New Thing

New Thing                               7331  (550)

Thursday, April 5, 2007-12:30 A.M.

I have climbed down from the cross.

Today is a day off, my third in four days, and I spent most of it in the car, driving and thinking and driving and talking and driving and listening to talk radio.  I settled down in Bristol, Virginia, a good four hours from tomorrow night's show, and just decided to relax in my hotel room and enjoy some television.  Only I didn't relax so much as get myself jazzed.

C-SPAN was airing a special taped last month at the Cooper Union that featured Tim Russert hosting a Lincoln-Douglas style debate featuring Newt Gingrich and Mario Cuomo.  I was riveted by what both speakers had to say.  They both made my eyes well up with tears, they spoke so clearly and with such a love for our country and with such dismay over the way it has broken.  I followed up by watching "Real Time with Bill Maher" on HBO, and even though it was a repeat, I enjoyed it anyway, and then I watched the Jerry Seinfeld Comedy Arts Award show on HBO.  It featured some of my favorite comics, Robert Klein, Chris Rock, Gary Shandling and Seinfeld himself, discussing standup comedy which is something I could watch (and talk about) for hours.

Lately I've been running myself through the mill with questions....questions about whether I should keep doing standup comedy or not, questions about getting involved in politics (I really was considering that for a while), and questions about what I could do to help improve the situation in our country, how I could give aid to the less fortunate and hope to the hopeless.

I believe that the answers to my questions are slowly taking shape, but just like a streetlight in the fog looks like a streetlight because even though you cannot see it's form, you can pretty much guess what it is not and by previous experience guess what it probably is, the answers are pretty clear.  I need not change what I am doing, but how I am doing it.

I love doing standup comedy, and watching Klein and the others discuss it just drove it home for me.  I'm not going to be happy doing anything else, and damn the consequences.  I can work harder to make better business decisions, and throw my rope at the better paying work, and that certainly means working harder.  Right now, I'm in with about five major bookers that keep my schedule full, but at club-level money which is a one-way ticket to the poverty line.  Corporate events pay much better, as do cruise ships, casinos and the like, but they require a different kind of comic.  Well, the only thing stopping me from being that type of comic is the willingness to change the type of material I resort to.  I wrote three great bits this week, all clean and funny (the Kool and His Friend joke got lots of compliments, thank you all) and I know that I can work that way.  Any notion of being a "sell-out" because I would work a gig where I can't work blue needs to be dismissed.  I've come to find that working blue is a lazy man's trap for me...it's so simple to take what I consider to be a well-developed joke writing talent (19 years spent developing it come May) and apply it to a scatological concept.  Not that I don't enjoy working blue....I like working on that edge and saying the things that shock and get the women shrieking, but it's an evolutionary dead-end for me.

Last night at Tippers in Clarksville, Tennessee, which is a college-age/young guys and gals from Fort Campbell Army Base type establishment, I started the change...not on purpose, but I dropped some of the blue material that I had developed that was staple stuff for me, and I killed.  I did cleaner stuff, and as luck would have it, there were actually some older people in the room, sitting front row, and I think they appreciated the cleaner stuff, although I need to ween myself off the "F" word, which I think I use some times way too gratuitously.  People have been responding to me better off stage as well, and last night folks actually sent me drinks on stage.  I'm not the kind of comic who gets drinks sent to him on stage, let me tell you....and it seems that I'm venturing into new water, an area that I've never been before, and the possibilities are really electrifying me.

I'll be honest, I wish I could get on stage RIGHT NOW, because I'm that jazzed up about standup.  I have five shows this weekend, so I'll get my fix.  And I'm looking forward to it, to be sure.

Ralph Tetta

Rochester, NY