Self-Inflicted Wounds: Heartwarming Tales of Epic Humiliation (22 page)

J. Lo was on fire.

And the moment that started it all, in the opinion of almost anyone who knows (or
at least anyone who agrees with me), was
that dress
.

That unholy Versace dress she wore to the Grammys on P. Diddy’s arm, the one that
was cut down to
here
and up to
there
and was one thread away from revealing the color, size, and temperature of her fallopian
tubes. That dress was crazy and beautiful and confusing and a little dangerous and
a whole lot slutty and it was all anyone could talk or think about for months after
she wore it.

Including me.

Well, actually, not including me. Including my stylist at the time. She was obsessed.
See, a big part of the whole “wear some shit on the red carpet and get your picture
taken” thing is that you want to make news. Looking nice and conventional and clean
and pretty is boring. Nice doesn’t get headlines, especially if you are the host of
a cult television show on a to-remain-nameless network that gets only marginal numbers
despite broad name recognition of the program. You are a minor star in a minor constellation
in a long-forgotten quadrant of the night sky. You want to be noticed, lady, you gotta
get out there and
make
them notice you.

Unfortunately, I was married and so could not make news by dating a rapper or dating
an actor or dating a rapping actor; I was not a drunk or a drug addict and so could
not make news by going into rehab; and I was not an idiot so I could not make news
by falling out of an Italian roadster wearing a miniskirt with no underwear and a
perfectly groomed undercarriage. Alas, I was just a regular old comedian with a decent
gig who worked hard, and what the hell would that ever get me? I needed to make a
splash.

Ugh. Why am I smiling?

My stylist suggested this could be done on the red carpet. I would wear something
eye-catching and risqué, something that would be sure to get people’s attention and
a few inches in the fashion rags, or at the least, on this newfangled thing called
the Internet. All I needed was a total lack of shame, a temporary lapse of fashion
reason, and a very nice pair of underwear.

I don’t know why I let her talk me into this. It was a bad idea, poorly conceived
and even more poorly executed. If I had seen another person in this dress, I would
have sprinted for a pen and paper with which to write a litany of jokes about how
bad they looked. I looked sad, and naked, and confused, and as if I had forgotten
part of my outfit at home.

This was not J. Lo material. This was J. NO material. I looked like a drag hooker
from Queens.

Somehow, I actually agreed voluntarily to wear this dress. I think at the time I was
just excited that I was in decent shape and that nothing was jutting out awkwardly
and I had no visible homunculi. In the house of delusion that was my mind, that made
me just one step away from Elle “The Body” Macpherson.
¹
I agreed, of my own volition, not only to put on this dress, but wear it out. In
public. And then stand in front of photographers so they could take pictures of me
wearing it. Using flash photography. Pictures that, like the Internet, will never
die. Even if in a million years the entire planet folds in on itself like an ouroboros
and slowly collapses into dust, the Internet will still persist, and on it will be
dozens of photos of me in this awful dress.

I hate this dress. I hate the pictures of me wearing this dress. I hate that these
pictures continue to resurface more than a decade after they were taken. I hate to
think that people might think this is how I like to dress, or how I ever liked to
dress. I hate to think that people are basing any opinion or understanding of who
I am as a person on the fact that I wore this dress.

But the fact is, I wore it. And I have no one to blame but myself.

Think about that the next time you dress to go out of the house and decide to wear
black socks with sandals, or a top that leaves your threadbare seven-year-old bra-straps
visible to the world. The days of looking like anonymous shit are over. You may not
be a globe-trotting Latina pop star with a multimillion-dollar fortune and two adorable
twins, but . . .

Actually, that’s it. You’re
not
a globe-trotting Latina pop star. Put on a decent shirt. Change your socks. Take
off that mesh half-shirt. It’s not 1983. Pull those sweatpants down to an area of
your abdomen that doesn’t make it look like you are smuggling a package of veal chops
in your pants.

Pull your shit together. People are looking at you. People are always looking.

And the Internet, unfortunately, is forever.

( 25 )

And Had That Awful Two-Toned Hair

See
chapter 24. What is going on with my hair? Did I not have a mirror?

Again, I have no one to blame but myself. And perhaps a brief bout of colorblindness.

Can you get that from drinking bourbon?

( 26 )

All the Times I Did Those Terrible Corporate Standup Gigs

“Satire should, like a polished razor keen, wound with a touch that’s scarcely felt
or seen.”
—
L
ADY
M
ARY
W
ORTLEY
M
ONTAGU

“These people must be dead inside.”
—
A
ISHA
T
YLER

There
are a few rules when it comes to performing comedy.

No matter how much you wish that things were different—that satyrs were real or that
your teenagers loved chores and vegetables, and hated drinking keg beer in a strip
mall parking lot—these rules are what they are. They have been in existence since
time immemorial, and they hold, eternal and fast. The sky is up. The ground is down.
Water is wet. Drunk people heckle. This is just the way it is.

I do not make the rules. I just report them.

If you want to succeed—if you want people to laugh—these rules cannot be broken or
ignored. They are absolute and immutable, and any success outside their parameter
is an abomination, an anomaly, an irreproducible aberrance.

1. Comedy must be performed at night.

2. People must be drunk or on their way toward being drunk.

3. People must be indoors.

4. People must be facing forward, toward the stage. Not at each other, where they
will inevitably be distracted by whatever their drunk-ass tablemates are doing during
the show.

5. It
must
be nighttime. I cannot emphasize this enough.

6. Under no circumstances can the show be organized, paid for or attended by employees
of a corporation.

No matter how many times people try to skirt these rules, no matter how many times
some corporate booker insists that
this
show will be different—our crowds are great, they can’t wait to see you, they are
your biggest fans, insert bullshit sycophantry here—the rules must be obeyed. Comedy
must be performed in a nightclub, where people are drunk enough to laugh like hyenas
at nearly everything that comes out of your mouth, but not so drunk that minimally
complex ideas or adorably clever metaphors confound them. It must be a close space
where laughs will become contagion as people flash the whites of their teeth at each
other like monkeys and elbow their neighbors wildly in the ribs, and where the noises
of mirth will bounce off the walls and compound into a sound wave of irrepressible
joy. There must be just the right amount of food served to keep people from getting
drunk too quickly and turning into an angry drunken mob, but not so much that gnawing
a mountain of chicken wings distracts them from the show, or so little that their
gnawing hunger turns them into an angry
hungry
mob. And while it is okay for people to come to a show with people they know from
work, they can never,
ever
, come with their bosses, in front of whom they have never acted like a person or
given a hint of being even remotely human, and so are highly unlikely to start now.

Here’s the thing. Comedy, good comedy at least, is irreverent, and bawdy, and dirty,
and outsized, and if done properly, will shock or offend a handful of people in the
audience at the very least. If you plan it right, you will never offend more than
a handful of people at any one time, and never the same handful of people over again,
thus sending that little fist of anger moving around the audience throughout the show,
so that at least ninety-five percent of the audience is laughing while that knot of
prudishness purses their lips, looks around at all the happy people, feels suddenly
uptight and out of touch for not laughing, and lets all that rage slip quietly into
another part of the audience, allowing a different group of people to temporarily
get their panties twisted into a hot and sweaty bunch. This rule of roving rage allows
that there will always be a minimal number of people with a wad of underwear crammed
between their posterior cheeks at any one time, but never enough to truly derail a
show.

This is the essence of how comedy works. It is inherently prickly, shocking, difficult,
and incendiary. Underneath personal style, affect of delivery, physical comportment,
subject matter, even whether you decide to curse or not, there is one essential truth:
if you haven’t offended
somebody
, you probably didn’t say anything very interesting.

This is why people must be in a place where they feel free to laugh at things that
under other circumstances might be seen as highly inappropriate. A comedy club gives
them that permission. Things are racy and broadstroke, and everyone is a little tipsy,
with a tummy full of ranch dressing, chicken limbs, and rum. It’s okay. You smell
like buffalo sauce. You can laugh. No one will judge.

And this is why corporate gigs never, ever work. Never.

NEVER!

I don’t know why I keep forgetting this. Every time I do a corporate show, and it
goes painfully, soul-scarringly wrong, I say to myself:
self, never again
.
¹
I will never again do comedy at nine in the morning for a bunch of convention-goers,
many of whom drank too much last night, several of whom are severely hungover, some
of whom slept with someone they shouldn’t have and are now undergoing an active existential
crisis over bad hotel coffee and cheese Danishes, all of whom are sitting next to
or within earshot of their boss, their boss’ boss, the CFO of the company, and/or
pernicious roving moles from Human Resources. These people will
never
laugh. They are physically incapable of mirth. I might as well perform in a bathroom
stall to a toilet paper dispenser; at least when I’m done I can stick my hands in
that awesome Airblade dryer thing, and I won’t have to pee anymore. At a corporate
gig, I spend twenty minutes staring down the gaping maw of disdain that is the sales
force of a midsized big box store conglomerate, praying I’ll have a severe histamine
reaction to hotel pastry and pass out so I won’t have to finish my show.

And then I blink, and they are still there, staring up at me with their bloodshot
eyes and their mouths full of transfats and their brains full of fabricated stories
to explain to their spouses why they didn’t answer the phone at three a.m. last night—how
they lost their wallets, their cell phones, and the phone in their hotel room was
broken, and
that’s
why they didn’t call—and I look at the clock. I am two minutes into a forty-minute
set.

And I want to die.

And I finish the set like a soliloquy, not an actual comedy set, more like a long-form
poem with no breaks or moments of silence so that it will never be apparent I was
trying to elicit laughs, so that when the laughs do not come no one will feel weird,
at least no more weird than people already feel at having to suffer through what seems
like a tonally inappropriate and very long motivational speech from a giant black
girl. One who seems to be doing everything she can not to say fuck but really seems
to want to say fuck and is spewing sexual innuendo and doesn’t seem to realize that
this is a work function and so by its nature joyless and devoid of any potential for
fun.

Then I sprint for the door, fast as I can, and I thank the person who has been assigned
to be my contact or chaperon or monitor or jailer, and gratefully demur when they
offer me coffee for the road, and make no eye contact with anyone, and rush back to
my hotel room, to drown my sorrows in twenty ounces of coffee and four Starbucks muffins,
because it
isn’t even ten in the morning yet and I have already bombed.
²

Why do I keep taking these gigs when I know for a fact—I don’t suspect, I
know
—that they will be the worst forty minutes of my life since the last horrible forty
minutes I spent trying to entertain people in suits holding corporate training materials
and wishing they were somewhere else?