On being a performer.
I love being on stage. Put that shit right into my veins, set up a permanent drip, give it to me day and night. The sound of a crowd moving exactly the way I want them to, following the paths I’ve created for them and loudly appreciating the traps I’ve laid for them…there is absolutely nothing like it in the world.
I wanted to perform early. I started off idolizing stand-up comedians. Listening to Cheech & Chong, Richard Pryor, Redd Foxx, George Carlin, Steve Martin…every comedy album my folks had, I wore them out. I studied the delivery, I obsessed over every single word, every pause, every bit of verbal misdirection. Listening to the records I strained my ears to figure out what the comedians were doing when they weren’t speaking but the audience was still reacting. Was he shaking his hips? Was she delivering a lascivious wink? A nod? What body movement would make this pause so good?
When stand-up had its big moment in the 80s and you could catch stand-up comedians on cable TV pretty much 24-7 I soaked up as much of it as I could. The magic that happened in front of those tiny, shitty brick walls, my god it was incredible. From the hyperactive growl of Gilbert Gottfried to the filthy purrs of Judy Tenuta; from Sam Kinison’s coked-up rants to the dry, deadpan of Steven Wright, I loved it all.
I watched Saturday Night Live, I obsessed over movies like The Blues Brothers and National Lampoon’s Vacation, going so far as to write down notes about how the jokes were laid out, and trying to reverse-engineer them into random bits I would do without warning for my friends at school. I would engineer myself into these situations just to deliver a punch-line I’d been working on for a week, or go hungry at lunch because I thought I could nail a pratfall coming out of the lunch line but it was gonna cost me my whole tray. I didn’t just want to be the class clown, I wanted to live like I was the lead in a comedy. I wanted to be Bill Murray, not just imitate him.
When I got into theatre I shifted away from comedy slightly to experiment with drama because I was told by Very Serious People that you needed to chase Very Dramatic Roles and for a little while I believed them but then I started to notice…comedy was harder. Way harder. And I was already better at it because it’s what I’d already spent the bulk of my childhood studying and chasing. No need to reinvent the wheel, why not just learn to be better at something I was already good at…and deeply obsessed with?
Credit where credit is due, my old man knew how to light up a room and wrap it around his finger. He was loud, he was bold, he was funny, and he knew how to tell a story and lead someone where he wanted them to be. Between growing up around him and my relentless study of all things funny, by the time I landed on stage I was ready to make people laugh, and believe me I did.
As I moved from theatre to yoyos I realized I had a huge leg up on the other demonstrators at the time. I already knew how to perform, whereas they learned how to yoyo first and THEN tried to figure out how to do it on stage. But I quickly realized that performing as a yoyo demonstrator wasn’t about the stage show, it was about how you interacted with people directly. It was a single, tiny show for one person, over and over again all day long. I developed jokes and bits that were applicable and easily repeatable and built myself a tiny one-man show that I repeated for every person I met with as I showed off whatever yoyos I was selling. It especially came in handy at trade shows like the International Toy Fair, where I had a steady stream of buyers and needed to rope them in and hand them off to sales staff as quickly and effectively as possible.
I don’t know if other variety performers go through it, but after about a decade of this I began to lose track of myself. The lines between Steve Brown and The Steve Brown Show™ began to blur and I found myself staging and working my interactions in everyday life in a way that felt disingenuous. It was the worst of what people call out about social media, the ultra-curated bullshit version of yourself, but I was doing it live, in-person, constantly. And once I spotted it and realized what was happening it threw me for a major tailspin. I developed the most severe cast of imposter syndrome you can imagine, and doubted how much I deserved literally everything in my life. I was a huckster, a fraud, a complete bullshitter to one and all. And then I had the existential black hole of “well then who the fuck am I?” to navigate through and lemme tell you, that really sucked.
It took years of really uncomfortable and painful work for me to finally right the ship, but I’m glad I did it. I’m a much better version of myself now, and while The Steve Brown Show™ is still incredibly helpful in work-type situations it’s no longer my default setting. And because of that I feel much closer to the friends I have, much closer to my own family, and much happier with the chubby dipshit that stares back at me in the mirror every day.
Like any other addiction, it snuck up on me. And it was hard to recognize, and hard to kick. But I have an addictive personality (more on that another day) and recognizing that helped me finally realize this addiction and kick it.
I do still love performing, more than almost anything else in this world, but now it’s something I choose to do, not a compulsion that I can’t turn off.
Fuck yeah, introspection!