Is You Okay? (9 page)

Right now is another moment where my skeptical side would say,
Oh yeah, is that all it takes? Wish upon a star and everything will be sunshine and kittens and rainbows?
The answer is
NO, lil' Miss Skeptical Side!
This is just the
beginning. Everything you do after this is built on that foundation.

If you're going to try anything new or scary or big, you've got to have faith—you're going to need it for those down moments when all your hard work feels like it's not going anywhere, when opportunities slip through your fingers or change on a dime, when people tell you that you can't do things or that you're not good enough. Faith
in yourself
is going to give you the strength to persevere and the courage to question everything those people say to you. What do they know that you don't? Why are they right and you're wrong? Why should you listen to them? (The answers to those questions are: nothing; they aren't; and you shouldn't.)

Never underestimate the power and importance of faith—it is the sister to hard work. Just as there is no excuse not to do what needs to be done, faith in yourself can actually help you accomplish those tasks. Armed with faith, I think people can do almost anything.

And I know
you
can.

     
Q:
  If you could travel anywhere, where would you go?

     
A:
  I'd love to go to Australia because I've never been there and I love koala bears and all those other crazy-looking animals with weird names. Not the ones that can kill you just by looking at you; I'm talking about the nice ones. I'd also love experiencing the culture of India because I love the saris they wear, and I love curry.

Once Tike and I got to Los Angeles, I did stand-up comedy for three years with no rest and no real progress beyond little crumbs of stage time that I could piece together.

If you don't know much about the stand-up comedy world, let me try to describe it for you.

The typical comedy club is a small, dimly lit room packed with small, dimly lit tables, and about two hundred to three hundred seats. In most towns, at least these days, there is just one legitimate club. In bigger cities like Los Angeles, San Francisco, Houston, or New York City, there might be three or four clubs. The owners of these clubs are usually guys—though sometimes it's a woman, like Mitzi Shore who founded The Comedy Store—and they make most of their money from parking and alcohol, so there is almost always an expensive valet stand at the front door, and a two-drink minimum at the bar. That means, if you come to a comedy show, on top of paying for parking and for your ticket to get in, you also have to buy two drinks (they don't
have to be
alcoholic, but that's normally how it goes), and be prepared to spend two hours surrounded by drunk people—including, sometimes at least, the person up on stage.

Stand-up comedians are a unique group of people. They're often very smart, but they're also usually outsiders who see the world differently (that part drew me in), and don't like what they see (that part did
not
). They talk about adult topics like drugs and politics and race a lot. They're pretty vulgar sometimes, and very insecure the rest of the time. At some
clubs, hanging around the comedians can feel like high school—there is lots of gossip and backstabbing, and it can be exhausting.

That said, I have admired every good comedian I watched perform. Having the courage, night after night, to stand up on a little stage, all by themselves, with only a microphone and a stool and the jokes in their head, and perform for a tipsy crowd ten feet away from them who let them know every minute or so, with their laughter or their silence, just how good or bad they were that night . . . well, that's a tough thing to do. You really have to be able to bear the pressure and commit to the hard work that goes into making stand-up comedy your career if you choose to put yourself through that, day in, day out. And they do.

As a result, there's usually a strong bond between comedians. They bond over stories of bombing onstage the way mothers bond over baby pictures. The really successful ones wear the bad times like badges of honor and hold on to them as reminders both of how hard things used to be, and how far they've come. They talk about the helplessness they feel when nothing they do turns the night around, and the thrill and joy they experience when they finally get that big belly laugh. Listening to them tell their stories—comedians
and
moms, I guess—you get the sense that these people are walking some kind of preordained path that has been laid out in front of
them. I won't say it is like a “calling,” but it is definitely a blessed opportunity they can't ignore. I knew that feeling firsthand from my time on the stage (and I can't wait to feel it again as a mom!).

What makes the stand-up comedian's path so difficult, on top of all the hard work and potential humiliation, is that they don't get paid much by clubs. When you're starting out, you can make as little as $20 per set. Even the most popular comedians at clubs in big cities will only pull in a few hundred dollars per set unless they're headlining the entire show. That's why most nonheadlining comedians will try to get up onstage at every club in town on a given night to cobble together a decent payday.

It's sort of the same logic behind doing collabs when you're first getting traction on YouTube. When I get together to do a video with Colleen and her husband, JoshuaDTV, for example, we don't just do one video for my channel, we do one for each of their channels as well. That's three videos instead of one, exposing each of us to three different audiences and potentially tripling our views. All in one day. What a YouTuber is trying to do with multiple videos and increased views, a comedian is trying to do with multiple sets and an increased paycheck.

On a regular day, if there are three clubs in a city and each club has two shows, that's six possible sets you can do if the owners will put you on the list and you can drive fast enough to get to each one in time. If you're lucky to make $100 per set, that's $600 for the night. And make no mistake, you're going to
work
at night, and only the night—during the week, clubs will have two shows, one at 8
P.M.
and one at 10
P.M.
On the weekend, there might be an extra show at midnight.

I know vampires with better hours.

Now, if you feel like you've gotten to know me a little over the years on my YouTube channel, let me ask you a question: How much of what I just described sounds like the GloZell you've gotten to know? If you can't answer that question because you are too busy laughing,
ding ding ding!
You're 100 percent right.

To start, stand-up is late-night, and I love to sleep. Most comics are young white guys (especially back when I was starting out); I'm a proud black woman. Comedy is often very vulgar—it celebrates the vices—whereas I don't smoke, don't drink, and I'm not raunchy. Maybe if there was a Muppets comedy club circuit I might have found my groove, but if there is ever a puppet at a comedy club, the guy pulling the strings is usually making it say and do very, very bad things. Comedians as people can also be overly possessive and
unhappy—I've always wanted to just have fun and share that fun with as many people as possible.

Originally, I did stand-up because that was my path to getting discovered, but over time I was also doing it as an escape from my troubles after my divorce from Tike at the end of 2003. I could live without a man who put his mother ahead of our marriage, but without our pets, the apartment became a very lonely place. The best way to avoid the loneliness of an empty apartment is to not spend time
in
an empty apartment, and the one place I knew I could go where there were people was the comedy club. I never had to worry about being home alone at night because I was always at work.

In the middle of the summer of 2006, something began to gnaw at me: stand-up comedy no longer felt like the route I was supposed to take.

When I first dreamed of coming to Hollywood, it seemed successful stand-ups had it made. Jerry Seinfeld. Roseanne Barr. Rosie O'Donnell. Bernie Mac. Ellen DeGeneres. Ray Romano. Each had a major TV show, something I very much wanted. But slowly, that changed. All those comics whose shows I loved were long gone from the airwaves.
Ellen
was over.
Seinfeld
was over.
The Rosie O'Donnell Show
was over.
The Bernie Mac Show
was over.
Everybody Loves Raymond
was over. An entire era was over. Suddenly, reality shows were becoming the big thing, and the few sitcoms that were still being developed by the networks were going to improv comics and really talented writers who could act—not stand-ups. I'd done a little improv with The Groundlings, but not a ton, and I wasn't a writer. The goalposts had moved on me—and it wouldn't be the last time that happened. As I started to reevaluate how I could make it in entertainment, I also started to rethink the world of stand-up comedy entirely, and my place in it.

I was a comedian, but I wasn't a
stand-up
comedian. Carol Burnett was a comedian and
she
didn't do stand-up. She sang and danced and did sketches to get her own show—so there
was
another way to do this.

Hardest of all for me over those three years on the stand-up comedy scene was that in order to get more stage time and better spots in a show, the club owners had to believe I could get people to come see me. It was simple comedy club math: People × Drinks = Money. The more people I brought, the more drinks they ordered, the more money club owners made.

But since burying myself in work after the divorce, I hadn't really gotten to know anyone outside my church (the fact
that I even went to church already set me apart from a lot of other people in the industry). And asking the humble members of the First Christian Church of North Hollywood Disciples of Christ out in the Valley to come see me at these places over the hill in Hollywood close to midnight, where my “coworkers” would make graphic jokes about sex, drugs, violence, and religion, well, that was just uncomfortable for everyone.

It says something about the wonderful people from my church that many of them did come out to my shows and I am forever grateful to them for their support. I owe those ladies my sanity, I owe them gas money, and I owe one of them in particular for the next phase of my career.

Her name is Tina. Tina is one of those beautiful people who open their heart and their home to you when you don't even know you need it. Tina invited me to a barbecue at her house for July Fourth that year. It was a perfect summer day: temperature in the mid-80s, sunny, blue skies, no humidity, just a light breeze. It was the kind of day that makes people visiting L.A. never want to leave. Kids were playing in the pool, the grown-ups were chatting, and we were all eating delicious food. I was tired because I'd performed the night before and had only gotten up a few hours earlier, but there was something about the day that got me talking and
confiding in Tina about my struggles with my direction in life. This was big for me, because I struggle with opening up to people.

“I always thought I would do stand-up comedy, then I'd get discovered by
The Tonight Show,
and then eventually have my own show,” I said. “But now I'm not sure that's the right thing for me to do.”

“You're not sure? How will you know?” Tina said.

“I don't know,” I said. “I've prayed about it, and I've worked very hard and paid my dues, but I don't seem to be getting anywhere.”

“Maybe you need some different inspiration.”

“I suppose so. I don't know.” I was truly lost.

“I don't know if you knew, but I work at NBC,” Tina said. “I can put you on the list to go watch a taping of
The Tonight Show,
if you want. You can go as often as you like—maybe you'll be inspired there.”

I've never heard an angel sing, but if I had to guess, it probably sounds a little like the words that just flew effortlessly out of Tina's mouth. She threw the offer out there so casually, on any other day it might have just floated right over my head, but on this warm holiday afternoon, it sank
right into my heart. It felt like Tina had thrown me a lifeline when I needed it most.

By the way, this is why, when you're trying to figure out who you are or what you want to do when you grow up, you should join every group that will have you and go to every party you're invited to. And when you get there, treat everyone with respect and love. It's the Golden Rule of show business, or any business for that matter: Treat everyone like they are important and could introduce you to just the right individual or idea or institution (like
The Tonight Show
).