Shrill: Notes from a Loud Woman(35)

During college, in Los Angeles, I went to comedy shows as often as I could (usually alone; my roommates didn’t much care): Patton Oswalt working out new material at M Bar, Paul F. Tompkins singing “Danny Boy” at Largo, Mitch Hedberg at the Improv soon before he died. It was rapturous. We were between comedy booms at the time, and I didn’t understand that normal people weren’t starstruck by Marc Maron and Greg Proops and Maria Bamford. Why were they so accessible? Don’t they keep the celebrities in a bunker somewhere? Why was Bob Odenkirk, the most important man in the world, sitting next to me at the bar, where anyone could talk to him? How was it possible that I just accidentally body-slammed Bobcat Goldthwait outside the bathroom? Also, was he okay? (He is very small!)

Once, at the Paul F. Tompkins Show (which I never missed), I was seated at a cocktail table next to Andy Richter and his wife, Sarah Thyre. “Have a craftsman on,” I thought, “OR have a narcoleptic on. Have a craftsman on, OR have a narcoleptic on!” I ran to the bathroom and called Meagan. “Fuck you,” she said.

I wanted to be immersed in comedy—the creation of it and the consumption of it—all the time. I couldn’t sleep without Ricky Gervais and Stephen Merchant’s XFM radio show playing; I’ve probably fallen asleep to Gervais’s voice more than my own mother’s. I never wanted to do stand-up, particularly, though I certainly nursed an idealized notion of how “fun” it would be to hang out in comedy club greenrooms (“HAHAHAHAHAH”—Me now). My real Xanadu was the TV writers’ room. I couldn’t believe that people got paid to sit around a table and riff with their friends—building from scratch the kind of rich, brilliant TV universes that had felt like family to me growing up.

I graduated in 2004 with an English degree and a case of impostor syndrome so intense that I convinced myself I “didn’t have enough ideas” to become a writer of any kind.

Instead, when people asked me what I wanted to do with my life, I’d say this: “Well, I only have one skill, which is that I know how to make sentences, kind of, but I don’t know, I’m not, like, a writer.” A COMPELLING PITCH, YOUNG WEST. With no other options, or ideas, or interests, I took an unpaid internship at a free “parenting magazine” in the Valley. It was essentially a packet of coupons and ads for backyard clowns, padded with a handful of “articles” written by interns (me) and a calendar highlighting what time Three Dog Night would be appearing at the Antelope Valley Fair (four p.m.). There were three people in editorial (including me), and what seemed like hundreds in sales.

Despite still being a child myself in, like, nine out of ten ways (exception: boobs), I threw myself gamely into the “job.” If I’m going to sit in a windowless office in Encino for twenty hours a week for zero dollars, I might as well try to get some clips out of it. The slimy Young Businessman who owned the place didn’t care that I was alarmingly, dangerously unqualified to dispense parenting advice, so I was assigned pieces on anything from “what to do if your child is a bully” to “should you bank your baby’s umbilical cord blood?” (I believe my answers were, “IDK, talk to it?” and “uuuuuuhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh.………… yes?” respectively.) I can only hope that no families were destroyed during my tenure. To be fair, though, DON’T GET YOUR BABY BLOOD TIPS FROM A CLOWN PAMPHLET.

I finally quit the day one of the slimers made me drive to a lumberyard in South Pasadena to pick up a cord of firewood for his motivational corporate firewalking side business. This was not in the terms of my internship. He instructed me to drop the wood off—and unload it myself, alone, log by log—at this creepy, barren porn-condo that apparently was Slimer Firewalking Inc.’s HQ. He touched my arm, slipped me twenty dollars, and asked, huskily, if I’d ever walked on hot coals. “Yeah, no,” I said, moving toward the door.

“Do you want to?” he called after me. “It’ll change you.”

“I’m good!”

In retrospect, I should have sued that place for all of its dirty, on-fire clown money. Instead, I gave up on L.A. and moved back home.

Seattle, in 2005, had our own little comedy boom. I started hanging around open mics because Hari Kondabolu—college roommate of a friend—had moved to town and joined our social circle. (Coincidentally, he lived in a house with the guy who brought the scuba gear into Autobiography class, because Seattle is only four people big.) When I looked at Hari’s Friendster profile, before we’d even met, and discovered that he was a comic, I thought, “Holy shit. I’m about to have a comedy friend.”

People who were around at the time still talk about that scene with reverence. It did feel special—some lucky confluence of the right people, the right rooms, the right mentorship, the right crowds, the right branding. Comics did weird, experimental stuff and filled seats at each other’s shows. You could feel something happening. Meanwhile, the national comedy boom was percolating—Louis CK was becoming a household name, people were starting to realize the potential of podcasting.

At those early Seattle shows, a few faces were ubiquitous: Hari, Emmett Montgomery, Dan Carroll, Derek Sheen, Andy Peters, Scott Moran, Andy Haynes (WHO WAS ALSO IN AUTOBIOGRAPHY CLASS OH MY GOD), and Ahamefule J. Oluo, a tall, gloomy single dad who quickly formed a writing partnership with Hari and was folded into our social circle as well.