first meeting, my classmates voiced similar motivations. The group included all kinds, lawyer to manicurist. Straight-laced to eccentric.

A prim, 60ish insurance executive had come “for a loosening-up experience.” On the other extreme was a balding, pink-skinned man with an earring and platinum hair standing on end, who turned out to be the ultimate square peg in a round hole. “I’m here to find myself,” he said with a laugh, revealing he designed the guidance system for the MX missile.

Our instructor, Shelley Bonus, was a bouncy woman in a floppy denim outfit. A blonde Cher on laughing gas.

“You are probably going on the most incredible journey of your life,” she announced. Like “real comics,” we would develop an act to perform on “open mike” amateur night at the Comedy Store on Sunset Boulevard.

“Some will discover themselves,” she predicted. “Others will die in the silence.” A discernable shudder passed through the class. My stomach clenched in spite of myself.

Bonus laid down the rules: no blue humor, no minority or gay bashing. Such material may work in clubs but not the big time, Andrew Dice Clay excepted. Old-style take-my-wife jokes are out, too.

“Being funny is about being yourself,” explained Bonus, again sounding the self-discovery theme. The best material comes from your own personality and experiences. Your personal mishigas.

We did an exercise to loosen up. I realized how so much of comedy is physical. Facial expressions. Noises. Pratfalls.

Standing in a large circle, we passed various sounds and gestures around from one person to the next--like an invisible volleyball. Someone “threw” me an e-e-e-k and a screwed-up face to imitate and “pass” along.

This should have been right up my alley: As a child, I did a mean cow imitation. But it felt embarrassing somehow.

In a more enjoyable exercise, groups of us paced before the class, “ranting” randomly about a nonsense “issue and attitude” Shelley tossed out--from “I crave sex” to “I despise money.”

Sure enough, jokes began to emerge. “I am angry about Lithuania, angry about Lithuania,” exclaimed one woman, “because I don’t know where it is!”

As homework, we had to rant into a tape recorder and develop material. Railing in my apartment, I felt like an escaped mental patient. Generating comedy from ground zero was definitely a strain.

Ordinarily, my jokes are sparked by someone else’s conversation. Alone, I felt like a space shuttle attempting lift-off without boosters. Clearly, this was not the piece of cake I thought it would be.

Eventually, I worked up some jokes--about cockroaches. Why I was so passionate about them I didn’t know. I hadn’t seen a roach since leaving New York.

The next class was show time. We had two minutes and two minutes only. Calmly, I stepped up to the mike. A voice inside me boomed:

They’re gonna think you’re an absolute idiot .

I opened my mouth. Nothing came out.

“Start,” Shelley commanded.

I felt like someone had stolen my larynx. “Ak. . . .”

“Say something!”

I started my roach routine. “Don’t you hate the way they leave pieces of themselves around? Like a hairy leg in a glass you’re about to drink from. My boyfriend would leave a hair in the soap (pause), but never a whole leg. . . .”

To my surprise, I got laughs and enjoyed it, too. A promising debut. Surely I’d be knocking ‘em dead in no time. Self-realization--maybe even an HBO special--was just around the corner.

Not quite. I soon discovered I had the worst stage jitters in the class. Shelley said they would lessen. But they didn’t. It also got harder to get laughs as we practiced the same material week after week.

By the seventh session, I actually looked forward to performing before the fresh audience at the Comedy Store. Stage fright or not, that had to be more fun than doing yet another encore for my roached-out classmates.

D-Day finally came. Wrong again, I thought as we arrived at the club in the early evening to get our performance time slots.

This place is mean. The bouncer at the door had a metal-detecting wand.

“Why do you need that?” I asked. He wouldn’t say.

It occurred to me how much comedy is about hostility. Comics either kill or they bomb . Here, apparently, they’re in danger of getting nuked.

We started at 8, along with other “potluckers” and some regulars. (Potluckers is the trade term for amateurs.) Their acts were more outrageous than anything we’d done in class.

“Good evening, fellow sex junkies,” said Miss Heidi, a gray-haired granny of 70 who proclaimed herself the “pit bull of geriatrics.”

The spirit of Andrew Dice Clay pervaded the evening’s raunchy, often homophobic humor. (Clay himself was rumored to be in the Belly Room trying out new material.)

I winced as a white male comic sang a song about 18-year-old girls with spreading thighs who keep having babies and wearing stretch pants.

Compared to these acts, the performers from our class were, shall we say, a bit tame.

And we were bombing.

“Let’s give a round of applause for all the potluckers,” joked the emcee. “They sucked, didn’t they?”

“I hate this crowd. They’re evil,” a classmate moaned. On stage, a woman named Glitter was spanking a young hunk from the audience. I didn’t get the joke.

Yet this paled in comparison to the evening’s most outrageous act, T.K. Kirkland, a popular Monday night regular. His act centered entirely on oral sex.

Still, he was getting laughs. People were rolling in the aisles. He got far more than the allotted three minutes. The emcee suddenly approached me.

“You’re on next.”

My stomach plunged into the basement. How could I--a woman--follow that? With my little routine about cockroaches, I would be dead on arrival.

The sympathetic emcee promised “to cool down” the audience after Kirkland’s exit. His efforts were to little avail. Finally, it was my moment.

“Let’s give a hand to Elizabeth Ames. . . .” Hearing my name made me cringe. “It’s her first time at the Comedy Store. Be nice to her.”

I took my place at the mike, stared into the lights and started.

“My boyfriend would leave a hair in the soap . . . but never. . . .”

Nobody heckled--or said anything for that matter. They simply listened--politely, thanks to the emcee. Without laughs to pause for, I rushed through my act, finishing before the blue wall light signaled my three minutes were up.

“Thank you very much!” I jumped off the stage and made a hasty exit.

Far from dying in the silence, I discovered quite a few things. That it was no accident that I’ve opted for the safety of the written word. That I’m a little more shy than I’d like to be.

As for show biz, I haven’t been missing anything. I won’t be appearing on “Tonight Show” any time soon. But I have stopped regretting what might have been. I have glimpsed my long-lost self.

I knew her already.