Photo by Jeff Richards
So I Was RIght:
Jon Reep goes from the middle of nowhere to his first network television appearance
"You can call it Almost Funny."
-Jon Reep on my "book" about stand-up comedy
Some comics say that anyone who does stand-up dreams of being a rock star. That might explain why so many comics use guitars on stage hoping to realize that desire in jokey-folk-rock couplets. Being a rock star is a constant red-blooded American Dream but for a stand-up it represents more. It validates the constant re-performing of material; it makes performing a team effort; it is easier for rock stars to get laid; and finally, and most importantly in my view, it takes away the enemy of a stage performer, silence, the critical opening a heckler needs to fuck up your set.
Being a comic was my dream for a while. I went up on stage a few times and suffered the long, embarrassing silence of a joke obviously bombing. "What folks?" I asked trying to turn around my set, "Does this cum stain make me look fat?" Nothing. People seemed to stop their hearts to invalidate me with quiet. That kind of silence changed silence forever for me. I realized that absence of sound is like the constant roar of waves crashing. Concentrating on it makes it way louder.
A couple of times I got a few laughs. That was even harder because it was a kiss of what I wanted so bad without the chance of consummation. It gave me my chronic case of comedic "blue balls". Because in a definite cowardly way, I knew I didn’t have it in me. The chance I had to be funny enough to do stand-up probably disappeared when I didn’t start doing comedy at the age most of the pros start, young twenties. It definitely disappeared when I started posting on message boards, becoming a hilarious user of instant messenger technology. Joining the world of e-self-publishers, I realized that everyone is funny in their own way. On the net we are all mysterious crowd pleasers cutting each other up with our own comedy swords. Seeing how funny everyone can be given a chance I became an extreme typical ironic, self-referential looser with my own homepage. Some how in dying to get some giggles from anyone I don’t know, I became the complete opposite of what it takes to be successful on stage.
So facing the reality that I couldn’t be a comic, I decided I wanted to live like one... in short bursts. I came up with a grand plan to trail comics at every different level of the craft, experiencing every different kind of gig. Then I would write the story of being a comic at this point in history. It was to be a fan’s tribute; kinda a visiting every major-league ballpark in one season kind of thing. But that plan wasn’t meant to be either. My effort ended after one trip. One trip to the middle of nowhere, where for a few day stretch I was a comic on the road with a buddy. We cut the prairie air at incredible speeds trying to make it to gigs and then fighting the boredom and disconnected sense of finishing a gig in a place that you wouldn’t waste your imagination imagining.
What started as an adventure through the world of stand-up comics now follows simply as a slice of life of one comic, Jon Reep. One comic who invited me into his life as he went from performing much sought after college gigs to living out his most immediate goal, appearing on network television. All of this occurred over two weeks with a series of events that were as unexpected as they were inevitable. I tasted what it was like to be a road comic that does college gigs. I also faced the reality that I may be a jinx.
The whole story begins with Jon Reep discovering the power of punch line.
The dream of pure soul-or pure mind-is, at its most intense, to be everywhere at once.
-John Limon
Stand-up Comedy in Theory, or, Abjection in America
The first time Jon Reep walked into a comedy club the hostess let him take a peek. He just wanted to see what was going on inside. As he opened the door to take a look, the comic finished a joke. And what Jon saw and heard was a huge laugh from throughout the audience. When he describes it now it sounds like a roar, the roar of a happy beast. Jon loved it.
The better part of a decade later Jon Reep is in Los Angeles about to tape his set for NBC’s Late Friday. Now it makes all the sense in the world why Jon moved to Los Angeles from Raleigh, North Carolina less than twelve months ago. Now it seems that almost everything in the world helped Jon Reep to move out to Los Angeles in the winter, early 2001. This person made calls for him. That person put him up on stage for the first time in LA. This person helped him find a place to live, sharing a two-bedroom apartment in Los Feliz near Hollywood with a working actor named Joe. Joe an actor that has been in several westerns and makes a new movie in Texas almost every year. Joe who is going deaf and listens to CNN at incredible volumes. Joe who Jon once discovered loudly complaining that the remote control didn’t work. Jon paused for a second at the absurd reality of what he saw and then told Joe that he was pointing the remote control the wrong way.
Jon gives them all credit. But what really provoked Jon to move out to LA after only three years of performing comedy, the third spent on the road featuring in comedy clubs across this country, was that he was hilarious for two minutes. In late 2000 Jon auditioned for a spot at the Montreal Comedy Festival. He did his two minutes in the middle of a showcase filled with two-minute sets by mostly inexperienced, questionably talented and questionably sober comics. He brought the house down.
"You would not believe how many comics tanked at this place. It was the quality of an open mic night," he tells me on the way home from a showcase for the 2001 Aspen Comedy Festival at Dublin’s on Sunset in Hollywood. "Some of these guys were just terrible, their first time on stage. I got up and people could just tell the difference. They were like, ‘O.K. He knows how to do this.’ I made fifty guys who were trying to be comics laugh." His Southern accent still evident (of course, as if the Hollywood assimilation machine worked in months) turns left off Sunset on La Brea.
Long story short: That night Jon won a trip to the Montreal Comedy Festival and impressed one of the judges a booker from the Improv in Hollywood. He was just a regular at a local club in North Carolina with a couple years of doing the road behind him. But he killed went on to Montreal and headed out to Los Angeles with a chance to do some spots at the Improv leap-frogging over what Jon’s comedy mentor, Dan French, calls the "clogs in the drain." These clogs are a million and eight people around LA trying to be comics. Some are actors. Some are wanna-be screenwriters sublimating their desire for public humiliation. Like me they are all probably funny guys in the right situation. Everyone is funny to his or her friends. Statistically almost none are funny on stage.
As soon as he started Jon would get laughs. Dan French, a veteran comic/writer/professor of communications (to pay the bills), saw something in Jon that made him decide to pick on him a bit. Dan was hosting the Open Mic night in Raleigh then. He chose which comics would get some stage time. "When I would get spots it was it hit and miss. I was really funny every other time. Dan would come up to say, ‘you are funny. You should take my class.’ At a certain point, Jon remembers, "Dan said, ‘If you don’t take my class, you won’t get up.’ I thought, well, I better do it." Jon who is as funny as fuck has always been as funny as fuck was not convinced that he needed Dan’s class, which cost a few hundred dollars.
"But I did," He tells me on the phone the night before I am to arrive in Kansas to meet him.
In 1997 Dan French’s comedy classes focused Jon on creating his first three minutes, then five minutes (and now well over an hour) of hilarious, reliable, killer material. Dan started taking Jon on the road.
"One of Jon’s very first paying gigs... one of the first times I brought Jon out on the road, he had to perform in a bar with no stage and a giant skylight, the kind you rent for openings, as his spotlight," Dan French tells me at Dublin’s, the night before Jon tapes his first network television appearance on NBC’s Late Friday.
"It was good," Jon explains. "I couldn’t see anyone, so I wasn’t scared."
After Dan’s class, Jon says that his sets started going from about doing well fifty percent of the time to doing well almost all the time. Dan continued to push Jon to tour. "You are a road comic." Dan would tell him as the other up and coming comics would compete for Dan’s attention and stage time.
Funny is a funny thing. Jon thinks that some of the funniest people he’s ever met aren’t up on stage. "I know some hilarious people, just amazing story-tellers but they just work regular jobs with regular lives." That was a path Jon abandoned in a series of tentative, plotted steps. The first step: walking into a comedy club when he was eighteen just as the crowd erupted in simultaneous laughter. The big step: In 1998, quitting his job and heading out on his first road tour of stand-up comedy clubs across America in his Red Suzuki Samurai with no cell phone or assurance that trouble wasn’t just up the road ahead of him.
Could you work the road as a comedian? Let’s say that you say yes. Nobody in the world knows who you are. You will have to drive for days on end to perform for just minutes. For this you may get paid less than fifty dollars. All your driving and belief in yourself has led you, in the best-case scenario, to be a feature act and perform fifteen minutes probably between a local MC and a real comedian. The real comedian is the one that gets paid a reasonable, three-figure sum, minimum, you’d hope. In all likelihood the real comedian kills using solid, dated material that he owns like an aging tuxedo. You are trying to be real, new, and personal. How well do you think that goes over in South Dakota?
There’s Jon Reep. He’s driving his Samurai across the United States of America. He’s leaving North Carolina and he won’t stop until he gets to the next club where he’ll be the feature act, maybe MC. He’ll spend a few days in Columbia, Missouri. He’ll do a weekend in Austin, Texas. He’ll probably kill, and then, on his way out on his last night, he will grab his calendar, stop by the manager’s office and schedule some more dates for the next time he will be around the area in, say, four months.
Then he is off. Back in his Samurai, alone except for burnt CD’s and, after a few months of regular gigs, a cell phone. It’s a solitary, difficult life. It is not the American Dream I’d imagine it to be. There’s no Neal Cassady sitting beside you shooting off philosophical fireworks. No beautiful hitchhikers to brighten the drive. It gets better Jon moved quickly from featuring clubs to headlining colleges, a much better paying gig. But the travel never changes.
Imagine driving alone for ten hours after a mixed-set: the bartender said you were great but the manager thought you bombed. No matter how clear you can see the stars on an empty black sky, you can’t visualize anything but the next chance to do well. There’s no real freedom; you always need to be somewhere else, making some new connections, finding a new stage to perform on. There’s bleak hotels filled with germs you can’t help imagine while praying that AOL has a local dial-up number so you can check your email.
When you do have a good night, make some fast friends and party like the star you will be for a night, you are still alone. You might as well be reading a book. You decide to call someone to tell them the good or the bad or ugliness of Middle America’s hairstyles and your cell phone doesn’t get any service. "ATT?" the guy at the gas station says. "I think that works in Montana." You are in Idaho. Then finally it’s all over. The last gig is all done and the only idea that comes to mind is driving all night to get home. You don’t need to sleep, now. Just put on the same CD you’ve heard fourteen times and drive. Flat Mountain Dew and cigarettes are the only thing keeping you awake, fourteen more hours and then you can sleep in your own bed. You make it, somehow managing to pull in just as everyone around you is heading to work. And when people at home, the people who know you, ask how it went all you see is snow on long empty roads where you are the only car. Thank God you didn’t get a flat.
To the extent that time is psychological, a comedian is forced to live in concentric spheres, revolving at different rates...
-John Limon
Stand-up Comedy in Theory, or, Abjection in America
When they tell you that something is boring in Kansas, believe them. This stripper with her glassy eyes, stoned from a few drags of the same brown pot she has offered us, knows what we are about to face. "It’s flat," she said. "Flat forever. Hays is about four or five hours from here. I barely remember. Last time I was there was an awful experience." Her friends had left her at a bar in Hays and disappeared. Until about 5 AM she wondered how she might get back. Then they materialized like a delayed plane and brought her back to Kansas City where she works as a stripper. As a stripper whose guy friends fight over the chance to make a web site for her to sell her art.
She has some paintings but more ideas. "I was thinking, I should stick my tits in pant and then press them to the canvas," I don’t know is it’s the way she uses "tits" so casually like a term of art or whether it’s the pot, but I think I must love her. It may be mostly because she has brought Jon and I back to her place after the bar had closed.
Just an hour earlier, I could tell that this stripper, Natasha, had been debating whether to come over to our table to talk with us. I could see that in her eyes as the bar milled about us with last call desperation. Then she decided to shock us. She sat down with us and immediately revealed that she was not really named Natasha and not really Romanian at all, as she had presented herself at the strip club earlier that night. She had a perfectly plain American accent, if there is one. Jon was more surprised than I was that she was now Plain Jane; the ruse of Eastern European identity (and the slinky grabbing of his nipple saying, "Can I molest you?") worked on him. He had bought a dance from her. Soon we were in her living room. We, Jon, the stripper and I, had all conversed excitedly at a small table until another guy joined us and changed the chemistry into flattened soda.
Coyly out of the view everyone we had approached her after the bar had been closed and asked if she knew where to get some weed. I convinced Jon to ask because he is so immediately pleasant and funny. He asked. She invited us over. It was like a dream, the American Dream of coming to a new city and seeing it’s most exciting sparks almost immediately. When she said, "Yes," Jon and I looked at each other with incredulity. Going to the strip club in downtown Kansas City seemed like a better idea every minute. It was a questionable plan just after Jon performed an hour of comedy for St. Mary’s college about thirty miles out of Kansas City in a small town only a nun would love, Lawrence, Kansas. I told Jon that I knew a stripper who would probably be working downtown tonight.
I had spent the last few nights hanging out with a few strippers and their friends with my friend Jeff Richards who was headlining at Stanford and Sons comedy club in suburban Kansas City. I have never known a stripper on a non-strip-club level (I had also never been offered coke before, so things were changing fast on this trip). The thought of going to their club was intriguing to me. To Jon it was a promising alternative to the nights he usually spends alone on the road hoping there is cable, cell phone coverage or email from someone he loves. Whether I could find the club or the girl was always in doubt until we finally parked on the street paid our money and sat inside. After about twenty minutes I saw the stripper I knew. She seemed to be ignoring me, but she wasn’t. My neurosis was disabused when as soon as I approached her she seemed pleased in her, now familiar to me, abject way.
She told me that everyone was getting drinks after the club closed at two. Would we like to go? I couldn’t wait to tell Jon. The pained attempt to find this club finally paying off into a chain of events beyond fondest dreams. It was a night where everything seemed to be getting better until it became so late that we realized that the former Natasha was not about to turn into the star of a Penthouse Forum story and we better be going. As an afterthought Jon asked about the drive to Hays. "It’s going to be a boring, flat drive," she said and remembered her last jaunt there as she told it to us. I don’t know why but I still asked her to join us. But that wasn’t happening. She was right; Highway 70 basically has no use to civilization unless it’s a necessity to get to Colorado from Kansas. The tollbooths are the most exciting feature and even they look flat the second time.
As we left Natasha’s back for the hotel room in Lawrence it became closer and closer to the time when most alarm clocks go off. In conversation I realized that the affection I was feeling for the former Natasha was not shared by Jon.
"Basically, she seemed full of herself," he told me as we drove back to the hotel room in Lawrence that night. The flashbacks of her sitting, pontificating explaining how she sleeps with a guy almost immediately, the second date, she made very clear so we wouldn’t get the wrong idea, to see if there’s any compatibility. Like it was some new radical theory, a post-feminist reclamation of sexual conquest. I could see Jon’s point. As shocking statements go it was boring, the kind of thing that shocks people who have never lived in Los Angeles or New York or ever watched Sex in the City. She was sad and lonely and wishing that all of her desperate acts meant more than her life was just kinda pathetic. Just kinda.
Plus once, when she wanted me to pass the pipe she said, "Hey big nose. Hey." When I looked hurt, she said, "I date guys with big noses." It stung but I couldn’t help but feel that I could sleep with her the next time I met her.
Crawling through the almost blindingly dense fog out of Kansas City and closer to Lawrence, I now agreed with Jon, she was full of shit. Full of shit even after the big reveal of her true American-ness. My sudden loss of love for the former Natasha was completely confirmed as I reminded Jon of something he said during while we were all smoking and talking:
Natasha pointed out that some of her paintings were hanging on the wall of the immense, cold apartment she rented for $450 a month. She pointed over our heads to the far wall where a colorful milieu on stretched canvas was hanging. Jon perked up from the slouch he was resting in and said, "I see a face in there."
"Well," Natasha said, her eyes remembering the cool thing she had to say now. "It’s open to interpretation."
"So... I’m right.
She barely acknowledged the joke, already drifting into some other thought. That’s how you know someone is full of shit.
After Jon and I woke up that morning and began the mapped out seven hour drive to Hays, we spent the next few hours imitating Brody Stevens. If you don’t know who Brody Stevens is, my hope is that you will... one day. His delivery is unique among modern comics. It sings like his language is Punchline and he’s teaching you how to speak it. Making up jokes in Brody’s voice about tollbooths, Natasha, and jokes about being gay, of course, because we were two straight grown men traveling alone. It made the time pass.
So did Jon’s stories about getting traffic tickets, a too-common occurrence of living life on the road. And then it happened. I began to jinx Jon. As we spoke a cop on the other side of the road shot his radar gun at Jon’s rented car and caught him going over one hundred miles per hour. In the silence of the cop running Jon’s license and explaining the violation and the tense conversation of the next hour, I couldn’t stop feeling that I had made Jon get this ticket. By following Jon and drawing out his story, I was a jinx on the entire experience of being on the road.
The whole scenario began to form: last night Jon hadn’t had a great set in Lawrence. He put me up on stage to introduce him. I told a couple of jokes and censored out anything having to do with cum since that’s the last thing Jon wants his college agent to hear about. I did ok. But my nervousness must have set an awkward tone because Jon didn’t do great. He was funny but the reaction was a bit tepid, but honestly it was better than I would expect from a show on a Catholic campus performed in a small lecture hall with no real stage lighting or sound. But Jon was not that pleased it seemed with himself, or maybe not pleased with me. The experience with the stripper seemed to make everything better, but that was the last trick up my sleeve. If I could produce a stripper in Lawrence, Kansas, hundreds of miles from any resemblance of urban life, I would have to be more creative than the Wizard of Oz.
Still, Jon wanted me to introduce him for his show at Hays College.
Breaking out of the moving violation melancholy, we arrived in Hays about an hour before he needed to be at the show. It is Jon’s habit not to eat before he performs. It helps him stay energized and light for his full set that includes about ten minutes of very animated dancing. Hays feels like a giant truck stop that people decided to build a college around. The food options at Hays are pretty much the same as anywhere in the US. Every kind of national fast food establishment you know and love has a franchise there. We had no appetite, anyway. Jon just showered and got dressed. I watched CNN.
Twenty minutes before the show a student from the college showed up to pick us up. Students book and organize the shows on campuses. Their stay is short but while they are there they are like the booker at a club, wielding the power to pay. The student was decent looking girl in a decent looking car. On the way over there she explained how badly she wanted to leave Kansas. We could understand.
This performance was in a food court. Jon nodded and looked around like an expert. "This is better than last night," he told me.
The crowd was much larger. The seats were arranged for a show with a sound system and some lighting. It was still a food court with non-college students cleaning up in the periphery and large bland-colored-columns blocking the view of every fifth student. The crowd seemed excited.
My intro was better that night but later Jon told me that I looked like I was in pain. I should try to look like I like being on stage. I guess I set a tone because Jon did well but not that well. The college students seemed restless like they wanted him to get dirty and shock them a bit. On the drive back to the hotel one of the students who booked the show explained that you can’t be too dirty with them. Some comic had been out there a few weeks ago with a litany of dick jokes. "He wanted to see how far he could go, but we loved it," she told us. If she was gonna say this, why not before the show? She couldn’t imagine how little I cared about the secrets of the Fort Hays food court crowd at this point in history. Not soon enough she dropped us off back at the hotel. We sat for a minute and decided to get some fast food when Jon discovered that the keys to his rental car were missing. We looked everywhere.
"This has never happened before," Jon kept saying. This has never happened before, to me, was Jon saying, "You are a jinx."
How would we drive back to Kansas City the next morning? How can this work out? I couldn’t help but imagine living the rest of my life in Hays, Kansas, like I was really stranded. Like I would have to wait for the next wagon train. Then as Jon was on the phone with the rental car company the girl who picked us up pulled up. "Are you looking for these?" she said.
It didn’t seem like we were asleep for more than twenty minutes before we were back on the freeway, driving the speed limit back to Kansas City. We tried to find anything to listen to on the radio. It was hours before the sun came up and the only thing we could find was Christian talk radio. Eventually we found a radio show where some comics were bantering with the hosts to promote their local gigs in St. Louis or wherever the station was coming from. That reminded Jon of some stories. Mayhem in condos that comedy clubs own to house their visiting comics.
And then I’m back at the Kansas City Airport where Jon and I met up just about forty hours ago. Ready to fly home to Los Angeles. "I’ll have the story for you in a few days," I said. He was off to Virginia for his next gig. He seemed glad to be doing it alone.
Jon got back to LA a few days later, and things had already changed. His manager at Brillstein Grey called him in Virginia to tell him that he would be appearing on Late Friday, NBC’s stand-up comedy showcase. I knew how exciting this was for Jon; he had told me that his decision whether to attend his high school reunion or not was predicated on whether he had appeared on network television yet. This was his chance. Not only that but he had a chance to showcase for Aspen’s Comedy Festival, another great opportunity.
The Aspen showcase was that night and the Late Friday taping the next evening. I asked to go hoping to give some positive closure to our small odyssey together. He seemed happy to have me.
The jinx continued at the Aspen showcase. Jon did well, didn’t kill. When he got off stage his manager said, "We didn’t need Aspen anyway."
I was sure that Jon wouldn’t want me to got to his Late Friday taping. Everything I jinxed before palled to the importance of this taping. But he just told me to call him tomorrow to meet up.
I imagined that as a true performer Jon knew that he was in charge of his destiny. If he believed in the jinx it made it true, it meant that he wasn’t in control of his performance.
The nest day we all packed into Jon’s neighbor Ryan’s car. Ryan and I don’t get along super well because he is the guy that will delegate authority given any chance. He says shit like, "Why don’t you sit here with the ladies while I get us some drinks?" I don’t take kindly to that bullshit. Wherever Ryan is from, Texas or West Texas, it may work. But I’m from the San Fernando Valley; we don’t listen to any guy unless there is money involved.
But there was a giddiness and I didn’t mind Ryan that night. He told me where to sit and I just sat excited to be a part of Jon’s big deal. They had his name at the gate and we drove right into the studio. Jon walked us into the audience and went back to the dressing room where they filmed behind the scenes stuff for the commercial transitions. The studio was set up like a very upscale comedy club. Real people and friends of the comics were mixed with extras that were bitterly celebrating getting paid to watch comedy with wry, sarcastic comments about everything. Free wine and beer was being served to loosen the crowd and the extras were saying things like, "I wouldn’t clean my feet with this wine." One person who seemed to enjoy himself was Jon’s roommate Joe. As a guest of Jon’s he was there enjoying the free beer. Though everyone else was limited to two drinks, Joe was on his fifth beer.
Jon was up last. Watching each comic was a test of my patience. They were all fine but I couldn’t wait for Jon to get up. Sometimes it felt like we were in a real comedy club but that we couldn’t move was an obvious difference. They needed us in the same place each time for TV congruity. It was irritating but bearable for the hour we were there, except for Jon’s roommate Joe. Two thirds of the way into the show he tried to go to the bathroom. They told him he needed to stay put. He did. Then there was another commercial and Jon was the only comic left. Joe said fuck it. He walked off the set. He needed to pee that bad. He was just out of the shot when the MC returned to introduce Jon. Then: Jon Reep, ladies and gentlemen! I could see Jon bolt from backstage up the stairs and to center stage in about one step. He was glowing with confidence and energy. He delivered each line with pace and timing. It took about a minute for everyone to realize that he was killing. It was so good that the director stopped to compliment Jon on his way out. It was so good that when NBC aired the show, they put Jon’s set first. It was perfect.
When Jon came out his body was loose with relief. Everyone congratulated him one-by-one and then it was my turn, the moment I was waiting for... "Jon," I said. "I guess I am not a jinx after all."
"I know," Jon said seemingly confirming my theory. "I made sure I didn’t make eye contact with you.
