How to Try Stand-up With No Good, Very Bad Anxiety and Stage Fright

One overthinking scaredy-cat's story

The easiest way to “say yes” to a stand-up comedy class, especially if you’re a generally anxious ruminator with level ten stage fright, is to give in to peer pressure.

Wouldn’t peer pressure backfire with a notoriously socially anxious person, you might wonder. My guess is yes, in most cases, it’s a bad idea. But there are some situations where peer pressure is exactly what a person—normie or not—needs, and stand-up happens to be one of them.

For me, I’d been working on curbing my self-isolation and avoidance of scary stuff (like acknowledging the grocery store cashier, or listening to voicemail or answering an email, or *yikes* letting the woman who saw me outside yesterday see me outside today) for a while, and one of the things I agreed with my therapist I should do is make a friend. So, when a dude I hella admired invited me to coffee, I hella agreed. And when he invited me again, I agreed again. Things went on like this until, eventually, I had to admit I’d, in fact, made a friend. Yay me. But now I had to keep a friend, and that’s some next-level shit.

So, I devised a few rules to nurture (and protect) my burgeoning identity as a Non-Normie Person With Adult Friendships. Most don’t apply to the topic at hand, but one does. Since my new friend was hella cool and accomplished and creative and basically well-adjusted in the self-esteem areas of life, I figured that the best way to not suffocate our friendship with my myriads of fears and worries and anxieties (and overthinking—sorry, the dude’s just gotta deal with that one) would be to “say yes” to him and whatever ideas he concocted as much as I could, in the spirit of friendship and learning and growing and yada yada yada.

You probably see where I’m going. Yes, my new friend is a comedian, and yes, he teaches

Stand Up 101

, and yes, he asked me if I wanted to take his class (no, NOT because he just needed to fill seats, *fingers-crossed* at least, that’s what I tell myself late at night), and yes, I thought I was still months away from having to “say yes” to anything too brave, and I really wanted to say no, but if I said no I’d be setting a precedent, and who knew what alternate universes I’d be snipping in the process, and what if he never asked me again or just wrote me off completely . . .

. . . so, yes, I “said yes” to saying yes.

Peer pressure.

Cool, Amy. Cool, cool. I just wanted to know what it was like to take a stand-up class, some of you are thinking but politely keeping to yourself. Well, I’ll have you know, the peer pressure continued to work.

At the first class, before we talked about anything, I mean anything, like, the dude didn’t do housekeeping tasks or syllabus breakdowns or “Who’s playing the Punchline this month?” or “Let’s play a game of Telephone to get to know each other!” or—and this is amazing because this dude LOVES to tell a story the way my dog loves to catch a ball (my dog’s brain: ballballballballball∞)—tell us a story or do an “About Me” roundtable or . . . okay, okay, you get it.

The first thing he did was make us get on stage and talk into the mic. And the person he called on first was me. Just get it out of the way, right at the top, he said. You #$%!@#, I replied. Because intense stage fright, remember? Also, anxiety and all that? So yeah. My first reaction wasn’t of the “say yes” variety. I was pissed. But what was I gonna do? Let my hella cool friend down before we’d even started?

I dragged my sorry ass up there and mumbled into the mic, and the class said they couldn’t hear me, so I mumbled a little closer to the mic, and my friend asked who’s your favorite comedian? and I said I cannot compute names or what is comedy? or some dumb thing and dragged my sorry ass back off the stage and sat down and . . .

 . . . felt so much better! Holy shit, he was right! Facing the dreaded stage and ripping the Band-aid off, hearing my voice amplified before we started on anything else, worked!

Peer pressure! (Also, okay, fine, he knows what he’s doing. Whatever.)

The following week, we had to share our notes on what had struck us as funny since the last class, with the idea being, like, life is comedy’s compost or something like that. These notes would be the seeds of what would become the full blooms of our five-minute comedy set. Again, the heady mixture of fear of letting my friend down and also wanting to impress him (since we’re both writers) so much that one day he’d ask me to go on a world tour with him, like an international one-person show but with two-persons, maybe called KLJ & AB R ADHD AF or something, I dunno, just spitballing. Or maybe we’d write a scary movie together, but maybe instead of filming it, we’d turn it into an experience, like a haunted house, except all the scary stuff would be shit normal people do every day, like sit in a cubicle alone or get put on hold while disputing a credit card charge. Or maybe he’d never really want to make a movie or go on a Metallica-sized tour with me, but he would think I was funny, and that would be awesome, too.

So, instead of taking notes, I wrote full-on jokes. Lots of them. And some were pret-ty okay, I don’t mind confessing.

PEER PRESSURE!

Week three, the stage fright came for me. We were supposed to work on what we thought our sets would be and do them onstage twice. But I had difficulty memorizing what I’d written, and even when I remembered a small snippet here or there, I couldn’t perform the jokes. I couldn’t deliver. And since I couldn’t deliver, I couldn’t land. No landing meant no killing, and no killing meant bombing.

I know—weird-ass terminology.

Something cruel and hard and as old as Betty White (oh, wait, no, no, no, scratch that) . . . something mean and punishing and as mind-fucking as my mother (thanks, Mom!) was holding me back, telling me NO, demanding I give up. It was invisible, but I felt it like a solid weight on my stomach. It was bad. I walked off the stage and told my friend I wasn’t gonna. He said, c’mon, ya gotta. I was like, nope, nuh-uh. He said, are you sure you’re not gonna? And I was like, the lights are too bright, I can’t see anyone, so I can’t. I think I said that to hide my embarrassment. But he jumped right on it. Said we could fix it. Told everyone in class to move to the front seats. Told me to go check it out.

I knew what he was doing. I knew he was giving me an out, or rather, an in—a way back onto the stage while saving face a teensy-weensy bit. It was a hella kind gesture, and I kinda hated him for it because, of course, once I was back up there, there was no way I was gonna let that kind gesture go to waste, so I finished practicing my set. It wasn’t great, but I survived.

PEER PRESSURE FOR THE WIN! (Also, he’s a pretty compassionate teacher. Whatever.)

So peer pressure got me through the Stand Up 101 class, but by the day before our big show, where we would all do *gasp* five minutes of stand-up, I knew something wasn’t right with my set. I was still fumbling through it, having a hard time remembering it, and definitely not performing or delivering it well. And I’d even purchased a mic with a stand to practice this shit!

I was carrying a mic around everywhere I went (even if where I was going was from my home office to my kitchen) and talking into it like life was a nonstop Karaoke night. I practiced my set repeatedly by plugging the mic into my computer and wearing headphones to hear—and acclimate—to my amplified voice. (Guess what? I thought I had a nice, booming masc voice. Turns out I don’t. Nope. High-pitched and nasally, that’s my brand, bitches.)

Truth: I would say it was the most practice and effort I have put into anything, and it still wasn’t launching.

Solution? Insomnia. And I decided to rewrite it twenty-four hours before our show. Actually, I didn’t write it; I took notes and then riffed off those notes into my mic until I came up with a pretty funny (maybe? Hopefully?) story. Anything I could remember fairly well made it onto the setlist, and then I whittled down the setlist. Then, I walked around the house and performed it over and over in between a few extreme anxiety-fueled nap sessions. About eight hours before the show, all my practice performances gifted me a few straight-up “joke” jokes, and I inserted some of them into my story.

I went to the show figuring I would bomb, but I’d done my best, tried every scheme I could think of, and there was nothing left to do but accept the humiliation coming. It was no longer about peer pressure because I assumed I wouldn’t be impressing anyone—

—except myself. I’d be impressing the hell outta myself.

And impressing myself had somehow become important. I knew how brave I was being; I knew exactly what I would overcome by seeing this shit through. I was gonna do the damn thing, bomb the damn thing, and then enjoy the hell out of it being over.

I showed up to the event full of dread—drowning in the stuff. The host called my name. I went up there. Took an inordinately long time to situate my setlist on the stool. Turned to the microphone. Said one thing. Said another thing—

—and heard a laugh.

Tried it again. Said a thing. More laughter. More things, more laughter. They . . . they were laughing at me!

THEY WERE LAUGHING AT ME!

Yeah, I surprised everyone and kinda killed it. It was amazing. I’m so glad I did the class, and I’m happy I didn’t quit.

Otherwise, I wouldn’t have impressed myself AND my favorite bestie-dude in the whole world, the comedian and storyteller

Keith Lowell Jensen

, who has sworn to me his second-born out of no reason except a supreme admiration of my hilarity.

Thanks, Keith!

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