Standup comedy is the most emotionally and spiritually toxic art scene I’ve ever witnessed. Much worse than open mike poets. It’s a cesspool of needless self-loathing. There is an amazing amount of untapped talent. So many are good enough for the few spots. It crushes people.

The more success comics get, the more emotionally unraveled they become. I’ve watched people go from chipper 28 year olds to depressed 40 year olds. It’s like a Stanford Prison Experiment run by antidepressant pharmaceutical companies

The problems are huge at the top but go all the way to the roots. The amount of abuse and mistreatment at the level of the free bar show is staggering. Comics are horrible to each other. If you’re being mistreated, walk away. It is supposed to be fun.

In 1989, I became involved in San Francisco’s art scene. This included spoken word and performance art. Shows at warehouses, dungeons, punk venues. A frightening percentage of people I met had only months left to live. They taught me to do art on my terms.

We created our own scenes within scenes. Communities of creatives, teaching and learning. There was no way we deemed our work sellable, so there was no pandering to the consumer, no rules to be followed, no one dictating what we to make or how to behave.

The scene was ravaged by AIDS deaths and heroin. Then the meth years gutted another group. Performance art went away for a number of reasons. The first dot com wave wiped out the underground spaces and raised the rents on legal spaces til they went under.

I fell off performance for a few years. I was too loaded to really make a go of things. After sobering up in 2002, I got back out there. But the scene had evolved to a point where I couldn’t find my footing. I hunkered down and wrote a new book, Whiskey & Robots.

When I tried to book readings, the poetry slam bookers only wanted poets from national slam teams. Most of them blew me off. NYC and Berkeley came through but the others had no need for me. You had to write and perform in a certain style to get booked.

I got readings where I could, and in San Francisco, this increasingly became alternative comedy shows and variety shows. A lot of my poems had a funny line or absurdities. It was lost on a lot of the slam world but the comedy crowds and the other performers really enjoyed it.

Greg Proops liked my poetry, and booked me to read at the Largo, with Fiona Apple, Drew Carey, Fee Waybill. Joe Walsh headlined with an acoustic set. One of the most fun nights of my life. This is around 2006? For my third book, All Blacked Out and Nowhere to Go.

I thought this was what comedy gigs were like. I really didn't understand that I had been dropped into a magical time and venue. Really, this is the one event that made me want to do standup, enough to suffer through the learning curve.

I started standup at 37. I worked 50+ hours a week and was writing a fourth book. I couldn't figure out how to get the stage time I needed to learn how to do it. It's really difficult to get out to those three-hour open mic nights as a middle-aged person.

So I started a show in San Francisco with three other comics who also wanted more stage time, in a tiny 49 seat theater. I told them I would take every Wednesday night for a year if they could cut a break on the price. They agreed.

We ran that show for years, and versions popped up in other cities. My inspiration was that Largo show, what I had read about the Uncabaret, and a late 80s queer variety club show called Klubstitute. It didn't always go well, but when it did, it felt like the best idea I ever had

It was for the performers. By the performers. If you didn't like it or didn't get it, that's on you. I booked novelists, storytellers, dancers. The audience ranged from the literary elite to ex-cons from halfway houses. We sold out that show for a few years in a row.

The show evolved and changed and morphed with different lineups and venues over the years. Eventually, the SF show came to an end. You can't maintain the energy forever, and eventually, it will die out.

My 7th book, Black Hole, was my breakup/love letter to San Francisco. The city and I couldn't get along any longer. It was someone else's. After it came out, I was ready to leave. I sold my home, my teeth fell out (another story), and I split for LA.

The dazzling paradox of LA comedy is that the talent here is unparalleled, but the scene as a whole is miserable. The comics are in the "It's a Good Life" episode of the Twilight Zone, afraid their careers will be wished into the cornfield at any moment.

There's so much mistreatment and abuse tolerated and internalized with the idea that it will get them to the next level, or into a writers' room, or just stage time, compressed into the soul with benzos and drink tickets. Maybe it works. IDK. I've never gotten very far.

I haven't done standup in months. And in this time, the scene as a whole...well, it's worse than I thought. Turns out the creeps and jerks I was dealing with are lil cuties compared to the ones who have recently come to light. So I'm really wondering if I should go back at all.

I'm currently working on a novel about a flying octopus. I'm training for a weightlifting event that literally no one in this hemisphere has completed. I enjoy this. I'm not spending one minute trying to convince a bar show booker that after 14 years I have 7 worthy minutes