People not in The Business often ask me how much money I make doing stand-up. If I were making any money doing stand-up, that would be a rude question. But since I don’t make any money, I can claim it’s because I’m not a sell-out.But oh, how I long to be offered the option to be a sell-out.
I’m in the interning phase of my stand-up career. And I’m okay with this. For now. Here’s my awesome analogy: say you’re a young fresh dewy-faced recent college graduate and you decide that you want to be CEO of IBM. You can’t simply apply for a CEO job and hope to get it because you’re cute. You have to work your way up. Your first foot in the door will be a terrible post of abuse and torture. You might work in the mail room, you might be an assistant, you might work on an assembly line. It’s thankless grunt work. But you are learning the ropes. And if you’re smart and you stick with it you might move up to some mid-level job where you know a little more and start making better money. You might even have some grunts under you to abuse. Then you move up to a higher ranking job, maybe with a fancy title. Then someone gets malaria and you become CEO. (I’m not sure how the final step goes, but you see what I’m getting at.)
I’m at the interning stage in my career. My payment is knowledge. Knowledge of the clubs, the people, the business and all the while, I’m fine-tuning my act into a torpedo of funny that could destroy a village, hopefully with a lot of carnage and dead animals.
Yes, one day, I will be a big famous star and make a ton of money that I could use to buy and sell your love. But I have to earn it (the money, not the love). And in this business, it doesn’t generally happen very quickly. And yes, it can be frustrating. Comedy clubs aren’t going to pay some asshole off the street. If you owned a comedy club, would you? At this stage, from the clubs’ perspective, I’m still some asshole off the street. In a good way.
I like the learning. I love the stage time. I love making people laugh. It’s like crack to me. And since my other vaguely marketable skills are few, I’m going to make it work for me.
But for now, I’m not a sell-out.