If You’re Trying You’re Dying
When the boos begin to rain down, or they cut the microphone, or turn off the lights, that is when I would really feel bad for them. There is an unbridled brutality that can accompany open mic comedy nights that is usually reserved only for blood sports and political rallies. It is a comedic “kumite” of sorts where only the strong and silly survive.
Some of the hostile reactions were due to how raw and classless the jokes were, but what an audience loathes more than anything is when someone is not true to their own voice and is trying to be funny. It did not matter that it was a night dedicated to amateurs, if the drunk teeming hoard smelled anything disingenuous in the first 30 seconds the performer was a goner. Bad timing was tolerable, forgetting a punchline, and even needing to look at your notes were more acceptable than to be seen as trying. To them, being funny is effortless, and has more to do with who the person was, not what they were doing. In struggling and trying to be, the performer who would break that illusion would suffer the audience’s wrath for doing so.
My pursuit of peace has been similar, in a lot of ways, to a comedy open mic night. Not in dealing with a drunken mass of humanity like with stand up, but in that if I do not take my time and try to listen to my own voice first, the whole thing falls apart. There were times when I would try to meditate for a certain amount of time, or like someone I saw, and thought was pretty frickin’ spiritual, and it would be miserable. The harder I would try the worse it would get until I was so tired that I had no choice but to be myself. I’d rather not think of how many times I have gone through that process, just to end up where I started, except exhausted enough to finally listen.
One of the most difficult aspects of seeing some amateurs struggling on stage when trying to do comedy for the first time, is that they are most likely really funny people who just didn’t figure out how to translate their humor to the audience that night. Unfortunately for most folks, if they don’t just crush then they see it as a public indictment of their funniness, and never try again, or think they should. When in all actuality, if they could stop and think of the value of their own perspective and voice and how to help people see and hear that, who knows what they could develop into?
When I take the time to look within and embrace who I am instead of trying to be something I’m not, my life is full of Love and peace. When I try to deny my own voice and the inherent significance of my perspective, then I shun all of that passion, beauty and power that is the essence of who I am. We are meant to be different from one another. It is one of the most strangely uniting aspects of being human, while being profoundly similar. If even one voice is muted in a choir it affects the sound of the whole group, and it is the same with all of us. We need each others’ differences in order to fill the whole world with the most gorgeous sound any of us have ever heard, but in order to do that we must look within and value what we find first.