Take It On the Run
Battling the blacktop to a draw
It’s two hours from Williston, North Dakota, east to the town of Minot, so it makes perfect sense to construct a comedy run between the two. The Friday and Saturday in Minot won’t make a ton of money on its own, so adding a date the day before gives the week some purpose, and makes it more of a road trip. You’re not just doing a couple shows in a sports bar for a bunch of oil field grunts, you’re on tour!
What doesn’t make sense is flying in from Los Angeles to do this run for $600, or driving 1,275 miles from Toledo to be the opener for $300. The fact that I did just that shouldn’t surprise anyone who’s read more than a few of these missives, or anyone who’s spent any time looking at the sordid business of road comedy.
The problem with only assigning those gigs to people who live a reasonable distance away is that there aren’t very many of them. In Chicago, filling 50 weeks a year with talent requires disappointing hundreds of would-be aspirants to the throne; in Minot, you can more or less show up with a joke notebook, a pulse, and entry-level depression and they’ll give you a date.
And the people putting on the gig are counting on you to show up. Several mini-empires have lived and died on the dreams of ten thousand fools like me, setting up shows in ever-more-remote corners of the road map, assured that someone in a car full of farts, hubris, and marked-up shoddy merch will take the long drive time and the virtual assurance of breaking even at best as a personal challenge and rite of passage in their Journey.
When I agreed to drive to Minneapolis, pick up the headliner at the airport, and drive the rest of the way to Williston, then do the whole thing in reverse that Sunday, the booker wasn’t ungrateful or anything, but they also weren’t surprised. They knew I, and the fifteen other new comics who’d have taken that run just as eagerly, saw it as a chance to get a foot in the door, to be seen as an asset, a team player.
The headliner approached it the same way. He was a road dog who’d moved to LA when his work in flyover country started drying up, without realizing that if his material didn’t pass muster in Indiana, it really wasn’t gonna work at a bunch of cutting-edge unpaid open mics in WeHo. He was struggling at home, not getting work at good paying clubs in the heartland, and edging ever closer to full-time Uber driving.
We both had reasons beyond the pay to take the work. Even more than the chance to ingratiate ourselves with the agency, we were both infected with a working comic’s pathological aversion to unfilled dates on the calendar. Better a money-losing weekend and a mind-numbing drive than the shame of admitting to your peers and the six fans on your Facebook comedy page that you were sitting home resting and eating a home-cooked meal on a Friday. The shame!
For every person who gets off that treadmill, there are ten new faces to take their place, and a contingent of lifers who still view the odometer as a measure of a comic’s real mettle. Suggest that the life might kill you and they’ll call you a pussy, as if you can wish yourself into artistic immortality by simply driving the furthest. Never mind that in other environments, “road dog” isn’t a compliment, and that comics in coastal hothouses working on TV sets think they can smell someone with the stale whiff of bar comedy on their person.
I know people still happily eating those miles, content and assured in their choices, and I wish them well. It was on my mind this cold and rainy morning as I planned a few long drives for non-comedic reasons, and the rituals of consulting maps and nervously eyeing weather forecasts got me reminiscing. I don’t regret those trips for their own sake, and I wouldn’t change any of it, but it might have been healthier to approach it from the beginning as six or eight years of scenic driving with occasional rest breaks to tell a few jokes.