A Very Punchable Face: A Memoir by Colin Jost

Author:Colin Jost [Jost, Colin]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781101906323
Amazon: 1101906324
Publisher: Crown
Published: 2020-07-13T23:00:00+00:00

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One question you get asked a lot as a stand-up is: “What was your worst show ever?”

Sometimes the answer is truly horrible, like when my friend Steve made fun of an audience member, so the audience member called him a “chink,” hit him in the back of the skull with a barstool, and Steve had to get staples in his head. Fortunately, I’ve never been physically assaulted while performing comedy. Though, oddly, I was called a “chink” by a guy in Boston once. (He was really drunk. And really Boston.)

One of my worst shows took place at noon (as touring comics call it, “a nooner”) on a random Tuesday at Finger Lakes Community College in Canandaigua, a five-hour drive north of New York City. (The Finger Lakes region is where Kristen Wiig’s character with tiny hands is from.)

I was told the show would take place in the cafeteria, but when they led me to the “stage,” I saw it wasn’t in the cafeteria at all. It was in a weird empty room adjacent to the cafeteria with ten folding chairs, a plastic table, and a microphone. I wondered, What is the table for…

The person organizing the show waved in about seven students, who clearly had agreed to attend last-minute out of pity. Then he introduced me: “Hey, guys, this is Colon Jast, and he’s gonna do some improvs for you! Oh, and we’re putting out pizza on this table directly in front of the microphone, so whenever you want to come up and take a slice, just go for it. All right, sweet! Now give a big Finger Lakes welcome to…Colon!”

I entered to zero applause. Just some whispered conversation about what type of pizza they would be serving.

As promised, five minutes into my set, fifteen pizzas*1 were brought in and placed on the table in front of me. There was a thirty-second grace period where the audience calculated how rude it would be to grab a slice while I was talking. Then the first dude decided, Fuck it, I’m not laughing anyway, and took a slice. That opened the floodgates.

In fairness, most of the kids looked morally conflicted about interrupting my train of thought to get pizza. One girl grabbed a slice and whispered to me, “Hang in there, it’ll be over soon.” Little did she know I had forty-five minutes left.

The worst part was that the room had a giant window looking into the actual cafeteria, which was packed. So after a while, the bustling cafeteria (which had no interest in seeing me do stand-up) noticed the presence of pizza. (And except for sex and drugs, pizza is the only thing a college student truly cares about.) This led to a steady stream of football and lacrosse bros peeking into the room, asking each other, “What is this shit?” (re: me), then walking in front of me and digging through pizza boxes until they found the pepperoni.

I did an hour of stand-up for an audience where the pizza outnumbered the humans.

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