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By Root 108 0

club booker actually took my calls. His name was Lucien Hold and he was the manager of the Comic Strip Live on the Upper East Side of Manhattan. Lucien was a New York comedy institution. He had been booking the club since the seventies and had supposedly given breaks to Jerry Seinfeld, Chris Rock, Eddie Murphy, and many others. He was a former ballet dancer who believed that comedy was an art form. He also believed in telling people exactly how he felt about their art, and he had a habit of talking at length. So not only would Lucien explain to you why he didn’t find you talented, but he would do so for a while.

Apparently on one occasion Lucien was in his closet-sized office giving notes to a female comedian, who was slightly overweight, and he said to her, “You’re overweight but it’s not comical.”

“Excuse me?” she said.

He said, “In other words, you’re not sexy enough to interest people with your looks and not fat enough to be a sight gag.”

She said, “Are you serious?”

Lucien said, “Oh yes. I’m not saying you can’t be a comedian. I’m just saying you can’t be a comedian at this club.”

Lucien had some enemies.

But he was honest, and honesty was a quality that was hard to come by when I was cold-calling bookers. I respected honesty more than unreturned phone calls. The first time I performed for Lucien, he said, “You’re a cross between Jim Gaffigan, Jeffrey Ross, and Todd Barry, and those guys already work the club, so I don’t need you.” Then he just waited for my reply. But I didn’t really have one. I liked those comics too. So I just made something up: “But I’m young and I’ll get better.”

He thought about this and said, “That’s true, but there are a lot of younger guys. I mean, it’s not like you talk about particularly young topics.”

I was stumped. I said, “I talk about the Teletubbies.”

He said, “The Teletubbies are for babies. Infants. We don’t serve infants.”

I had found myself on the wrong side of a preposterous argument. I was somehow an advocate of infant drinking. Lucien decided not to “pass me” at the club. That was the term for being on the booking list. When you are “passed” you get a phone number to call and leave your weekly availability. I wasn’t passed, but Lucien told me to come back in the fall.

• • •

This left me with a lot of time on my hands and no real prospects for work. My brother “Joe Bags” had moved to New York a few years before me and he had some ideas for me. He got me a job as a focus group participant. Well, sort of a job. It’s kind of like jury duty, but instead of deciding the fate of some alleged murderer, you work with a team of equally broke New Yorkers to decide the fate of the newest Del Monte canned fruit cocktail recipe, which will be called either “Extra Cherries Jubilee,” “The Cherry on Top Cocktail,” or maybe even “The Very Cherry Explosion.” Your opinion can change history. And you get paid.

The first focus group I participated in had candy and sandwiches and lemonade in the waiting room. It was fantastic. But I got a little suspicious. Why are they being so nice? Sandwiches in New York cost eight or nine dollars. How did I stumble upon this sandwiches gold mine?

After eating two or three of the sandwiches, I was ushered into a conference room and seated with ten other strangers and an overly enthusiastic moderator. The entire wall behind her was a one-way mirror, which she asked us to ignore, as if that were possible. It was easy to imagine the young ad agency hotshots and their clients back there, trying to guess how many of the free Hydrox chocolate cookies I could possibly stuff down my throat. The answer: many. But I was happy because I was making fifty dollars an hour to eat cookies and babble like a drunk person about fruit cocktail. I was winning.

Focus groups seemed pretty great. They were like taking college courses called “Introduction to Fruit Cocktail” and “Breakfast Sandwiches.” And there’s no homework, there’s never going to be a test, and there are no wrong answers.

Sometimes my fellow focus room participants said things about advertisements and