Sometimes You Just Need to Laugh-Cry

Yesterday, I came home pretty low.  Between the stress of preparing for conferences and the emotional beat-down that was the house inspection (and its associated question of do I proceed?), I just didn't really have anything left in me.  I didn't want to write a blog post.  I didn't want to cook myself food or make a sandwich.  For the first hour I was home, I didn't get any farther than the couch, which is less than ten feet inside the door.  I didn't even have the energy to use the bathroom.

This is it, I thought.  This is the day that my up-till-now consistent and at least partially coherent blog falls apart.  Maybe if I just explain why, my readers will understand.  Surely they'll grant me a raincheck.  I could just make it up this weekend.

So I started to write an explanation of why I was too tired to write a full blog post...and ended up writing a full blog post.

Somewhere between the first and last words I typed, I found some peace in the proceedings of my day.  A lightness of heart, if you will.  Somewhere in that hour and a half of type-type-backspace-type, I eased my own sorrows a little.  Of course, searching through dozens of Stephen Colbert GIFs will do that to a person.

When my piece was complete and published to the world at large, I realized that it was only 8 o'clock.  Too early to go to sleep, I thought.  And since I just didn't feel like taking a shower, I logged into Hulu with the thought that I would just watch a little mindless TV before I went to sleep early.  No shows caught my attention, so I returned to my mainstay, my one and only, Jimmy Fallon.

One Fallon clip turned into two Fallon clips turned into watching a twenty minute episode of Silent Library with Jimmy and The Roots.  If you haven't seen this yet, it's a must.  But save it for a bad day.  You know, one of those no good, downright bad days when you feel like crying or quitting your job or punching pillows.  Keep in mind, there is almost no talking in the whole video.  It's just six guys laughing hysterically at each other while trying to stay quiet in a fake library.  I promise you, you won't regret watching it.

Yesterday, comedy saved my spirit from an evening of worried and distracted quiet, just as I knew it would when I opened that first clip.  Comedy is how I got through high school.  Every night at ten, peanut butter jar in hand (because my brother read that it improves your mood and suggested it as a way to fend off my constant anticipation of world-ending overload), I would sit down in front of the television and watch an hour-long episode of Whose Line Is It Anyway?  Sometimes my family would watch it with me, but for me, it was a daily ritual.  A rain dance, if you will, to end the drought of joy that was a typical day in the life of high school me.

When I got to college, I didn't really need comedy in the immediate way I did in high school, so I forgot about it for a while.  I probably could have used it throughout my five years in Virginia, as well as during my first years of teaching, but I didn't really seek it out again until my third year back in the city.  A friend of mine told me about this improv group called Stupid Time Machine.  I blew it off for a little while until I saw them at a bar in the hipster part of town one Saturday night, and I was hooked.  It became a weekly thing: a big cup of froyo and a second-row seat in a small t-shirt print shop in uptown New Orleans.

Not long after, one of the guys in the group convinced me to buy a pass to take an improv class.  He touted various benefits of the purchase, but the one I just couldn't wrap my head around was the idea of getting onto that stage and making things up as I go.  I'm just not a performer, I told him.

Well, in the spring, for reasons I still won't admit publicly (read: a guy), I signed up for a Level One class with The New Movement, a budding comedy theater here in New Orleans.  And it turns out, once I set my fear of embarrassment aside, I wasn't half bad at the whole making-people-laugh thing.  The class ended with an ensemble performance, and we killed it.  I went from body-shaking nervous to top-of-the-world.  What is this rush? I wondered.  I was happy.  I felt good.  I wanted to do it again.

I only ever made it through Level 2.  As much as I loved being on stage and as much as I loved this newly discovered side of myself, I knew that being a powerful comedian required time and commitment, two things I didn't (and don't) really have available at my disposal.  Successful comedians are devoted to their craft.  They put in their time.  They practice most every day.  And these days, I'll be lucky if I'm free every other Monday.

Recently, the comedy theatre put together a Kickstarter to fund their move into a larger building.  Forking up some cash to help a theatre that made me more confident in my own skin seemed like a small way to say thanks, so I chose to give just enough to earn me a free improv class.  Because, while it might be a while before I get the chance to use it, I know that the only thing better than laugh-crying in the audience is seeing tears roll down a laughing person's face...and knowing you caused them.