I am not a robot. I am human. I am 83 years old. Recently, I have been doing open-mic comedy. You have five minutes to try to be funny. It is kind of fun. It takes place at comedy clubs. Perhaps ten people show up to be part of the audience and to take turns at the open mic. It is a little scary for me. That is part of the fun.

Mess up in front of peers? Get laughs? I do my part. 

From Math and Swimming to Standup

I didn’t want to be a comedian when I was ten years old. I didn’t want to be a comedian when I was twenty. I didn’t want to be a comedian when I was 45. 

I taught high school mathematics for many years. How does that relate to comedy? If we ignore clues when trying to solve math problems, our results will likely be weird or funny. But when we get through laughing, we would do well to use our funny results to try to figure out where we went wrong.

 I taught swimming in summer camps. As a swimming instructor, it was important to teach in an orderly fashion, starting with skills that are easier to learn, but also keeping an eye out for skills that will make more advanced skills easier to learn. Otherwise, the results will be comic.

I was married, before my wife divorced me. My wife was fond of finding fault with me. True, I have faults. But shining a spotlight on my faults caused me to dwell on my faults, rather than to overcome them. I wasn’t allowed to be funny in my marriage, because she couldn’t take it. 

A Lonely Apartment Building 

When I turned 83, a few months ago, I wasn’t happy with my life. I didn’t feel connected to people. 

The address of the apartment building where I live is on an avenue way out at the very end of Brooklyn, but the building itself isn’t really on the avenue, it is in an alleyway off a traffic circle behind a parking lot, and there is no address sign over the building to identify it, and none of the neighbors knows it’s there or that it even exists, so there is no way anyone could ever find it to visit me. Even if you could find it, when you try to buzz up to my apartment, the intercom doesn’t connect to my apartment, it connects to an office at the high school where I used to work but quit twenty years ago, and no one at the high school remembers me, so if you tried to buzz me to come up and visit, you wouldn’t be able to get in. How do I fix that? I don’t know how to fix that. Do you know how to fix that? Even if you snuck into the building and came up to see me, I don’t have any coffee or tea to offer you, so there is no reason for you to come to visit anyway. 

But at the synagogue I attend, I feel like I can make people laugh. I don’t always know why they laugh; often I don’t. But I feel more connected to people when they laugh. 

So I was sitting in my apartment one night, I was feeling a little lonely, and I wanted that connection. I looked on the web, I found a comedy club with an open-mic night, and pretty soon – I don’t remember how long – I was on the subway heading for the club. I didn’t have any jokes. I had some things that sounded funny to me. Riding on the train, I must have been nervous, because how could I not have been nervous? But I don’t remember. 

Observations 

I got up on the stage and started talking. I don’t remember what I talked about. The audience didn’t laugh right away, but eventually they laughed. It was something we created together. The host running the comedy show said to me, “That’s ok.” So I figured it might not be too bad. Because if it was bad, why would he say it’s “ok”? 

I do not think much about jokes. If something is awkward or is outlandish or pokes holes in one’s world view, then that becomes a potential “joke.” So I don’t tell “jokes”; I make observations. For example: “It’s too noisy in New York City. Would everybody keep quiet?” Like that. 

A lot of the time, I come up with ideas for what I am going to talk about while I am riding on the subway to the comedy club. Then I do a lot of adlibbing. If I blocked it all out in advance, if I thought I knew in advance what would be funny, it wouldn’t happen. So maybe I will talk about what just happened on the train. Like, in the subway trains, they have bars across the top of the cars that are horizontal to the ceiling. I don’t know what they are there for. No one knows what they are there for. Some people, they say the bars are to hold onto, so you don’t fall down. But no one really knows for sure. So I did some pullups on them. Because if you want to make a gym for me, I’ll use it, if I don’t have to pay for it. I did this one time, and a woman came over to me and said right in my face, “This is not a gym. Don’t do pullups. This is not a gym.” And I came up with something really funny that I wanted to reply to her, but when you say something funny, you don’t always know how someone will react. So I didn’t say it, and we just stared at each other. That’s something else I talked about in my routine.

Often the audience doesn’t laugh right away, because I don’t know what I’m doing, and they don’t know how to react to me, and it’s all a puzzle. I don’t know what’s going on; they don’t know what’s going on. But that’s interesting. To me that’s funny. We don’t know what’s going on, let’s figure it out together. One thing I talk about is why they’re laughing; “Tell me why you’re laughing, please, because I don’t know.” They don’t respond. They just laugh. I listen; eventually they get tired of blank space, so I have to say something. I have no control over it, but I feel connected, because people respond to me. 

Comedy Is Poetry, Too

I think I’m going to keep doing it. I have to keep doing it. It’s therapy, it’s interaction, it’s turning things upside down and turning them right-side up, making sense of reality by seeing the nonsense in reality. 

In almost every walk of life, it is important to relate to other people in an effective manner. This applies to comedy, as well. Yet, in comedy, there needs to be unexpected twists and turns. 

Otherwise: “Where is the surprise?” “Where is the humor?” “How does comedy relate to other things I have done?”

I wrote a book of poetry, titled Love…Light…Life. My poetry, particularly in my book, is about being human, acting human, and relating to other humans humanly. We all have faults. We all are infinitely far from perfect. If we take our roles in life seriously, if we believe there is a Divine Force in life, then how can such a teacher, like me, not treat his students in a manner which brings his students closer to the Divine, regardless of the religious or non-religious beliefs of his students. We all, students and teachers, need to treat each other with respect for our human dignity. We err. But hopefully, we learn from our errors, and we improve. My poetry emphasizes the heart. My mathematics and mathematics teaching emphasize the head. However, we continue to be human no matter what activities we pursue. And being human, our heart, our head, and our will need to play crucial roles. 

Open mic comedy involves one person at a time, doing a five-minute comedy routine. That is not that much different than writing or reading poems or teaching mathematics. We are still human, so we need to involve the head, the heart, and the will in comedy too. With comedy, though, there needs to be an element of surprise that captures our attention to the point where we actually laugh. That, I think, is a key function of comedy. However, poetry and mathematics can also have comic characters. A solution to a mathematical problem can be simple, yet ingenious. Yes, comic. 

And with the poems in Love…Light…Life, more often than not, I burst out laughing. True, poems in Love…Light…Life have clear simple themes. Still, applying those clear simple themes to our lives requires surprising, substantial work. 

Comedy.

^^^

Stuart V. Witt, a former math teacher, is the author of Love…Light…Life, a book of poems. 

Photograph by Oblivioni Magazine.