First Battle Scars of Stand Up

I would post the video of this, but oddly enough my flip broke right before this, so none of this was caught on tape.

Last Tuesday at Bar 4, one of my favorite venues to perform at, I ran into a bit of resistance during my set. Bar 4 is a music mic, and while the musician that was playing before me was onstage, a group of about 10 very loud and obnoxious women entered the bar. It just so happens that they were all lesbians.

It's Park Slope, what are you gonna do.

But this was nothing new to me. It it's a loud crowd, it's my job to keep them in line. When I got onstage though, they had quieted down, and so I felt fine to go straight into my first joke. About halfway through it, they start talking loudly again. So I stop and address them directly. Nothing harsh, I'm being friendly and nice about it. I ask if they haven't seen each other since high school or something, if that's why they're talking so much. And one of them yells out, "No mate, you're right shit, actually." Now at this point I ask if she's joking. She says she's not, and I call her a bitch and tell her to fuck herself. I'd been onstage for a minute. I wanted to rip her apart even more, wish AIDS and a sad lonely death upon her and her family, but I don't. I want to explore her accent, and shit on wherever she comes from (probably Australia), but I don't. I plow through. None of the other lesbians scold her for what she did, and that annoyed me. The audience didn't really take my side against her, despite her being an obvious cunt. But, she leaves, I continue on.

I get some laughs here and there. Then I get to my gay marriage joke, a joke in which I DEFEND gay marriage. The joke starts out though, with me saying, "We can't let the gays get married." And then after that I say things that lets the audience know I was being sarcastic. On this night however, when I said, "We can't let the gays get married", a chorus of boos came from the mostly lesbian crowd. I decided to wait until the boos stopped, sensing that I would win them over once I continued the bit and they would see that I'm defending gay marriage. But before I could continue, one lesbian on the right side of the stage crumpled up a napkin and threw it at my face, hitting me between the eyes. Had there been ketchup on the napkin it would have made me look Indian.

Now, I'd like to say I played that off cool and made it fun for everyone. I'd also like to say that I have a big dick. Neither are true. I didn't play it off well. I need more stage experience I guess. I basically reacted in shock like, "Did you really just throw a napkin at me for that?" She said, "It was a napkin" and shrugged. I replied, "I don't care what it was, I'm ONSTAGE. Do you understand that you're derailing my fucking performance here?"

It was weird, guys. Neither of these events had ever happened to me before, and they both happened during the same set. Now to any comedian that's reading this (why would you be? you should be doing spots), I know that you have worse stories. I've heard a lot of really bad stories. People crying, people throwing a bunch of shit on the stage, people wanting to get into fights...again, I'm inexperienced. I just realized that I have a shitty blog I update rarely and that this probably deserves to be in it.

By the way, a lot of people say that doing stand up is "The hardest job in the world," which definitely isn't true. But if people believe that, how are there still hecklers? People have no respect for a job that's supposed to be hard? When I picture a heckler, I picture a person walking by a burning building, and stepping on the fireman's hose to decrease the flow of water through it.

...Hecklers and douchebags, is what I'm trying to say.