REJECTION IS UNDERRATED

If you’re going to enter any even half-serious pursuit of the creative arts, there’s one thing that’s almost undeniably going to be given out as a warning. From people with experience, sure, but even from people who’ve only heard stories. The saying you’re so often going to get, paired with sympathetic eyes, is a variant of “you’ve got to be ready to deal with a lot of rejection.”

On its nose, of course this is true. Unless of particularly blessed parentage, you’re going to get hit with quite a couple hard nos. This was always something I thought I was pretty ready for. I handle rejection fairly well, or at least I like to think I do. Whether it’s professional, personal, or romantic, I’m not off to shop for trenchcoats and bumpstocks just because someone said “thanks, but no thanks.”

The thing is, I now have fifteen years of comedy and creative pursuits under my belt, and if anything, I desperately wish for more outright rejection. Because, unlike the bon mot would suggest, rejection is not the most common response to putting yourself out there. In my experience, what you need to be ready to bear above all else is an immense amount of indifference. Which, to me, is vastly more destructive to the spirit.

Rejection is a concrete obstacle, something to bookmark and build from or, possibly, use as a sort of vile creative fuel. I wouldn’t suggest the latter as a path to emotional health, but it works for some people. Even that, though, requires a “no” as a base. Whenever I hear some actor talking about how they kept every rejection letter they ever received, all pinned to their bedroom wall as morning motivation, I just think, “they sent you letters?”

Which is some extremely sad-sack type of shit to say, but that’s where these sorts of pursuits tend to leave you. Especially when, as said sack, you’re forced doubly to confront your feelings about it given the arrival of an age demanding you really consider how the goals (or, yuck, DREAMS even) you’ve committed so much of your no-longer-young life to are working out. I’m thirty-five years old, and a mid-life reckoning is upon me with a level of clockwork that’s discouraging in itself.

I don’t perform much anymore. Which leads to the question of if I quit stand-up comedy altogether. A question I find it funny to answer, because the fact is, I didn’t even really have to. Last year I recorded a special, and it’s a piece of work I’m thoroughly proud of. Behind the scenes, I knew it was serving another purpose: to hopefully bring back some of my passion for the work that goes into good comedy.

Instead, it all deepened my exhaustion with the housekeeping that came along with scraping together even a couple minutes of stagetime, and the unpaid type at that. I couldn’t seem to muster the stamina for hoop-jumping that’s required to get to the good stuff. Which is where I’ll bring it back to the many times that I craved at least the baseline respect of an outright rejection. It got harder and harder to continue the volley without even a wall to send the ball back at me. Follow-ups sank into the same quicksand as the original requests, to the point where, I, more than once, started to ask myself if I’d found myself on a secret blacklist due to some accidental slight or misstep. 

This all compounded by the fact that talking about how rarely you’re booked is, in itself, shameful. Like speaking it out loud would truly confirm yourself as a line-up pariah. I had to wonder if other friends of mine were also eking out maybe a spot a month in the best of times, none of us wanting to bring it into the bright, bare light of conversation.

Sometimes, in what felt like a prank pulled from high school prom times, I’d be the one reached out to, only to be left adrift after my responses and follow-ups. Twice I received e-mails from prospective representation, only to have responses live forever in the void, leaving me to assume I served simply as a billable hour for somebody. Maybe now’s the right time to send another “just checking in” e-mail, years later, at least because it would be a pretty good bit.

Now, I’m fully aware of how woe-is-me that all got over the last few paragraphs. There’s a healthy dose of narcissism to expect yourself to be top-of-mind in a crowded field, but I’d also counter: we’re talking about comedy. You need a measure of narcissism to start this in the first place. What I’m trying to say, though, extends beyond a personal pity party.

What riles me up, far beyond my own annoyances? Stand-up comedy is very hard to do (please, no comparisons to being teacher or a soldier or an elephant shit-shoveler at the zoo, we’re all hopefully capable of relative thinking.) It requires you to dump a whole lot of life into it, and being anything but dogshit at it takes even more time and some latent talent. With all that, you could hope for a base level of respect, or at the bare minimum, decency.

Instead, every comedian I know is often treated as a professional inconvenience. In an industry quite literally built around their inherent value, they’re treated like an unfortunate cost of doing business. I’m not even going to go into detail on the financials, because that’s an article within itself that I’m not quite ready to touch. Plenty of places barely pay you enough to buy a ticket to the show you just performed on, which is a nasty bit of math. I will just say that, for the most part, there’s no money in stand-up comedy itself. A bit of a reverse banana stand, if you will.

Yes, operating costs are high, and I’m sure no comedy venue’s balance sheet is anything but alarming. Which, to me, is only a stronger reason that you could at least provide the comedians, who are the entire difference between you owning a business and an empty room full of sticky chairs, something that doesn’t cut into your bottom line at all: professional courtesy. Are all comedians professional? Oh hell no. And if that bothers you that much, you don’t have to book them. I’d argue, though, that you don’t get to point to the fuck-ups as a reason to treat all comics as chaotic idiots that can’t be trusted with glassware.

I guess what I’m trying to say, outside of hopefully just voicing some frustrations that other, more active comics I know aren’t able to: If you want to say you work in comedy, if you want the “oh, cool”s and cultural cachet that comes with that, I think you owe it to yourself to examine how you’re treating the comics you love to name-drop. I’d go so far as to say it’s a bit of an obligation, if you want to profit off that world. I’m sorry if that means you have to open all your e-mails.

I’m also hoping that I can maybe pull at least one other comic with two bookings peppered over the next twelve months off the cusp of a full breakdown by confirming that, yes, plenty of people are struggling to step on a stage without having their name pulled out of a bucket beforehand. I’d like to also tell you it gets better, but I can’t personally promise that. So, strap in, I guess. I suppose the prevailing wisdom is that we signed up for this shit. Keep feeding quarter-minute clips into the content slot machine of social media and find a self-soothing hobby like crochet to keep the bile levels in your brain to a manageable level.

I feel the need at the end here to say that, even though these are clearly the rantings of a bitter, bald old man, I’ve mostly made peace with them. No need to check my pockets if I show up at the JFL auditions. I just no longer have the strength to keep my eyes unrolled while I kiss the ring of someone who acts like they struck oil because a bar lets them use their back room on Mondays at 6 pm. Not to say that there aren’t bookers and club owners and managers/agents that treat comics with respect. There absolutely are. Especially the ones that might possibly, and I know they’re slammed, but have even just five minutes on their show sometime, which I’ve heard is really fun!