Comedy didn’t save the country after 9/11, but it did reflect it. JesseDavidFox spoke with 37 comedians — including pattonoswalt, marcmaron, and davidcrosss — about their first time onstage after the attacks and how the day changed comedy forever
Photo-Illustration: Vulture; Photos from Getty What differentiates comedians from your funniest friend is not that they are funnier. It’s that they can be funny to strangers, on demand. “The difficulty in doing stand-up comedy is not knocking down the pins,” veteran stand-up comedian Brian Regan once told me. “A lot of people can be funny and knock down the pins. It’s setting up the pins that weren’t there to begin with.
Mitzi decided to open the Comedy Store the Friday after 9/11 and requested for me to go onstage, open the show, and talk about being Middle Eastern and Muslim, to which I replied, ‘Nope!’” I was nervous and didn’t know what to talk about, and she said, “Just be yourself and you’ll know what to say.” So I took her advice. My first joke was “Hi everyone. My name’s Ahmed Ahmed … and I had nothing to do with it. Please don’t follow me out to my car after the show.
I didn’t even know what I was going to say to the audience when I walked out on reopening night, but it came to me. I’m a descendant of people pleasers, caregivers, and comforters. I used my mom’s adage: “Be nice to people, Louie. You never know what kind of day they’ve had before they’ve seen you.” But I did know what kind of day we all had. We had to go on and not let anything or anyone stop us from living.
I had jokes about what was going on around it, but not about the tragedy that had just occurred. I am never quick when it comes to making up a joke after something horrifying or earth-shaking has happened, and there wasn’t a joke I could find that seemed to truly work at that point in time. I didn’t know if someone in the audience knew someone who died or had lost a family member.
“It touched me to my core, and I just started talking about what happened.” Elayne Boosler Photo: Getty Images/Getty Images Like everyone, I was numb. I was booked to go back to a 700-seat room in Laughlin, Nevada, the weekend of 9/14. Of course, we called to let them know I wouldn’t be coming. They said “You cannot cancel. We’re sold out and no one has canceled their reservation. People are expecting you to come. They need something.” We drove from L.A. to Laughlin.
What I remember most is the feeling of relief — it was like the audience took a huge sigh of relief after my first joke hit. Once they started laughing, it was such a release. So much energy had been pent-up — so much pain, anxiety, sadness, and worry. That first laughter just felt like the world had been lifted off of their shoulders, just for a moment. I remember after my set, I was standing by the bar, and this gentleman came up to me, and he said, “I want to say thank you.
I then just … talked about it, trying to find jokes along the way, most of which made it into my album [Shut Up You Fucking Baby!]. I would say the audience was not nearly as comfortable as I was talking about it, but they were a good, attentive audience, and it ended up being a pretty good set that felt like a minor accomplishment.
I think the main reason I couldn’t find a joke in it is because I imagined if I had a family member in it. I don’t think to this day I’ve ever, even indirectly, really cracked a joke about it. Then this kid, Sean Clay, went up and did a joke where he goes, “I appreciate what the firemen and cops did on 9/11, but stop calling them heroes … Heroes? Spider-Man’s a hero. Batman’s a hero. These guys are firemen and cops.” And it got a laugh.
So I wrote that material, and then I thought, Am I going to head to Hawaii or Alaska or somewhere and try this out gently? No, I’m going to go where it counts. I was booked at Bananas Comedy Club in New Jersey, six miles from Ground Zero. It couldn’t have gone any better. From then on, for a couple years, I did that routine almost word for word, all throughout the country.
When I started doing sets, I ignored the attacks. That was my strategy: Just get laughs. At the top of my set, I would say something soft and benign like, “Just wanted to make sure we all know where the exit signs are.” That was it. But I don’t do topical or political anyway. ‘I was ruthless!’ Adele Givens Since I was working on The Hughleys, I didn’t do a lot of stand-up dates, so when I finally got the opportunity to try some material related to the 9/11 attack, I was ruthless! By then I’d seen way too many videos looped by thirsty news outlets, and my comedic irony observation was on full alert.
I remember talking to other comics about how we couldn’t do any George W. Bush jokes anymore. We all had W jokes. He was a treasure trove of material, but at that time it seemed un-American, unpatriotic, disloyal to disrespect the POTUS. I’m always prepared, but there was no way to prepare for this. I’ve always been able to disarm an audience, but for the first time in many years, I was the one who was feeling disarmed. I had rid myself of my usual comedy weaponry.
Well, after standing there for what felt like 500 years, I decided to go to the bottom level of hell. I told the Aristocrats joke. If you know anything about that joke, it’s beyond offensive. It has to do with loads of incest and bestiality, and those are the clean parts. To my shock, the audience went from brewing and hating me to laughing uproariously. The laughter just kept building. When I got to the punchline, people were cheering.
We had a thing about the flag and patriotism in our show, and burning the flag and freedom of speech. We took that out. We had a thing in our show with guns. We took that out. I remember I bought an American flag and put it on the back of my car. I don’t know if it was out of fear of having somebody shoot me or if it was out of patriotism; it was probably out of both. I was pulling into the parking lot of the Comedy Store, and there was this comedian, Marilyn Martinez, who’s passed away since. She just was laughing at me in a funny way. She was like, “Oh my God, look at Maz Jobrani. He’s got his flag to try and blend in,” and I go, “Hell yeah, Marilyn.
You could feel a bit of tension with other comics being like, “You should just say you’re Italian,” or “I wouldn’t do that” — just being a little bit critical or, even to this day or years after 9/11, it was almost a little bit of sour grapes by comedians: “Well, I can’t just get up there and talk about my ethnicity, because I’m just white.”
“I don’t like that it takes stuff like that for us to come together, but there it is.” Jackie Kashian I live in Los Angeles, so I woke up to people yelling into my voicemails to turn on the TV. I spent the day with friends watching TV. It took five hours for the comics I was hanging with to start making jokes. Not about New York. Not about the dead. Not even hacky about the Saudis. The first joke I remember was when L.A. decided to lock down Disneyland — to lock down Warner Brothers and NBC.
“How can an entire mood be dead — and why?” Jen Kirkman I can’t remember how soon I got back up — maybe two weeks? I wasn’t a headliner yet nor doing comedy for a living. I had been doing comedy for five years and was working a day job that I hated in NYC. “We were living in the sort of body-dust cloud of that event for months, so there was no ‘too soon.’” Marc Maron What I remember is the way [the Comedy Cellar] felt. Nobody was secure in their sense of reality, and people were clearly freaked the fuck out. It was like shock. The laughter was quick and weird. Clearly what we were doing wasn’t really a comfortable or effective show. It was just doing something, because at that point, Lower Manhattan was closed.
“Everyone was on edge. It felt like disarming a bomb.” Jerry Minor My vague memory is doing the ASSSSCAT show at UCB Theater on 23rd and 6th. I was living above the theater at the time and making plans to go back to L.A., where I had been living before moving to New York. I had just been informed by SNL my contract wouldn’t be renewed, I think, a mere days before, after a long summer of it being up in the air. I was so ready to go back to L.A.
Then, I think a few days later, we came back to work at SNL like, What’s going to happen? It was brand-new territory for all of us. I think my first stand-up show was only a little over a week later at Stand Up New York. The audience laughed inappropriately loudly. It was not a comedy show, it was a therapy session. It felt like they were hugging us with their laughter.
“I knew, right as I was saying it, that comedy was going to suck for a while.” Patton Oswalt Photo: Jeff Kravitz/FilmMagic, Inc I was onstage less than a week later. At the time, Blaine Capatch and I were living in the same building on Normandie [Avenue in L.A.], and the morning of 9/11, Blaine woke me up with the scariest phone call I’ve ever received. It was 8 o’clock in the morning on the West Coast, and there’s Blaine’s voice in my ear after I answered, saying, “Turn on the TV, man.
My first sets were in England a month afterward. The flights and airports were eerily empty. The U.K. crowds were also out of character by being most sympathetic. English crowds have a pathological hatred of sentiment. But I found by making fun of our innate self-absorption and W’s obvious weaknesses, illiteracy, privilege, inarticulateness that we could find some humor.
People were ready to laugh, man. But I remember being onstage also recognizing, This isn’t all about comedy. This is about people wanting to express themselves in a way other than how they’ve been expressing themselves for a week. The show represented normalcy. People were like, “We miss the world the way it was.” I mean, nobody was naive. It wasn’t like people were going, “Okay, it’s time to forget.
“I just wanted to give a respite or levity. Our hearts were broken.” Sheryl Underwood Photo: Michael Caulfield/WireImage for BET Network When September 11 happened, I was determined to get back onstage doing comedy because of my love for this country — my love for New York and being a prior Military Air Force Reserve. I wanted to show that you weren’t going to beat America.
Women, people of color, and queer folks in the crowd understood, because we all had been living in an America that had never offered to us the benefits straight white men enjoyed. I made a choice to take on blind patriotism, and it resonated with those in the audience who felt conflicted and angry our nation was attacked, while often being left out from, and often harmed by, its policies.
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