Funny First

1.

Often when I write something, the funny comes, if it comes, out the sides. I don’t examine it, because I am afraid of scaring it away. Recently, though, I decided I wanted to write something funny rather than something that was something else first and funny second. I decided to look funny in the face.

I enrolled in a stand-up comedy class that met near my apartment in Manhattan, figuring that it would at least help me learn how to write a joke. Initially, I wasn’t differentiating between writing funny words to perform in front of people and writing funny words to be read by people later, because I thought the work was the same: writing funny words.

But I soon came to see that writing for performance rather than publication highlights an issue that has been bothering me for some time, which is how fundamentally upsetting it is that my great love, writing, requires me to separate my words from my body and then leave them there for someone to discover later, like the remains of a killing.

 

2.

One of the primary reasons I became a writer is because I knew from a young age what it felt like to be alone with my words. The words I had at the time were simple: the babysitter’s husband is raping me.

I did not say these words, because of what the babysitter’s husband threatened to do if I said them. So I was alone with my words for years, and then later, when it no longer mattered so much, I could write them down and/or say them, but by then the damage was done; I was ruined for everything but the pursuit of being in community with words.

I was young; I could have done many things with words. But I pursued writing, in part, because my body had already proven to be such a troublesome locale, and writing nicely and neatly dispensed with it.

I came to writing, then, grateful for this dislocation. It never seemed odd to me, and I never asked why, in this weird medium, my body was in one place and my words were in another, as if this were in any way a natural situation, as if my body and words were two crazy kids who couldn’t be left alone in a room together or god knows what might happen.

3.

I took two six-week stand-up comedy classes and performed in two class shows over the course of writing this essay. My first teacher, Chris Griggs, jokes in his stand-up act that he comes off like a “grown-up ex-military Charlie Brown,” which is...