Stand Up   Holy shit...   I did it... The History When I was in hospital corps school with the U.S. Navy, I got the opportunity to see some of the best instructors I will ever see in my life. I was amazed at how they were able to effectively teach through the use of humor. I remember thinking that if I were to ever teach anything, I would try to teach the way I saw it done in corps school.   Honestly, I don't remember any of the instructors' names, but I remember a good number of the jokes they used to get us to remember things. It was something.   The weird thing wat that all of the memorable instructors but one of them was enlisted. Officers, in the medical field at least, were some of the worst instructors I've ever seen. The one exception was Captian Frank Dully, which I found amazing. A full-bird Navy captian had no need to be funny or entertaining due to his rank, but he nonetheless was a riot.   As usual, I digress...   Anyway, when I got trained as an AHA CPR instructor, I decided to try to emulate the the trainers I had seen in my navy schools and found the task almost more than I could handle. My jokes flopped, my funny stories were unfunny, and my delivery stunk.   Then the navy had a bright idea...   Massive CPR Certification   At some point, the navy randomly decided that EVERY one in the navy should be trained in CPR. I was on the USS Constellation at the time and there were only 4 or 5 of us that were qualified to teach CPR. We were supposed to get the ship's company and all of the squadrons trained in 60 days or less. This meant that we each had to train over a thousand people each in two months.   To be honest, I figure that I wouldn't let a third of my first trainees do CPR on a decaying dog on the side of the road. My first three or four hundred students were woefully undertrained and grossly incompetent. Oh well...   But after the first few hundred trainees, I found my shtick and made it work.   I found that telling bizarre, grossly unrelated stories and then tying these oddities into the practical aspects of CPR was an effective way of getting people to listen and learn. People laughed, gasped, and eventually picked up the skill.   The Unsuspecting General Public   After getting out of the navy, I had an opportunity to teach CPR to Colorado state employees.   Holy crap.   I either forgot or just simply didn't know that civilians weren't used to the way that military people talked. At first, my civilian trainees were shocked senseless. It took a few classes for me to tone it down but I found a groove that worked. There was still a lot of freaking out at first but the audience eventually fell into the rhythm of it and had a good time while learning an important skill. At the time, the AHA said that an instructor was supposed to be teaching classes of ten or less but it was not unusual for me to be teaching classes of 50 people or more. I got used to the larger groups as time went on.   One of the last classes I taught was somewhere around 50 people and I had used the excuse that I wanted get my instructor's certificate renewed in order to get some face time with an audience. I talked to the instructor and she looked a me bewilderldly but she agreed to let me teach.   On the day of the class, she handed me a bunch of videotapes and told me to have at it. I gave her tapes back and told her that I wanted to do the didactic myself. She was floored. She'd never heard of anyone actually WANTING to teach the class without using audiovisual backup.   The class was great. In a nutshell, I killed 'em. They were laughing insanely and nearly forgot that they were learning a skill. The real punchline is that the practical testing of each student went amazingly fast. These folks were taught one man, two man, child, and infant CPR in a matter of two-and-a-half hours and they BREEZED through the quals.   When I was done with the class, the instructor looked star-struck. She couldn't believe what she had just seen.   Retirement and Divorce   At some point I decided that I was compensating for what I really wanted to do (standup comedy) and I quit teaching CPR. My route to doing standup was a weird one that led me to recording two CDs, doing some radio work, and trying to do some writing. Most of this was a relative success. In other words, the relatives said that they liked it. In any case, I got airtime and developed some strange skills.   But...   Every time I wanted to do the standup thing, I got depressed. I hated the idea that an effective tool like humor was going to be wasted on a bunch of people in a comedy club, so I never got around to it. This was a big contention in my divorce. Even though I had succeeded in getting national airplay and getting my money back on my recording ventures, my now ex-wife said I was a dismal failure and a disappointment to her because I never pursued the standup thing.   The Head Injury and Corporate America   In 1999, I fell off of a semi-tractor and did some weird damage to my brain. My now ex-wife said that I wasn't the same person that she married. She was right. I was different.   I was angry.   The first five years or so after my accident, I was pissed off all of the time and at some points suicidal. My version of suicide would have gone unnoticed as such by the general public. In order to achieve my subconscious desires, I started working weird jobs trying to get myself killed.   Two jobs come to mind during this period...   1. I washed airliners for United Airlines and operated a high-speed lift without safety devices. I was often 65 feet in the air with no restraints while hanging out of the side of a flimsy bucket. While most wouldn't consider this extremely odd, one has to take into account that I have an insane fear of heights and did the job anyway.   2. I worked at a hotel as a night auditor in a somewhat rough neighborhood and took to chasing around armed gangstas with nothing more than a portable phone. The weird thing was that most of the hotels in my area were robbed multiple times at gunpoint while my hotel had no such incidents. For a while, the police thought that I was in on the robberies and they thought that the bandits were using my hotel as safe hiding place. The truth was that people thought I was a crazy-assed, dangerous weirdo and they were afraid that I would take a bullet for a few of my company's hard-earned dollars. They, the gangstas, were wrong, I would have taken the bullet for free.   I eventually came to my senses and started working normal jobs.   Enter Corporate America.   I've written plenty about my problems with corporate garbage. My current jobs are ok but they still have piles of crap to deal with and I really hate the stuff. It's funny how ideals can swirl around only for so long with all of the crap in the toilet before one decides to flush the whole thing and start over again.   My pure disgust with American business has forced me to rethink my beliefs about standup and I have decided that going to a club and making people laugh without having them learn anything is ok. Laughter is therapeutic and that's good enough for me. If this works, I will not be forced to lie to customers, screw over people that pay for services, or generally pork customers senseless. Essentially, stand up comedy is my lesser of two evils.   The Experience   I've been planning this for two years. I started writing routines on and off since the summer of 2007. Getting together with Adrienne and getting married took me off the schedule for a bit but I knew it would get back on track. About eight weeks ago I started working to get the act onstage and finally got to do it on June 30th.   I had two minutes at the Comedy Works and it was waaaaayyyy different than I expected.   First of all, the lights were insanely bright. I couldn't see anyone in the audience. I felt like I was doing standup for God Himself. I could hear laughter but I saw almost nothing. I am used to being able to SEE the people that I am talking to. Others that do regular work there actually LIKE the fact that they cannot see the audience... Not me, I want to see the reaction that I am getting.   Second, the sound system was awful for me. I've done hundreds of hours behind a mic and I've experienced nothing like this. The system was really loud and I kept wanting to turn it down. It also didn't help that I never worked a mic live, all my mic experience was in-studio.   All in all, though, it was a great experience. I didn't do so great but I learned a lot. I should have gone to watch more than I did before actually taking the stage. I am tempted to go again to really know what it is that I'm seeing.   I screwed up by leaving early, though. Afterwards, I realized that leaving early was rude and when I figured it out, it was too late to take it back. I hope it doesn't screw me up in the standings.   In any case, I had a good time. I am looking forward to doing it again.   Woo hoo!   Copyright 2009 by Frank Emsley