After 30 Years of Standup: The Wall of Punchlines
The past through rose-colored beer goggles
Now you're telling me
You're not nostalgic
Then give me another word for it
You who are so good with words
And at keeping things vague
- Joan Baez, Diamonds & Rust
In a week-and-a-half, on Mother’s Day, I will celebrate my thirtieth anniversary of doing standup comedy. Thirty years is a long time to do anything consistently, and at the end of that week I am graduating from USC’s School of Cinematic Arts. The program is so notoriously rigorous that it’s been unironically compared, in terms of workload, to medical school. I have been too tired to plan anything special beyond a Substack post commemorating the occasion.
Last year I recorded my debut solo special, West Coasting, which was released this year. It was a mix of bits that I wrote after moving to Los Angeles almost a decade ago, and I’m proud of it. You can rent or buy it here: writeliam.com.
I’ve been getting serious about my standup comedy again, consistently writing new material and getting onstage. This is not healthy behavior – I have a screenplay to finish writing and a short film to begin prepping, and standup comedy is one of my creative stalling tactics. Yes, I am a productive procrastinator, the kind that other people hate. Blame my ADHD and the fact that I come from a family with an insane work ethic.
I’ve been getting serious about my standup comedy again... This is not healthy behavior
My great-grandfather supported his family and kept his tailor shop in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn, open during the Great Depression by also working a full shift at a clothing factory a mile away. Every day his wife, my great-grandmother, would take tailoring orders, lay out the clothes, and every night Benny would get home from the factory and do the tailoring all night. I can’t imagine he did the world’s greatest job sewing and stitching, but it was the Great Depression. People weren’t wearing suits to too many job interviews.
My other set of great-grandparents on that side of the family ran a luncheonette in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, during the Great Depression. They were hardworking immigrants, and after the cops busted up their slot machines they could never forgive Mayor LaGuardia. My grandfather used to babysit Buddy Hackett.
When I was a hip young comedian, I would sometimes walk into a store in Billysburg, wondering what my ancestors would have thought of charging ten dollars for a bottle of kombucha. Or I would stumble to the L train, drunk, at 2 a.m., after a night of standup comedy and partying. I would walk past the spot on Bedford Avenue where their luncheonette once stood and wonder if they could possibly have been proud of me.
So when I work on something that feels as trivial as a new joke, I work hard. Part of my process for generating new material involves going through all my old archival materials. I parse ancient Word files, stream-of-consciousness blog entries, and handwritten notebooks, trying to find old ideas and jokes and see if I can rewrite them for today.
When I look back at the Liam McEneaney of the first decade of the 2000s, I marvel at what a good joke writer he was. This is not giving myself too much credit; I was such an unhappy, angry alcoholic at the time that writing standup comedy was literally my only escape from that headspace. As a result, I had a writing discipline like no other and I would tackle the problem of setup/punchline like my life depended on it.
My great-grandparents worked through the Great Depression. I do this.
Maybe it did. I used to call it my version of writing crossword puzzles, because it was a pleasure to create the puzzle of writing the setup, and then solve it by figuring out the best possible punchline or punchlines. I’ve written about this on this Substack before so I won’t go into it here, but this compulsion eventually got me out of a destructive work environment.
The jokes are great, but the voice they are written in is not one I would recognize. I was writing my standup to escape myself, as I said, and so while they are written from the point of view of someone who is snarky, observational, kind of angry, they also have a generic quality.
Standup comedy is, when done well, such a personal expression of the comedian that one should be able to hear the voice of the performer while they’re reading their words on the page. I was working so hard to disconnect myself from who I was, my standup was neutral, generic. Funny but it could have been written by anyone.
Which is ironic, because the performers I would have told you I was patterning myself after at the time would have been Bob Dylan and Bruce Springsteen, two guys who figured out how to take their natural personae and turn them into onstage characters. While Bob was notoriously guarded, he deliberately took his true self and hid him behind veils of myth and poetry.
I used to call joke writing my version of writing crossword puzzles
Bruce took the young man he was from the working class suburb Freehold, New Jersey, and built a larger-than-life blue collar mythos around himself. While neither man was transparent, once you knew where to look you could see how nakedly autobiographical their best work was. Whereas I hid myself behind a solid wall of bullshit and denial and punchlines.
What follows, then, is a set of jokes I wrote around 2006 I think, and I have been tempted to try them onstage. And maybe I will figure out a way to integrate them into who I am and what I do twenty years later. But more likely, I think I’ll just enjoy these as a moment frozen in amber, an artifact of who I was. Not that you would know who he was from what you’re about to read below.
I was in K-Mart last Christmas, and I saw the worst gift idea - four salamis in a gift box for ten dollars.
What kind of friend are you giving this to?
“I drew your name in the office Secret Santa. Here’s to another year of no eye contact. I found it while shopping for extension cords.”
Those gift foods are never for eating. It’s like you’re saying, “Hey, imagine what it would be like if you had food you could eat.”
Because I don’t know if you’ve ever tried to eat gift meat, but it always tastes like it came from rubbery dehydrated cows,
And why give fruit baskets? “Here’s twenty pounds of fruit - enjoy the gift of uncontrollable shitting. When you spend three days on the toilet, I want you to think of me.”
Fruit baskets are the only present that goes rotten after two days. Except for the pears, which will stay nice and hard and unripe until the Judgment Day.
It’s like guest soaps - those seashell-shaped nice-smelling soaps that you’re afraid to ever use.
They’re called guest soaps, but no one actually wants their guests to use them.
They’re actually “guessed” soaps, as in, “We guessed you would find the soap you’re supposed to use on the sink.”
If you want to buy your friend a ton of food he can’t eat, just go balls-out and go to Costco and buy him a 40-pound tub of I Can’t Believe It’s Not Butter.
Which is the greatest name for a food ever, because that thing’s been on the market for 25 years, and I can’t believe that guy still can’t believe it’s not butter.
I imagine him in his factory, tasting spreads: “Mmmm, okay, that’s gotta be - whaaaat? Are you kidding me? NOT BUTTER????? Okay, how about this - this is definitely - NO WAY! THAT’S NOT BUTTER EITHER! I mean, here I am in the factory I own where we make non-butter spreads all day long, and none of this stuff is butter!!!!”
He should make other foods that he can’t believe what they aren’t. Like, he could make Budweiser, but the label would say, “I Can’t Believe It’s Not Horse Urine.”
For more fresh takes on classic standup topics like gift foods, trips down memory lane, and pop culture takes you can subscribe for free right here. Next week I’ll be looking at a secret all-star album recorded by a major band of the 1980s before they hit it big.
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