Column and photos by Kelly McKewin
Just Before the Apocalypse: March 4th, 2020
Kris Gulvezan told me I had to perform in that week’s bar show.
It wasn’t that I didn’t want to perform—I was always dying to get up on stage—but I had promised myself and some friends that I’d have new material at the next show at Bar 1868, and I hadn’t written anything new that I was confident performing yet. I hadn’t even practiced at rehearsal that week.
So when Kris asked who wanted to be part of the line-up at the next bar show, I offered to go up with some old material only if they needed to fill stage time. Kris, however, told me I had to perform no matter what.
They didn’t need me to fill space—they had a full line-up—but I knew Kris wanted me to perform as a way to make amends for what happened at a show a few weeks earlier.
I had been set to headline at the last bar show, but after the show ran a little too long and a few too many people before me bombed, the bar had cleared out. I performed to a small audience mostly consisting of my own friends and a few frat guys who had stopped paying attention to the show and turned their attention to a game of pool. My set that night had been funny though, and Kris said it was a shame more people didn’t get to hear it.
I argued with him at first.
“I don’t want to go up just because you feel bad about what happened two weeks ago,” I said. “I’ll perform at the next show, it’s fine.”
But Kris told me to swallow my pride and just perform, even if it was old material. So I did. And looking back, I’m so glad I did. Though I didn’t know it at the time, it was the last comedy show I’ll ever get to perform at Miami.
My Love For Comedy
I started doing stand-up comedy at the beginning of this school year.
It started mostly as a little personal experiment. I’ve been an avid fan of watching stand-up since middle school and I’ve written my own jokes for years, but I’d never worked up the nerve to actually perform anything. I only performed in my head, in those very elaborate daydream fantasies you sometimes have in class when you’re supposed to be paying attention but absolutely are not.
I also had kind of a rough start to college—the first couple years, actually. It took me until midway through junior year to really find my footing here and feel like I had a place at Miami.
I also never really did anything crazy during my first few years here. It’s not like I wanted to go out and get arrested every weekend or anything, but I felt like I hadn’t done anything even remotely interesting or wild. I had never even been to Brick Street, never mind doing like, the kind of thing you look back on in 30 years at alumni weekend and think “Wow, that’s something only a dumb, stupid 20-something-year-old version of myself would have thought to do.”
So when senior year rolled around this past August, I told myself I wanted to do something kind of stupid and kind of crazy and the best thing I came up with at the time was trying stand-up comedy. I knew we had a stand-up club on campus called Not Very Funny (NVF), and I’d seen them perform a few times, so I figured I’d go to a few of their meetings and try it once. Just once though. And probably not even in front of a real audience, just in front of the club at a meeting one day. Just to say I did it.
Well, doing it once at a club meeting turned into doing it every single week at club meetings which turned into doing it at bars Uptown and in Armstrong and pretty much as often as I could.
Stand-up comedy was addicting. I loved the jittery feeling I’d get the day of a show, reciting my sets over and over beforehand. I loved the adrenaline rush I’d get in the minutes before I performed, waiting as the MC introduced me. I loved the exhilarating, almost out-of-body experience of being on stage, interacting with the crowd and delivering a punchline so perfectly that the whole room cracked up. I loved post-show celebrations.
I loved writing jokes. They’d come to me sometimes as I was zoned out while cooking or walking to class, and I’d always rush to my laptop as soon as I could to jot them down. I’d rework them every Tuesday night before the NVF meetings. I kept everything in a Google Doc titled “Comedy???” because I used to wonder if my jokes were funny at all. I’d leave the meetings every week ready to delete the “???” part of the title, because I’d know they were.
Most of all, I loved the people. It probably goes without saying when talking about a group of comedians, but the people in NVF were some of the funniest I’ve ever known, and even during the worst, absolute lowest weeks this school year, I looked forward to our Tuesday night meetings more than almost anything else in the week.
I was one of only two girls in the club, which at first scared me, but turned out to be a blessing in disguise. I became a lot closer to Olivia than I would have otherwise, and I worked a lot harder on my jokes in the beginning in an attempt to get the boys to respect me more as a comedian—which they absolutely did. Everyone there was talented, funny, and supportive (if also a little bit inappropriate and sometimes asshole-ish when they decided to poke fun at each other).
On top of all of that, I was good at stand-up, which is something I never expected to be.
Doubts and Hesitations
During my freshman year of high school, I had an English teacher named Mrs. Carro. She recorded every single speech we had to give in class that year so we could watch them back during finals week and see how we’d improved. During every single one of mine, I got so nervous that I couldn’t even read from a notecard anymore, and I would stand in front of the class stuttering until I started to tear up and she would finally let me sit down. When we got to the part of the year where we watched all the videos back, Carro told me I was one of the worst public speakers she’d ever had in all her years of teaching. I don’t think she even meant it to be a mean comment—she was just trying to give me the facts.
I think about Mrs. Carro every single week when I get up on stage. I can only imagine that if she ever somehow stumbled across my Twitter account and watched one of the clips I’ve posted of my shows, she’d think an evil twin had stolen my identity or that I’d been possessed by an alien or something equally crazy—there’s absolutely no way a girl who cried her way through a two minute speech on “To Kill A Mockingbird” can now stand in crowded bars every week and make fun of bad hook-ups and the alcoholics in her family. I barely believe it myself.
Stand-up has always been like therapy for me when I couldn’t afford to go to therapy. I used to watch it to distract myself from the bad or anxious thoughts, but performing it has been even more therapeutic than I ever imagined it could be.
Anything that was bothering me in my daily life—an argument with a boyfriend, a pregnancy scare, car troubles, a problem with my parents—got turned into a joke, which suddenly made it far less scary and much easier to deal with. Saying those jokes out loud and getting laughs was even better.
I’ve been to real therapy. I’ve had therapists give me those one-line platitudes before, like “Oh, everyone goes through this, it’s okay.” But that’s hard to believe when you’re sitting in a windowless office, surrounded by shallow motivational posters and trying to vent to a person 30 years your senior when you know they’re out of touch with the reality of being a college student today.
Venting to a bar full of your peers though? Making your problems funny and hearing everyone laugh and knowing they only find it funny because they’ve gotten into the exact same stupid fight with their mom too? It does something therapy never could.
And of course, there’s the fact that I didn’t think I ever would have the courage to stand in front of a room of people and tell bad jokes. I still get nervous every time I go up. I still fight off that anxiety and have to make sure my voice doesn’t crack and that I don’t talk too fast once I’m on stage. But I do it, every single time, and pulling off a nearly flawless set inspires a kind of confidence I don’t think I can get anywhere else.
The Story I Didn’t Get to Write
After I realized that stand-up comedy was going to be a crazy thing I did not just once, but a whole bunch of times, I planned to write a story for this issue of MQ titled “My Year As A Stand-Up Comedian.” I had so much I wanted to talk about—how I improved at stand-up, what it was like to be one of the only girls in the club, my friend’s reactions to finding out what I was doing, the other NVF member’s perspectives on the art of comedy. It was going to be the final piece I would write for MQ and as a student at Miami—a good-bye to both my journalism career here and the most fun, crazy, awesome thing I got to do in college.
After the coronavirus swept through and caused the rest of the semester to get cancelled, however, that story as I initially envisioned it was no longer possible. Shows I’d been looking forward to writing about were cancelled. NVF members were suddenly spread all across the country and some of that camaraderie was gone. I didn’t really get a chance to do a full year of comedy, so the title didn’t even make sense anymore.
It also felt like it would be a little silly to talk about now. This was supposed to be a story about me facing my biggest fear. But six months ago, my biggest fear was talking into a microphone and looking a little stupid in a bar full of drunk college kids. Now I worry about my parents getting sick while at work and dying alone in a hospital while I’m two states over. I worry about finding a job and how I’m going to pay my rent in June. I worry about my friends and their mental health and my own mental health when it’s been weeks since I’ve seen another human being. No one wants to read my stupid little comedy story in the middle of all that. I probably wouldn’t if it was anyone but me writing it.
At the same time, comedy has still been so prevalent in my life these last few months. I knew I had to write about it in this issue. I’ve written pages and pages of sets filled with coronavirus jokes and mocking all aspects of quarantined life. There’s a chance no one will ever hear them now, but they felt good to write and they make me smile to read over.
There’s a laundry list of things that have been cancelled because of coronavirus that people my age are upset about—spring break trips, internships and jobs, graduation. And while I’ve been affected by those things too and I know how much they mean, sometimes, when I find myself getting angry at the world for all its taken away in the last few months, it’s not graduation or my lost job or anything else that upsets me the most. It’s those cancelled comedy shows—and everything else they represent—that break my heart the most.
My time at Miami is almost done and with it is my chance to freely learn and explore and express myself and spend carefree time with my friends and try any stupid thing I can think of with minimal consequences. Stand-up represented all of that for me so well. On any given Wednesday night this year, there’s a good chance I was in a bar, laughing with friends, ready to get on stage and perform something original I had written even if it was dumb, and then have one too many drinks for a Wednesday night and wake up the next day late for class but knowing I’d had an absolute blast.
I had wanted to have a series of “lasts” at Miami—a last meal with friends, a last walk to class, a last night Uptown. My last stand-up show was going to be a big part of that, despite the fact that I only did it this year.
In the end, I did technically get a last stand-up show, and I’ll be eternally grateful that someone called me out on my stubbornness that night and forced me to do it—I think I’d be crushed if I looked back now and knew I let that opportunity slip by. And while this story isn’t the way I had planned for my last MQ issue to go and that show wasn’t the way I had planned for my last show to go, they turned out the best they could given the circumstances. And that’s really all anyone can do right now.
