The Road To Calvery

It was 1992. I had been a successful salesman for campany called Masterguard selling home firealarm systems in rural Texas. I was living outside Kerrville, Texas in the tiny town of Ingram. I knew a few things about brush and forest fires because I was on a Hot Shot fire crew in The Sierra Nevada National Forrest so I became a member of the local volunteer fire department.

I was in shape running ten miles a day and had been fasting for three weeks to get even more healthy. I lived near my friend John so every motning we would run the dirt roads of the Texas hill country.

But I was living solo and dating a young woman who worked at a hair salon in Kerrville but Lisa was thirty years my junior (our first official date was too her high school prom.)

Lisa sleeping at my place when she mentioned that her “friend” was in town and need a place to stay. So lisa and her lesbian lover ended up in the bed with us. This was all pretty new to me being a hetro male my entrire life but I consented because I wanted to be with Lisa. The “Friend” turned out to be very possive so it was an awkward night all the way around.

The next morning Lisa’s mom showed up. Another awkward situation since her mom was my age. It finally dawnwed on me that Lisa was far more into lesbian sex than she was with my usual activities.

I knew it was going to be strange when I met her mother and all she did was apologize for the awkward situation, I was half expecting to read the riot act for being a forty-five year old man banging a teenage girl but I think her mom was just happy that Lisa was having sex with a man for a change even if it was with a guy twice her daughter’s age.

Around this time I was making trips into Austin to hang out with my old pal from Southern California, Arthur C. Arthur had become manager of a comedy nightclub in Austin tht was an extension of Houston’s Comedy Annex, the stage where Bill Hicks and Sam Kineson did stand-up. I became assistant manager and house emcee at Austin’s first full blown comedy nightclub. It was here that I first met Jay Leno and while Jay was guest host of the Tonight Show during Johnny Carson’s final season.

I knew a few things about writing and had always been a joke teller so working eight comedy shows a week was training ground for me. I saw every traveling stand up comic during stand-ups in the 1980s heydays. Before long I was writing jokes for Leno’s monologues.

During that same period I was traveling every week to Houston, San Antonio and Dallas teaching standup comedy writing and performing, cowriting comedy material with twenty students. What made the class a success was we were writing material together and doing a lot of brain storming so my writing kept on improving.

What I will be doing this month is posting text from The Comedy Gym Workbook that is now in its eighth edition so stay tuned and I will teach you have to write and perform original comedy material.