Blue Collar Man

Blue Collar Man

It seems like I just got home, and I'm getting ready to hit the road again, even if it is just for the weekend.  I'll be lighting up the stage at The House of Comedy in Niagara Falls Friday and Saturday night, so if the spirit moves you, come on down!  I'm not sure of my placement on the show...I was supposed to be featuring, but by the looks of the club website, I'm the big cheese on the show.  Not that I'm complaining, but I'm making little cheese money.  This is Show Business, and I have to handle them both myself!

Today was "getting things done" day, and it's nice to have that.  My wife and daughter and I loaded up the Honda Civic and ran a day's worth of errands, topped off by a lovely home-cooked meal with my mother-in-law attending as well.  I like it when she has a chance to sit down and break bread with us...my mother-in-law works in the medical field, and she's always on the run.  She's been quite the Godsend with helping Pam and me raise little Harmony, always there to watch the baby, always there with good advice, and not above sliding a few bucks in there when needed (actually, she's been embarassingly generous....who needs a village to raise a child when you've got Mama Davis?).  Anyhow, pan-seared Tillapia is Pamela's new specialty, and it went down nice with a little rice pilaf and Wegmans mixed greens salad-in-a-bag.  What did we do before Wegmans?  It makes me understand why all those cavemen walked with a stoop.

I'm coming to a crossroads in my understanding of this comedy business.  It's almost as though I know all the things I should be doing to move up the ladder, and I'm consciously choosing not to do them.  At the beginning of the year, I promised myself that I would take a notebook around with me club to club, and ask club managers to write testimonials for me about how valued my act and I were to their club.  Managers who were willing to move me up to closer could express that, and managers who did not feel so strongly could indicate so or beg off.  I missed the first week, and before I knew it, it was the end of February and I decided not to do it.  What's to stop me from doing this in March?  Or starting in April?  Theoretically, I can start anytime I want, right?  Yet somehow, I've decided not to begin this process.  Why?  Am I afraid of success?  Am I worried about what club managers might write, or feelings they might express?  I'm constantly asked back to these clubs, and I have most of my year already booked, so somebody must think I'm OK at this comedy business.  What do I fear?

I promised myself that I would have a website this year.  I have a journal page (you're reading it) and an AOL homepage which is a handy little thing that allows me to update my schedule, but a living, breathing website would be so much better...and I'm dragging my feet.  In my defense, there's a cost issue involved, but it's not insurmountable.  If I had to, I could find the money.  What's slowing me down?

I don't know what I want out of this business.  I do know that I enjoy the travel aspect of the job, getting up on stage and really letting my stuff rip, but I also know that it's a treadmill to nowhere, and I'll burn out sooner or later.  There must be something more, and I really don't know what it is.  Most comics long for their own sitcom, but I don't know...even the best of the best only last ten years or so....is that what I want?  Lately, I've been listening to Al Franken on Air America Radio and The Daily Show with Jon Stewart ...I really like what they do, championing the left, but do I want to pursue political comedy?  I used to do it, years ago, and was somewhat successful with it, but there's also a certain amount of legwork necessary to keep up with the players if you're going to do political commentary, and that sounds like too much of a job to me...I got into standup comedy because it was fun...politics would strip all the fun out of it.

And then there's acting and commercials.  They can be lucrative, but again, you're committed to memorizing scripts, shooting schedules that last hours (the Sprint Long Distance commercial took all day to shoot-10 hours) and that's just too much work for me.  I'm not lazy...when I'm doing something I like, I can stay at it for hours  But in order for me to buy into it, it has to be of my creation...my improv show, for example.  When I'm working out with the Inner Loop Improv Troupe, I can run a four-hour practice and not even notice the time.

Ultimately, I'm a writer....I did that before I ever did standup.  At some point, I thought I might try my hand at writing screenplays, but even though I have a premise that I feel is workable, I'm finding the task to be daunting andodious.  Perhaps I have risen to my level of comfort in this business, just a rat on a wheel, chugging along in pursuit of the cheese.  I hope there's more than this, but I have to answer the question "What do I want?"  I wanted to be on Last Comic Standing, because I thought I would have excelled at the tasks that the comics had to complete, and I thought I would have been great on the package tours that the comics from the show got to do when the show was over, working the auditoriums across the country.  But alas, the show is cancelled and the opportunity has passed.

I will continue to explore this issue.  It is quite a puzzlement.

Ralph Tetta

Rochester, NY