The Todd Glass Situation by Todd Glass

Author:Todd Glass
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Simon & Schuster

CHAPTER 25

TWO NOTEBOOKS

Comedy’s gay marriage (between stand-up and sketch).

I couldn’t believe what I was feeling, like it was somebody else who’d been doing stand-up for more than ten years. I’d been in front of audiences that were, in some cases, a hundred times as big as this one. But this wasn’t the kind of audience I was used to, and they weren’t expecting a traditional stand-up performance.

My stomach ached like it did the first time I stepped in front of an open mike. I wasn’t even supposed to be performing tonight at the UnCabaret, a club that was helping to push comedy into an interesting new direction—somebody got sick or fell out, and Dave Rath suggested they put me up instead.

“It’s good that you have a stomachache,” Dave said to me as I paced nervously offstage. “You’re stepping outside of your comfort zone.”

So I pushed down the butterflies and took the mike. “You know,” I began, “I know the point of this scene is to open up. To be real. To tell real stories. So I need to tell you something. I’m going to go deep. I’m going to go real deep. I need to tell you something that I’ve never told anyone before . . .”

I paused and took a deep breath. Then:

“Dave Rath is gay.”

All of which was true, except for the last part about Dave being gay.

It was 1994, and stand-up comedy was beginning to feel stale. Everyone had a theory about what was responsible for the decline, for the news that another club was closing, for the sinking feeling that comedy might be dying.

I knew that comedy wasn’t dying. Comedy will never be over. It’s like asking if music will be around in thirty years. But anything can get oversaturated. In the beginning, there weren’t comedy clubs in every city. Then, all of a sudden, there were. People went, and it was great.

Then there were two clubs in every city. Or three. Pretty soon, some cities had six or seven. The audiences were great, loaded with people who loved stand-up for the same reasons I did. The best comedy movie you’ll ever see might deliver twenty or twenty-five big laughs. A great comedian, on the other hand, might make you laugh a hundred times or more during a single forty-five-minute set.

But by 1994, the audiences weren’t coming out the way that they used to. Maybe they were getting older or having kids. Maybe they were just noticing what I was noticing: Stand-up comedy was becoming formulaic.

Seinfeld was the number one television show in America; Home Improvement, starring stand-up comedian Tim Allen, was number two. Paul Reiser’s Mad About You was also near the top of the ratings. This was the kind of success that every comedian dreamed about. And as far as most comedians were concerned, what worked for Seinfeld would work for them.

The first step was to get on The Tonight Show. You needed a “clean seven,” seven minutes of great material that could get past the censors on network television.

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