The Woods in Things That I'm Grateful For

When I was finally at a place with my stand-up where I could actually tour and sustain a whole show by myself, I started writing concept narratives. That was how I did my shows. Each of my shows had a theme, it’s not completely dissimilar to Margaret Cho, in fact, I’d say that she directly inspired me in that sense.

I had done a smaller, mini-tour called The Curse which was based off of all the ridiculous things I learned from the Jeff the Jew affair, which was still happening at the time. Writing these things became my version of therapy, how I worked things out… unfortunately, it was almost always in front of an audience.

My first tour was called Language, it wasn’t my most high-concept but it holds a place in my heart for being my first big show. I remember being in Bakersfield playing a club and absolutely hating it. Not the place, I just had been doing the show for about a two-and-a-half months at that point, and I was already bored. My biggest hurdle in doing stand-up was making it sound like it was the first time I was telling these jokes (Kathleen Madigan taught me an awesome trick for that). I remember I was kind of unhappy with what I was giving out to the audience that night.

Language was a good show but it was basically about my difficulty communicating with others. It wasn’t very deep and didn’t reveal anything too special. It felt like I was going through-the-motions even though I hadn’t really even done it once. I knew I needed to do something about it because I still had three-and-a-half more months of the tour left.

I went back to my hotel that night and turned on the tv. Get Real happened to be on that night. It’s one of my favorite movies and I hadn’t seen it in a long time. While watching the movie, even though it’s set in England and they have completely different social references, I realized there was one thing that I could totally understand, and that night I got the idea for the next tour.

I spent the rest of the tour writing the next one. I was so excited. Little did I know that this would essentially become my work cycle for the next five years. I started booking the next tour while I was completing the previous one. I went around the country nearly three times each year.

That second tour was probably my least remembered tour, although it was more successful and lasted longer and brought in more money for me than Language. I never repeated any of the material in it because it really seemed like it lived in a specific place and time. The poster was the only one not to feature my face. People remember nearly any other tour I did, Language, The Joys of Anal Sex, At Wit’s End or Tears of Allah, before they remember this one, but I think it was the most honest I’ve ever been. Honest with an audience and honest with myself.

It was called The Woods. In Get Real, when the main characters want to be intimate and free from the stress and paranoia that grips them due to being a same-sex couple, they flee into the woods to get away from the world. We all have that place, someplace to which we retreat as a way of trying to hide from the world. But as in the movie, it’s not as safe as we pretend it to be, and hiding out prevents us from doing what needs to be done. We all need the woods, but we can’t live there forever. We have to get real and drag ourselves back to this place.

I have been in The Woods for a long time now. It’s time to find the trail back to reality.