Choking to Death

“Does anyone know the Heimlich maneuver?! There’s a woman choking...up there on stage!”

I stood gasping for breath, but food wasn’t the obstruction blocking my throat. It was the blinding blankness of my mind as I choked on silent words.

I had come out so strong. My first two jokes were like well-trained bullets hitting their targets, my hands twirling pistols, free of their double-holster. But then as I went to my next transition…nothingness. Everything I had ever known was gone. My mind kept reeling, “Think of something,” but all that my brain could come up with was, “words.”

Shit.

It was semi-finals of San Diego’s Funniest Person Contest at The Comedy Palace and I was blowing it. I had already made it past two rounds and knew my routine as well as my last name, but that didn’t matter in the depths of my hack attack.

The hack attack = a comedian’s kryptonite; a condtion resulting in the ridiculous, the stupid, the boring, the corny...

Was that me? I had been on such a high. My prior “comedy career” had been a handful of open mic nights that I had successfully completed to my standards (ie writing, memorizing and performing a routine.) But now the stakes were higher. I had entered the contest to get myself back on stage after almost a year hiatus and maybe I was in over my head. But it didn’t seem that way when I knocked out the first two rounds with my new material.

And the material was me. It was a true representation of who I was and that’s what made it easy to tell, but since I couldn’t even remember my own name, that didn't help me now. I stood there asking the crowd to give me, “Just a minute,” and stared at a stranger in the front row, hoping somehow she would feed me my lines.

I tormented myself as to why:

Why didn’t I go into the bathroom beforehand and practice like I always did?
Why didn’t I do more open mic nights for extra practice?
Why didn’t I pull out the piece of paper in my back pocket that had all my prompts on it??!!!

And that’s when it hit me: this was the first, and most crucial, lesson of my comedy education.

1) There is no such thing as too much practice. I had to get out there every chance I could. Practice. Practice. Practice.

I felt disappointed, but wasn’t soured by my downfall. I realized that when life hands you lemons, you make lemonade. So when comedy hands you limes, you turn them into limelight.