standing at the displays in her leather jacket, picking things up and putting them down, swinging the little Japanese ceramic pendants in front of her face and weighing the votives in her palm. Something about her made me think she’d be able to listen to their stories. I blushed.
“Last night I met this kind of strange chick at Nomad,” I said. “She came up after my set.”
“Sounds like you’ve got a new number-one fan,” Ruby said. “Watch out.”
“I’ll be sure to hide my sledgehammer,” I said. “No, she was nice, actually. We had a lot in common, it turned out.”
“People must come up to talk to you after shows all the time.”
“Only a dozen or so per set,” I said with a straight face. “I can usually handle it.” I went back to doodling in my notebook.
Ruby jerked at another tag and looked at me. “What was strange about her?”
“Huh?”
“You said she was strange.”
“Did I?” Ruby looked at me pointedly, and I backtracked. “It was what you said about Becca that reminded me.” What was it exactly? “This woman was telling me about her ex-boyfriend, and she said, ‘He didn’t hit me.’ Just out of the blue.”
“He definitely hit her,” Ruby said sagely.
“It just seemed like a weird thing to volunteer to a total stranger.”
“Sounds like she has boundary issues. I used to have major boundary issues because of being molested as a child.” I’d grown accustomed to upsetting revelations like this from Ruby, but I never knew where to look. I kept my eyes trained on my notebook. “My therapist says I cope by controlling what I can. Like this.” She pointed at her fake hairdo, and I nodded as if it made perfect sense to me. “You have to be careful, though. They can really change your personality. This one wig I used to wear, kind of a Louise Brooks–type bob, made me really mean . . . She was bad news . . .”
My note-taking fingers were itching, but Ruby droned on until my phone buzzed under the counter. I had a sudden presentiment that it was Amanda calling, as if I had summoned her with my thoughts. Superstitiously, I let it vibrate and listened for the shudder of a voice message before glancing at the screen.
I suppressed a mild disappointment. It was Kim, the Other Girl in the Thursday-night lineup. To the extent that every girl comic has a schtick, hers was familiar: blond and skinny and kind of dirty-sexy, with a high-pitched baby voice and a foul mouth. At shows like this I was always the only brown girl opposite some Kim or other. I didn’t take it personally. It was better than when I’d left, but ironically, that was part of the problem. There had always been a strong Latinx comedy scene in Austin, but it was dominated by men. Besides, as a half-Mexican, half-Jewish woman without a word of Spanish, I’d never quite fit in there. My mom had given me her last name but failed to teach me her language, venting her anger at my dad without sacrificing her ambitions for my perfect assimilation and eventual departure from Amarillo. It had worked; I’d left. And the mainstream comedy scene run by pasty white men had worked for me too—probably because I was best friends with one. While I was in L.A. the scene had grown more diverse, but with my clumsiness for such matters, I’d somehow managed to leave Austin at exactly the wrong time to benefit from it. Missing the chance to build connections on the way up, I’d reaped none of the rewards of the new scene, just stiffer competition from a glut of newcomers.
Staring at Kim’s text—she told me to break a leg in the contest and offered herself as a practice partner if I needed to try out new material—I realized, not for the first time but with a fresh throb, how lonely I was back here in Austin. I kept my distance from comics like Kim, avoiding the preshow beers and the postshow hangouts. That went double for the guys. They were fine, all more or less like Fash. But if I didn’t want to sleep with them, and I didn’t, I knew the best I could hope for was to become a mascot, their short, cute, brown girl-buddy, great fun to pick up and swing around when they were drunk. No, thanks. I missed Jason too much to want to play that role for anyone but him.
My mom always said I must have gotten my sense of humor from my dad, and I had vague memories of him as a hairy, elfin jokester who was always winking at me and taking off his thumb to make me giggle. Still, it was my mom who bought me my first joke book sometime after he’d left. She’d taken to shopping the Saturday-morning garage sales, waking up at the crack of dawn to scoop the neighbors, and often came home with stacks of worn, dog-eared chapter books for me. Included in one of these stacks was a flimsy orange paperback called 101 Wacky, Hilarious, Totally Crazy Jokes for Kids Ages Eight to Ten.
Most of the jokes were god-awful puns, but there was one that always stuck with me. It went something like this:
A moth walks into a psychiatrist’s office and lies down on the couch.
PSYCHIATRIST: So, why don’t you start by telling me a little about yourself?
MOTH: Well, Doc, I’ve got a wife, two kids, and a nice house in the suburbs with a two-car garage.
PSYCHIATRIST: And how does that make you feel?
MOTH: Okay, I guess.
PSYCHIATRIST: Any problems?
MOTH: Nope.
PSYCHIATRIST: So you’re saying you’re perfectly happy with your life?
MOTH (thinks): Yes, I think so.
PSYCHIATRIST: Then what brought you in here today?
MOTH: The light was on.
I can still close my eyes and see the cartoon illustration, down to the last pen stroke: the moth, standing upright in a cartoon fedora, holding a briefcase in one of his hairy insect legs and shaking the psychiatrist’s hand with another, the mysterious couch looming in the background. Everything I learned about joke structure, I learned from that pathetic moth. Setup: two things that don’t go together (moth and psychiatrist). Heightening: the middle of the joke, lines that make you forget he’s a moth. Punch line: a sudden remembering.
There are a hundred different versions of the moth joke, I later discovered. The moth goes into a bar, but he doesn’t order a drink; the moth walks into a gym, but he doesn’t lift weights; the moth strolls into a dealership, but he doesn’t buy a car. Eventually someone asks him why he’s there, and the moth always says the same thing: The light was on. The joke lulls you into believing that this moth, this time, is different. But he never is. In a way, it’s a joke about comedy itself. Comics aren’t happy people. We crave the light, and we don’t know why.
When I started putting together my own set, I tried to picture the author of 101 Wacky, Hilarious, Totally Crazy Jokes for Kids Ages Eight to Ten. I imagined some poor guy sitting in a bleak New York apartment with a typewriter in front of him and a stack of paper napkins on which he’d made his drunk friends write down their favorite jokes, but they were all too dirty for a kids’ book. So in the end, past deadline—with a whole batch of these joke books he’d committed to churning out—maybe he went down to the library and checked out a stack of slightly older joke books, where he found the hoary old moth joke. And somehow, the hour being late and having just watched a Woody Allen movie with his girlfriend and maybe even had an argument with her afterward, he set his version of the joke in a shrink’s office, despite the fact that one of society’s most fervent desires for children ages eight to ten is that they should have little to no idea
