Who’s Q.? [PART 4], by Q. Reyes – Artistic Warfare #10

February 15, 2009 Q. Reyes 0 Comments

There’s nothing glamorous about starting out a career in stand up comedy, and I had no clue about what I was about to get into.  I hit the open mic circuit.  Open mics are the places where you sharpen your comedy claws before you jump into the waters of actually trying to get paid to tell jokes.

You start out by networking with other comics that are getting paid already, and you try to dig for information about how they’re doing it.  Who books them?  Where?  These are the ever-eternal questions paid comics have for each other.  To top it off, recommendations aren’t easy to come by either, since in a way you would be recommending someone to take a gig from you in the future.  It’s really a hard industry to network.

After you pry the information from your fellow comics, now the next step is to get the bookers to look at your five-minute demo.  Phone call after phone call just to get them to watch it.  That’s why a recommendation its so important, since it can put your demo tape to the top of the stack.

The gigs and bookers I’m talking about here are really “b” and “c” comedy rooms.  Just bars full of drunks demanding that you make them laugh or they’ll kick your ass in the parking lot.  So, this is a small step in a full-fledge comedy career.

Once you’re ready to give up doing comedy for a living, you’ll get a phone call from a booker that needs an emergency comic to do a thirty-minute set in Salem, Oregon for fifty dollars.  Of course I’ll do it!

So I’m in my car driving from the Bay Area to Oregon, spending way more in gas than I’ll make the entire weekend, but with a smile as big as the sky.  If I do well here, I’ll get more opportunities in other places.  My life was meaning something now.  Once I get that check, I’ll be officially a professional stand-up comedian.  The problem?  I don’t have thirty minutes of material!

Here I am on stage, trying to extend a one-minute joke into a ten-minute bit.  Wait!  It was working.  People were laughing and buying me drinks as I did my routine.  I can get used to this… if I could afford it.

I had a great run that weekend, and I received subsequent phone calls to do more gigs.  Washington, Oregon, California… I was driving everywhere, and if I would have had a heater in my car, it wouldn’t had been that bad.

Sometimes I would car pool with the headlining comic.  The headliner was a comic that had to do a full hour of material.  This was usually a comic that had been doing it for quite a few years in order to accumulate jokes. They didn’t have to be necessarily good, but they just had to be on stage for an hour.

Even with my apparent success in these hole-in-the-wall comedy spots all across the Western U.S., I still struggled when I came home and performed in the black rooms in Oakland.  It’s like the Oakland crowds knew me, and knew me well.  They knew they could break me.  I was still getting booed like if they just liked to hear themselves booing.  I understood it, and in a way their boos grew on me. It meant “we love you” and “get off the stage”.

I started working the comedy rooms a lot harder.  I was doing two, three, and sometimes four comedy open mics every night trying to perfect my routine.  I became obsessed with comedy.  I would write and re-write all day just making sure the right word sounded right and the right sentence was short and sweet.

All my hard work was paying off and I started to get noticed.  I was also trying to get into acting and I got bit pieces in Nash Bridges and Sliders, but really the most nerve-racking moment was when I auditioned for BET Comicview, and I actually made it to the show.

Here I was.  Scheduled to perform in front of all these people in Atlanta, GA and I had, not butterflies, but pigeons in my stomach.  This was a black crowd and they weren’t necessarily too fond of my act.

I got on stage, and without having to alter my calm demeanor and slow delivery, I rocked the crowd.  At the time that was one of my biggest accomplishments in my stand up comedy career so far.  I knew I was going to get booked at bigger venues now.

Unfortunately, racism is rampant in the comedy world.  Not just in the comedy acts, but in the business itself.  I found my self not getting booked to those real comedy clubs like I thought I would.  In one occasion, one of my comic friends that was getting booked in those clubs told me the reason.  He said it was because I did BET.  He said he overheard one of the comedy club owners saying that as soon as he sees “BET” on the resume, he won’t even look at the tape, let alone book someone.

I dug deeper, and this was, and still is, very common among the comedy clubs in the United States.  When you see the likes of Dave Chappelle, Carlos Mencia, George Lopez, you’ll hardly ever see BET on their resume, and they’re really not good examples because they had a following in the comedy industry before hand; but, take a good look a the success ratio of comedians that have performed on BET and see how many of them actually move on to do bigger and better things, and you’ll see that success ratio is pretty dismal.

This racism has nothing to do with BET itself, because BET is just an outlet.  It has to do with the real bigotry that the comedy industry is plagued with, and partly to blame are the comics in the industry.  I saw a lot of comedians come and go and most were doing it to become rich and famous.  I hardly saw comedians dedicated to the art form.  Perfectionist of the craft.  Purists.  When I did meet some, the difference is day and night.  Those are the ones that make it.

Still, it doesn’t matter how funny you are, you must be committed to a lifestyle that is not suitable for the weak.  To make any money when you’re a nobody in comedy you have to work year-round, everywhere you can.  Most comedians lack that commitment, even though some just lack the opportunity.

I need a break from comedy… now what? [TO BE CONTINUED…]