DEAF COMEDY JAMMED

For a while, back in the 90’s, I dabbled in standup comedy. I can’t say I was great, but I also don’t think I was too bad. Mostly, I was just too cautious, relying too heavily upon scripted material instead of letting my personality come through. I would eventually learn that the greatest risk of being over-reliant upon a script is that it leaves you unprepared to handle the unexpected while on stage. And by “eventually,” I mean April 14, 1997, at open mic night at The Velveeta Room in Austin, Texas.

It was my first time to perform at The Velveeta Room, which had a reputation for being a notoriously tough room. To be honest, I don’t know if that meant “tough on everyone” or “tough on a newbie who got cocky and decided to drink beers with his buddies before his set instead of mentally preparing so that he could possibly stand a chance of not falling apart when the absolute most unexpected thing happened about four seconds into his set.”

Either way, it was a tough room. For me.

I broke from my usual, solitary, pre-show routine because I had both friends and family in town, namely, three college buddies and my older brother, none of whom had ever seen my act and all of whom were really curious to see just what I had been doing since I dropped out of law school.

Another distraction was the fact that I’d been published, that same day, in the Austin American-Statesman. It was the first time they’d run one of my columns and I was feeling pretty darn cocky.

So, as my turn in the open mic show approached, I passed the time talking and drinking instead of pacing and practicing. When my name was called to perform, I bounded from my chair and jogged up the aisle to the stairs on the side of stage as if Bob Barker had just called my name on The Price Is Right. The MC smiled and handed me the mic as I waved to the crowd and took up a position at center stage.

As usual, the stage lights were too bright to make out many details in the crowd, so at first there was nothing about the 8 people seated in the front row that caught my attention. Truth be told, the front row could have been on fire and I would not have noticed, because right about the time I was taking the mic from the MC and waving to the crowd, I was also realizing that I hadn’t the faintest clue what I was going to say. My mind was a total blank.

I blinked hard, adjusted the mic, and took a sip of my beer. Then, like a ray of light, the first words of my routine flashed across my mind and I almost choked on my tongue trying to get them out before I forgot.

Now, I don’t know if my first joke flopped because it was too garbled to understand or if it was just not funny. But I can say that jokes 2 through 20 were articulated perfectly and failed just as miserably as the first. So…draw your own conclusions.

But here’s the deal. Between the first joke and the second joke, there was a...a…disturbance along the first row. This was not the typical, drunk heckler/loud talker-type disruption, but rather eight hearing-impaired individuals all turning the heads in unison to “read” my joke being spelled out for them by a sign language interpreter standing in the wings.

I was not prepared for this.

My first reaction was to try to hold the mic in such a way that the deaf guests could read my lips. This proved to be impossible to remember to do. I would pull the mic away from lips and raise my voice accordingly, but then I’d forget and bring it back up to my mouth. But then I’d realize I was talking really loud so I would pull it away and raise my voice again and then forget again and so on until it pretty much looked like I was engaging in a very loud, very obscene act with the microphone.

Which was probably the only remotely funny thing I did during the five minutes of self-immolation on that stage.

Now aware of the deaf people-interpreter thing going on, when I told my second joke and they all turned their heads toward the interpreter, I did likewise. I could not read sign language, so I had no idea whether he was butchering my joke or not, which kinda bothered me. It did not cross my mind that he might actually be improving my jokes, which actually kinda makes sense considering how awful they were to begin with.

Whatever he said, it didn’t get any laughs. If you’re keeping score at home, that means that by the end of the second joke, the eight people on the front row had had FOUR chances to laugh – my version of Joke No. 1, the interpreter’s version of Joke No. 1, my version of 2 and his version of 2 – for a total of 32 total opportunities for SOMEBODY TO AT LEAST CHUCKLE.

But no dice. I was bombing at twice the rate I’d previously thought possible. At one point, I swear I saw the interpreter give a little “Don’t blame me, I’m just the messenger” shoulder shrug before translating a joke.

My entire consciousness was occupied by the goings on between the front row and Mr. Saturday Night in the wings. The practical effect of this was to completely disconnect my brain from anything I ever once considered to be funny. I was drowning in a mental flood of panic, grasping at words and phrases like a man going down the third time.

At one point, I told the first sentence of a joke and then, at about the mid-point of the second sentence, decided it was going to be a disaster, SO I JUST STOPPED IN THE MIDDLE OF THE SENTENCE. I took a drink of beer, offered neither an admission nor a transition, and simply started telling a completely different joke. WHICH WAS ALSO A DISASTER.

At about the two-minute mark – which sounds like not very long, but how long can you hold your breath while also jabbing shards of glass into your soul? – the MC gave me “the light.” The light is a visual cue – usually a flash light or red bulb – indicating to the comic that his or her time is up. The MC usually gives a one- or two-minute warning by flashing the light briefly and when your time is up, they hold the beam in your eyes for a while.

I received no warning. I got the full-on, exit-the-stage-immediately light – a signal which, had I been in my right mind, would have been greeted with Titanic-life-jacket-level enthusiasm. But instead, I just powered ahead telling “joke” after “joke” until the MC had to, literally, walk on stage and drag me off.

I walked back to the table, where my brother and my friends pretended not to notice me and I pretended to be really fascinated by the label on my beer bottle.

Hmm…says here it’s “Rocky Mountain fresh”…interesting…”

We sat in silence through the next comic’s set. During the break between acts, my friend Raymond finally broke the silence.

“Is that what…um…usually happens?”

“Oh no!! That’s never happened before! That was a disaster!”

Raymond – and everyone else – breathed sighs of relief and burst out laughing.

“Oh thank God! We thought that was, like, a normal thing for you!”

With that, the mourning period was over. Which is not to say they let me off the hook; they made unmerciful fun of me the rest of the night. But they all understood, in their own ways, what it meant to screw up.

And they knew it wasn’t fatal. It only seemed that way.

© 2014 Lee B. Weaver