Sleepwalk With Me_ And Other Painfully True Stories - Mike Birbiglia [45]
Mitch’s shows were like a guided tour of his brain, where he’d walk around and point out ridiculous things our brains have actually known all along, about things like foosball: “a combination of soccer and shish kabobs,” and rotisserie chicken—“It’s like a really morbid ferris wheel for chickens.” But to call Mitch a one-liner comic would be a disservice to the strong connection he made with his audience. Mitch liked the people in the audience. You could tell. This is rare for comedians. Mitch had long hair over his eyes and wore sunglasses and often spoke with his eyes closed. He occasionally referenced this on stage. “The reason I close my eyes sometimes onstage is that I have drawn a picture of an audience enjoying the show more on the back of my eyelids.” To Mitch, his jokes were like his children. Some of them were accomplished. Some of them weren’t. And some of them didn’t even make a lot of sense. But he loved them all equally. He just loved jokes. When people didn’t laugh, he’d pause a second and go, “All right . . . that joke was ridiculous.”
Sometimes people would misunderstand Mitch. They’d ask, “What is he doing? Why is he lying on the floor? Why is he walking behind the curtain?” During one famous theater performance, the promoter placed a dozen seats on the stage, behind the performer—something about making more money by adding more front row seats. Mitch walked on stage and performed his entire show to those twelve people, ignoring the hundreds of people laughing hysterically behind him. Mitch straddled the line of what people considered a show, and no two shows were the same. He was the Iggy Pop of comedy. He was a rock star.
When I moved to New York I was confronted with the reality that only one club out of forty would give me regular spots. I knew that I needed to take my act on the road, the way I had seen all those other working comics do when I worked the door at a comedy club in college.
If I could just become a “middle act,” the guy who performs after the emcee and before the headliner, I could make enough money to live. I needed to “middle.” That’s the technical name for it. I’ve always found “middling” to be a little bit of an insulting term. It implies mediocrity by definition. It’s like if someone said, “What slot are you on the show?” and you’re like, “I’m doing some mediocre comedy before the headliner.”
“Yeah? You’re mediocreing? Sounds like you’re not very good.”
“Well, no. That’s misleading. To be specific, I’m neither good nor bad. I used to just emcee. I really sucked then.”
Anyway, I wanted to middle but I wasn’t experienced enough so I hit the road and worked as an emcee for about a year. I’d do ten minutes at the top of the show, remind people to turn off their cell phones, and bring out the other acts. I drove my mom’s Volvo station wagon all over America, making somewhere between zero and three hundred dollars a week. It’s really hard to convince club managers to let you middle when they see you as an emcee, so after these emcee engagements I’d drive hundreds of miles to do “guest spots” at clubs for free. I thought it was the only way to convince club managers that I could middle. Sometimes people enjoy the middle act more than the headliner, but almost nobody remembers an emcee. I was a traveling salesman of comedy, and I needed to make a sale if this comedy career delusion was going to pan out.
I caught a break from Lisa, the booker at Joker’s Comedy Club in Dayton, Ohio. I had driven all the way there to do guest spots for the Amazing Johnathan, and he didn’t want any openers. I spent one night operating the lights and doing sound cues in the back, and I wasn’t even good at it.
At the end of the week I walked into Lisa’s office, and she felt bad too. She said, “I’m going to give you a week to middle.” She flipped through her calendar and stopped in April. “We need someone for Mitch Hedberg.”
My life couldn’t possibly get better.
On April 23, 2002, I opened for Mitch at Joker’s Comedy Club in Dayton, Ohio. I know the exact date because I