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"Friends Just For Laughs"

by

Joe Canas

Keith and I have been friends for 20 years, ever since we met in junior high school at the age of 13. Much of our friendship has consisted of telling jokes, acting goofy and making each other bark with laughter. Booger jokes and sly allusions to Starsky & Hutch nestled comfortably in our collective repertoire. We watched SNL, Monty Python, Steve Martin movies, listened to Robert Klein and George Carlin records until we could spit the routines out verbatim on the playground. Countless weekends, we'd get together and spend hours improvising silly nonsense into a tape recorder. Johnny Carson's Karnak the Magnificent character hanging out on the golf course with the Marquis de Sade. Brooke Shields teaching metal shop to aliens. Comic book superheroes marrying mutant hamsters and opening up chic New York restaurants that serve red kryptonite gnaw sticks. Our sides, they hurt from the laughter.

This wasn't some passing fad, like being in a band or playing soccer after school. We planned our lives around this weekly splash of creativity, year after year after year.

Ten years ago, we decided to put together a comedy act for the express purpose of performing on stage. We shared a dream: Be funny in public without getting arrested or beaten senseless.

We met almost nightly to develop ideas and to hone our material. Keith was never without his microcassette recorder; we couldn't bear losing any of our great ideas, like "976-geisha." That was the one about the guy who dials a special 976 number and a beautiful voice tells him she's walking all over his back, that she weighs very little, that it... feels... so... goood. We made elaborate props -- for the "Mouth Divider" sketch, we fused a snorkel, a jock strap, a plastic daisy, a child's windmill toy and a few other handy objects. I'll be kind and only divulge that the premise of "Mouth Divider" was, "ever feel kinda sick, but kinda hungry at the same time?"

We practiced our bits while driving around looking for parking, or while waiting in line for movies. We approached strangers with "chain toast." "You have to make ten pieces of toast, and mail them off... or else it's... [throat-slitting gesture]." Never far removed from current events, we came up with "Butt Rats," our nod to Richard Gere and that gerbil rumor. "Ouch, that's gotta hurt."

We videotaped our rehearsals, critiqued them, revised, honed, practiced, taped again. We spent months at it. Knowing what little you do about our fine material, can you blame us? But we were having an absolute blast. One day, we decided we were ready for open-mike night, so we practiced a few more times -- the lines fell like Hail Marys by then -- and headed off to the club.

Sure, we each wondered who would be the funnier one. After all, this was stand-up comedy, a sport which rivaled football for competitiveness. Comedy competitions had recently sprung up nationwide, and Keith and I attended all the local ones. But we didn't seem to worry. After all of our rehearsals, one thing was clear: We'd both be plenty funny. It didn't matter who was funnier.

Now, the beauty of this comedy team arrangement was that we had each other to fall back on. We were nervous, sweaty, excited, the whole bit, but we were able to keep our energy focused. We got a good spot on the signup list, and then sat through a couple of would-be comics. Their stuff was crap! Oh, this was going to be a smooth night for us. So we got into position and then, when our moment arrived, we took to the stage.

Get this: We bombed. Nobody laughed. Well, we laughed, quite a bit. But that isn't always good when you're performing. Because the laughter can really carry when the crowd is so frightfully still.

Thrown by this odd turn of events, we butchered through our material. Somewhat chagrined, we left the stage, and sat through the remaining performances. A thirteen-year-old boy performed that night for the first time ever, and absolutely slayed us all. He was a natural. At the end of the night, Keith and I went up and thanked the emcee, a tall head-shaven leather-clad man named Tree. The next week, we worked double-time on our material, revising, honing, polishing, practicing.

The following weekend, we partook of another open-mike opportunity, this time at the fabled Other Cafe. We got a couple of laughs. In fact, we were really going to town, when the red "get off the stage" light began flashing, throwing us both into a frenzy. I forgot a line, Keith forgot something, and then the emcee was up there ushering us off, saying, "hard to believe these guys don't perform more often, huh?" Everybody laughed at that one.

After that, we must have developed other interests, because we didn't spend any more time revising, honing, polishing or practicing our routine. In fact, after that year, we saw less and less of each other. The usual suspects -- work, relationships, family -- claimed our time. We still laughed at each other's jokes during our infrequent phone calls and our rare visits, but we had stopped taking notes. Succeeding at the stand-up game hadn't been our lifelong dream -- it just seemed like a natural extension of our relationship. And perhaps because we hadn't been so great at it, our friendship found other ways to play out. The lines of attachment never broke -- to this day Keith is my dear friend -- but they certainly did stretch.

Something about missing the mark, I guess, no matter how casually the mark has been drawn. For years, I winced when I thought of those two nights. I wasn't as good as I thought I'd be. Three months of work boiled down to two disastrous five-minute appearances. But those appearances were deceiving. Just as with an optical illusion or an Escher woodcut, when I look at that episode from another perspective, it isn't an atrocity at all. I've had such a good time thinking, all these years, about the two times I told jokes in front of a crowd. I've gotten tremendous mileage out of that experience. Whenever people say I should perform stand-up comedy, I delight in saying, "I have performed stand-up comedy." Yes, it's a grandiose statement, considering how poorly we did. But we did it, we did it, we did it.

And besides, I was funnier.

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