“I think cops cause more accidents than they prevent,” I studdered.  “When you see one on the road, you slam on your breaks and struggle to get a seatbelt on.  Think about it.  Next to every accident you see, there’s always at least one cop.”

                The auditorium erupted with laughter.  Suddenly I had a little confidence.  I smiled into the blinding spotlight and looked down at my hand for my next joke.  My set list, which I had written on the back of my hand before the talent show, was nothing but a sweaty black smudge. 

                I panicked for a second, then remembered, “If Sir Isaac Newton had a brother, he’d be the uncle of modern science.”  It was a joke format I had stolen from Carlin and I delivered it like Hedberg, but that’s how all comedians start:  by borrowing from those before them.  Or as Newton put it, by standing on the shoulders of giants.

                By the end of my set, I was a new man.  I was a stand-up comic.   Or so I thought.  I called up every comedy club in Cleveland, Ohio (the Mecca of comedy).  “Hello, Cleveland Improv?  May I speak to the manager?  Hi, yes, I am a 16 year-old comedian in Cleveland.  Just did a high school talent show.  I’m hoping to perform at your club.  Maybe this weekend?”  Click.

                The only stagetime I could find was this open mic listed in the newspaper.  It was a small club in the inner-city called the Robin’s Nest.  Opening the door was like one of those scenes in Westerns where the music stops and some hick yells, “You ain’t from around here, are you?” and then fills the silence with a banjo.  At age 16 and weighing 115 lbs, I walked into what turned out to be an all-black room.  Just a little nerd from the suburbs chillin’ with a couple dozen black people.

                I wrote my name down on the list and waited to go onstage.  The guys before me were doing very well with the crowd, but in a way that made me know I was going to bomb.   When one comedian shouted, “I eat ass like a crab!” and then made a corresponding  gesture, he got a standing ovation.  I looked down at my set list: Sir Isaac Newton, Trojan Wars, Harry S. Truman.  “This isn’t going to go well,” I thought.

                I finally get called up and struggle just to get the microphone out of the stand.  My first couple jokes bomb hard.  For some reason, I’m just not connecting.  I’m like, “Don’t you guys hate it when your DVD player breaks and you have to walk to the other side of your mansion to get your other one?”

In the front row sits a heckling fat dude with bushy white hair on each side of his head and two gold front teeth.  I’m bombing; he’s heckling.  This cycle continues until I get to this anti-joke.  In my first set, I used to just say, “Koala bears are awesome,” and then move on  because I thought it was funny to begin a new random topic and ignore it.  Well it just so happens Bushy Hair Magee heckles me and I say, “Koala bears are awesome.”

                The whole audience goes, “Oh snap!  Oh shit!  He did not just say that!”  And I realized that the heckler kind of looked like a koala.  So I get an unintentional applause break with an urban crowd, and ended up winning some “Best Comeback of the Night” award.

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