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COPYRIGHT 2004 All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission of The Condé Nast Publications Inc.
Late one Saturday night in January, at Ha! Comedy Club, on West Forty-sixth Street, Peyton Clarkson learned what it was to bomb. Peyton, a blond, blue-eyed twenty-three-year-old from Alabama, had been performing at Ha! for only a month and a half, but he'd had so many "spots" onstage--about twenty five-minute performances a week--that he'd already gained more experience than many young comics get in a year. Still, there's no substitute for public humiliation.
Peyton is soft-spoken in person but energetic and swingy when he's onstage. Like a lot of aspiring comics, he'd always been the class clown; at Auburn University, he was considered the funniest guy in his fraternity. After graduation, Peyton went to New York to become an actor. During the day, he waited on tables at a restaurant in Trump Tower and went on casting calls. Every night, on the way home from his second job--running the discount-ticket lottery for "Rent"--he would pass Ha!
The comedy world is a small one, and Ha! has a reputation as a home for starting comics, most of whom find their way there by word of mouth. Ha! also hosts an open-mike night once a week, during which hopefuls can audition for the club. The first time Peyton went, he got such a bad attack of stomach cramps that he left before his turn and ran the two blocks home, to Forty-seventh Street; the second time, he made it through his set and was told that he was good enough to bark--to distribute flyers to passersby and get them to come to the club. In return for getting two people to a show, Peyton would have a five-minute set.
Ha! has two stages. The main one, on the ground floor, is larger and is considered tougher, because the audience members feel more anonymous; the farther away people are from the comic, the more comfortable they are shouting out or creating their own private parties. In the lounge upstairs, Peyton had never lost the audience. The room is more intimate, with high barstool tables lining two of the walls, and lower tables surrounding a tiny stage. On this January night, though, the proximity worked against him. Even his boyish comedic style--a naive pose with lots of gesturing and miming--failed to elicit the protective feeling he often gets from an audience.
"This motherfucker ain't gonna be funny," a woman said before Peyton even reached the stage.
"My name is Peyton Clarkson," he began.
"This motherfucker's stupid," the woman said loudly. Peyton glanced at her boyfriend, hoping that he might shut her up, but he didn't say anything.
"My friends call me Consti-peyton," he continued, with less than his usual intended dopiness. The woman shook her head, disgusted. He went into the first full joke: "Everybody in my family is a really, really big drinker, or really, really homosexual. I personally prefer the drink over the pink, but you can bet I know how to make one hell of a Cosmo." It didn't get a laugh. Usually, the silence was only a pause, broken by laughter when he went into the character--narrowing his eyes and pursing his lips as he limply held a Martini glass. But this time the silence grew. And then Peyton made a serious mistake.
If you are going to address a heckler, you have to be sure that the audience is on your side--that it wants the heckler to be put down. And you have to be ready to say something funny that will end the exchange on your terms. Peyton appealed to the woman's mercy. "What have I done to you?" he asked. "Why are you so mad at me?"
"Stop it--just go to the next one," the woman said, her eyes down.
He tried, pulling his jokes from nowhere, out of order. "But what did I do?" Peyton asked the woman desperately, when it became clear that he'd lost the crowd. "Why are you so angry and bitter?"
"You just get on with your show," she said. "Don't worry about me--just go on with the show."
The m.c. flashes a red light when a comic has one minute left, and comics generally try to use up every second of the remaining time. That night, when the light was flashed, Peyton got offstage quickly, hot with shame. Despite a recent rule at the club that comedians can't drink during work, the club's manager, Francisco Aldorando, had a shot waiting for him at the bar. "I really screwed up," Peyton said later. "I was her bitch."
When Peyton emerged from the club to go home, around 2 a.m., a group of comedians were clustered beneath the club's red awning, smoking. It was an awkward moment: everyone knew that he had bombed. Just then, a Hummer limousine turned the corner at Forty-sixth Street and cruised down the empty block. "See that?" Francisco called out to Peyton, who was by then on the sidewalk.
Peyton turned back toward his colleagues, bracing himself: comics can be astonishingly cruel to one another.
"Someday, you're gonna be in there, with a bunch of strippers," Francisco said. "And I'll be driving."
Peyton looked grateful but baffled. "Thanks."
"It happens."
All comedians need stage time--to keep sharp, to try out new material, to remember who they are--but tyros need it to become comedians. Unlike writing, or painting, standup comedy can't be practiced alone; the pacing and the direction are influenced by incremental responses from the audience. Some comics say that you have to repeat a joke forty or fifty times just to get the feel of it in your mouth. Even before beginners can start to refine their material, they have to tackle the basic physical challenges--figuring out where to put their hands, how to hold the mike and move around without getting tangled in the cord, how to breathe without its seeming like a sound effect. Then, they have to learn how to work the audience: how to deal with hecklers; when to go out on a limb to bring a crowd back and when to wait for it to return. Some audience members laugh at whatever they find funny, but plenty of people take their cues from others, and sometimes, if the room is quiet, a comedian might look for an anchor, usually a couple who are laughing; if he can hold them, they effectively give other people permission to join in. Eventually, you take on challenges of a slightly higher level: learning to get comfortable enough onstage to play around with your set, inserting ad-libs and riffs and "call backs"--lines that return to the themes of earlier bits.
While the pros refine their material on the road or on the elite circuit, newcomers work on their basic skills as they move among a string of dingy rooms--often a different place every night. A-list clubs, when they use amateurs at all, are careful to identify them as such to the audience, and confine them to brief intervals between the professional sets. This is where Ha! distinguishes itself: in a ninety-minute show, fully a third of the time might be given over to the barkers, each of...
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