Sleepwalk With Me_ And Other Painfully True Stories - Mike Birbiglia [35]
Somebody asked if NASCAR is the one with the low-slung pointy cars or the big road-type cars. There may be no such thing as a dumb question, but if you’re supposed to be a huge NASCAR fan, that is a dumb question. As I looked around the room at the faces of the other nervous Hydrox cookie eaters, it hit me, I know more about NASCAR than most of these people. The moderator proceeded to show us this really elaborate website all about NASCAR and NASCAR chat rooms and NASCAR stats, and then this other guy suggested that they build a website like this around baseball, because that’s his favorite sport. At this point everyone in the room, including the moderator, turned to this guy with this look, like, Are you stupid? They are giving us fifty-dollar bills and Hydrox cookies to pretend we like NASCAR. You will not ruin this for all of us. Your favorite sport is NASCAR.
We all started to catch heat from the moderator. She was looking around at us like, None of you losers watch NASCAR, do you? But she couldn’t say it, because then the jig would have really been up. I felt for her. Who were these losers who had lied to this company so they could make some extra cash?
I looked in the one-way mirror and saw my answer.
With nothing going on in New York and my couch welcome at Gina’s wearing thin, I moved back home with my parents. It was more or less a full-time job in tech support and lawn care in exchange for being able to sleep in my childhood bed.
I spent my days roving the Internet on my parents’ computer for contests I could enter, kind of like the character Lazlo in the movie Real Genius. But while Lazlo’s strategy had to do with any contest, mine was comedy contests. In retrospect this strategy was kind of insane, it was like I thought, I just need to win a contest for my career to take off. Boy, I sure hope such a contest exists!
Fortunately, such a contest did exist. Comedy Central was holding a “Laugh Riots” standup comedy competition in major cities nationwide. The winners of these regional contests would compete in Los Angeles for a spot on a Comedy Central standup show called Premium Blend. When I told my dad that I was accepted into the semifinals, he asked me what it paid, and I said, “It only pays if you win. Because it’s a contest.” And he said, “Are you going to get a job winning contests?”
He had a point, and I didn’t win, but one of the judges named Michelle from Comedy Central told me I was “kind of funny” and gave me her card. I told her I’d be back in New York soon and I’d call her when I got there. I wasn’t planning to move back to New York, but now that I had this business card, it seemed like a worthwhile life choice. I’m kind of funny!
I found an apartment in New York with dirt-cheap rent and at night I would go to comedy clubs and try to just “be around.” That was advice I was given. Just “be around.” I was around at the Comic Strip one night when Lucien said to me, “Mike, I’m not passing you at the club but I was asked to put some young comics on a showcase for Adam Sandler’s production company. Maybe you could do some of your Teletubbies material.” That Saturday night I killed in front of a hot 8:00 p.m. crowd. I had to. It was my only chance. Lucien said, “Audiences seem to like you. Why don’t you call the club with your availability?”
Then he looked over at his assistant Maria and said, “Will you write down the phone number for Mike?” That meant I could do one spot a week at the club and that if I hung out for the whole night on standby I might perform on “late night,” which meant that if there was even one last pathetic audience member left after a four-hour show who was still willing to order a drink, I would go on. I was there every night. Maria wrote the number down on a Comic Strip business card and I still remember it. 212-496-1424. It was one of the only numbers I called for the next six months.
I was getting