America's Got Talent

We have a helluva way of getting it in front of people, though

Since Pop Pop is a day late on this one, the next dispatch will drop Thursday, May 14.

In the middle of the 2010s, before TikTok and reels and crowd work clips had cemented their hold on the industry, nothing would get your foot in more comedy doors than a TV talent show credit.

If you’d made it to a broadcast episode of American Idol or America’s Got Talent, but hadn’t gotten much further than that, you could still hit up any number of fly-by-night promoters in middle America and write your own ticket, as long as your ticket was for bar gigs with okay guarantees. Smaller credits, like the not-yet-resurrected Comics Unleashed with Byron Allen or (most notoriously) Laughs on Fox, would get you lesser but still valuable spots.

What this meant for me, an aspirational road comic with neither representation nor a photogenic clip, was that I often piggybacked onto shows with people at my skill level who’d gotten an in with one of the aforementioned outlets. One night my path crossed that of a guy who’d recently been on AGT, and the show was billed as his TV-quality headline extravaganza with me and a few others opening the festivities.

Two realities emerged in this situation. One, the credits guy was mentally unstable and had maybe twenty minutes of usable material, and almost no real experience handling a bar show crowd. He was an open miker who’d gotten a Golden Ticket and he was learning that fact in real time. Fortunately (?) for him, his specific name also meant jack and shit to the residents of small-town Indiana who came to that dive bar that night to see a comedy show.

Thus we could sell the show as an America’s Got Talent event, with splashy color flyers of a guy who’d indisputably been on the same broadcast television this bar’s regulars had in their home, and then stick that TV guy in the middle of the lineup and let a grizzled utility player like me close out the show with 45 minutes of somewhat road tested material.

Despite what those handbills and their certainly-unauthorized use of the AGT logo told that bar, this was a Keith Bergman headlining show. That didn’t guarantee any happiness on the part of the patrons – after all, I was four years out from my first open mic back in the game, a year out of heart surgery, and I hadn’t even recorded my first CD yet. I was still doing a joke where I called an overweight Native American woman “Snackajawea.”

There were no pros in the building.

But such was the talent deficit in the rest of the lineup that I emerged as the den mother anyway, the one with the experience to shut down hecklers, work with talky tables, and land the plane to enough paying customers’ bemused satisfaction. If I recall, my fee for this Augean task was something like a hundred bucks, plus the right to sleep on the booker’s couch 90 minutes away and do a similarly awful show the next night. This was making my bones in the heartland.

After we wrapped up, a DJ took the stage and started pitching karaoke to the locals, most of whom were not interested. He got up and sang a few songs himself to prime the pump while I trotted out my merch and tried to earn another half a tank of gas to make this trip somewhat less futile.

I don’t remember the exact chain of events that led to me daring the audience – none of whom smaller in diameter than me – to buy my last two adult small size t-shirts (complete with my “old school ice scraper” cassette graphic) in exchange for me singing the song of their choice at karaoke. But I wound up on deck to sing, $40 in my pocket, my unsellable tiny shirts sold to two dudes who could have been the twins on the mopeds in that famous photo on the back of the Guinness Book of World Records.

Of course, they picked “Barbie Girl” and “It’s Raining Men.”

To a certain mindset, there’s no better gotcha than coercing someone do something they think is unmanly. “We made that dude sing gay songs! He looks gay!” They dangled their twenties in the air and dared me to humiliate myself the way kids in my school cafeteria used to give Peter Smith a dollar for real food if he’d tear off strips of their Styrofoam lunch trays and eat them. It was malevolent hillbilly behavior, someone with barely a pot to piss in lording their largesse over a fellow peasant one rung down and demanding tribute.

My brethren in Christ, giving the jokes I was actually proud of to a bar full of you morons was more debasing than half-drunkenly selling “Barbie Girl” for two and a half minutes. Leaving there with forty of your dollars and minus two shirts that never should have been printed was a bigger win than any mean-spirited karaoke request from a tub of lard banned from the local Dollar General could rack up.

I went as over the top as possible for both songs, got my money, and split. A minute or so of video made it to social media, but I can’t find the link now to share it here. When it resurfaces, I’ll add it as a postscript to that week’s dispatch. Anyone expecting me to be embarrassed by such footage has never offered a struggling artist $800 an hour to drop trou in public in a zero-stakes environment.

Reading what I’ve just written, it comes off as fairly contemptuous of small town audiences, the low rungs of the comedy industry, and the mores by which we hand out accolades and access to performers. It is, and that contempt is why I’m sitting home right now grading records for sale and not driving home from an open mic with a notebook full of new premises.

A seasoned headliner I’ve anonymously mentioned here before still uses his decade-old America’s Got Talent credit on all his show flyers. His entire schedule is places like the bar where I serenaded local dipshits with Weather Girls wisdom. Nobody brings up the fact that after a promising initial audition, this man’s final appearance on the show was a bomb so hard and a rebuke so scathing from the celebrity judges that he left the stage almost in tears and flew straight home.

Nobody checks to see how he actually did when he got under those lights, they only know that he was there, and that’s how what shoulda been a career-ending crashout became just enough to keep him working.

It took a few years and a pandemic for all of this to come to a head and make me walk away. I had great times doing standup, and had life happened differently I may have found a better way to pursue it without resorting to rooting through hell gigs like a truffle pig to find the occasional moment of transcendence. I’m glad I gave it a shot, and I’m grateful for all of it, even the two Jabbas at the bar who thought it was worth a Jackson apiece to make a city slicker look dumb.