You Take The Low Road And I'll Take The High Road

Sometimes taking the high road is very unfulfilling. Like, someone insults you and you have the world's greatest zinger at the ready, but you hold off to let the other person save face and address them in private. It takes calm, cool, collectedness. It means being unflapable and trusting that other people can see their idiocy without you having to point it out.


Unfortunately, I just don't have that high of an opinion of other people. Too many "other people" are idiots. Half of the population of the world, by definition, is below average - and I don't like those odds.


Psychologically speaking though, we're ALL idiots. We are terrible at accurately recalling what we have just seen or heard, emotions cloud our judgement, and apparently we spend more time shopping for key chains than we do for car insurance. Our eyes are easily fooled by optical illusions, we can't inhibit our responses... hell most of us can't even remember where we put our cars keys (behind the orange juice?)


I guess that's why I'm simultaneously understanding and annoyed beyond all bullshit when one of my fellow human beings (or ME) does something that betrays our all-too-human idiot-ness. Recently, I started taking a class for people who wanted to try their hands at standing before an audience of people and attempting to make them laugh. It's obvious from day one that the instructor couldn't organize their way out of a wet paper bag. Classes start late and finish early. There is always some excuse. They have to perform at another show. The rest of the students aren't here yet. In fact, InstructorB does very little instructing at all, preferring instead to have us talk our ideas into a small camera and give us "notes" along the way. So less than 6 hours before our last class, InstructorB emails us all to ask if we want to go on a $field $trip and have class at different bar/comedy club than the one we paid to have our classes at.


Uh-oh.


They say that majority will rule and since everyone else is agreeing, I reluctantly go along with it, despite the club being a much farther trip for me, and not really wanting to stay out late, since I have work responsibilities in the AM. Then after closing down my computer and heading out, InstructorB emails the group again to say that the commedy place we were supposed to meet at doesn't open until half way through our class time so we'll meet at another bar.


Let me get this straight. You're taking a bunch of students who paid Bar 1 for classes to TWO OTHER BARS for their class? Uhm... does the management know that you're taking a sizeable group of customers to what is essentially a competetor for the class you are supposed to be doing there? Uh, I'm a therapist, so I'm going to ask a very cliche question: How do they FEEL about that?


Oh, but wait. It gets better. Of course, a bunch of people were late, because they didn't get the 11th hour emails and went to Bar1. But then InstructorB can't REMEMBER if they have downloaded their other class's videos of their camera, so they can't record our bits and give feedback. Cut to Classmate6 trying to film us with an iPhone in a noisy bar with honkey-tonk playing over the speakers and using a table candle for a spotlight. Half way through this "class" we have to leave to make sure we get seats at the other comedy club/bar. The performances were meh, and the MC was so mean to almost be Yuk-Yuk's worthy. I realize it is getting late and decide to head out between sets. Of course, I get picked on by the MC, but I expected that. What I didn't expect was for the InstructorB that I am paying good money to learn something from would insult me in front of the entire crowd. "Where are you going?... Aw, you guys SUCK!"


Of course, InstructorB denies this particular verbal characterization of the events... and I DID have two glasses of wine over the 4 hours I was seated in a bar that evening. I don't know how many double whiskey's they had.


This person has left a class I paid for half an hour early so that they could go work in another show. They've changed the class schedule so that we'd finish on the same day as another class despite people having booked off certain nights at work. And more than halfway into the course, can still not get their head out of their own genitals long enough to tell us when the performance night is... or where. They are starting to rival StoopidClassmate.

JournalistHusband keeps telling me that organization is not the strongsuit of the average comic. That there are huge problems with publicity in particular. He can't understand why they complain about not getting any publicity and why no one comes to their shows! After all, they did send out an email blast on $facebook 3 hours before the show started! Shouldn't everyone have dropped what they were doing, left their dinners half-eaten, their babies without sitters, and their coitus interrupted to run across town to sit in a dank hall with pissy, unwashed waitstaff to listen to them tell the 108th variation on why men and women are SO different (back me up ladies!) to the same crowd of mutually masturbating other comics? There's a real Peter Pander syndrome thing going on here... I'm not convinced that if you can make an audience (populated largely by other am-comics) laugh at one of these things that you can make an actual audience laugh. And why the hell are MCs so often SO mean?

Don't get me wrong. I really have no idea if I could even make a bunch of really nice drunk people laugh. It's not so much a judgement as plain old scientific bewilderment. I want to know why...