We Are Nanette

In 2014, four years before we got the privilege to see Hannah Gadsby’s “Nanette,” I was just a girl at a microphone on a Monday night.

It was at an open mic of all women in Tao Studio. This room was a warm and supporting place, filled with women sharing, women laughing, women cheering among the red walls. Above all, it was safe. Everyone in that room made me feel empowered, and I could explore my humor in the best ways possible.

I learned the basics of comedy there. You get about five minutes, give or take, depending on the venue. At one minute you get the light, so wrap it up. Speak slowly, as you’re dealing with a bunch of drunk people. Pay tribute to the house by buying something – a drink, a snack, etc. – and try to stay to the end and watch and support all the other comics (although most people don’t).

Here there were women of all races, shapes, sizes and sexualities. We also all had our own stories, not unlike Hannah Gadsby and “Nanette.” And each sense of humor was special and treated as such.

This women’s mic still occurs once a week (and I still love, even when I can’t make it out). But even in their mixed-gender mics, Tao has a code of ethics that rule over the studio and the people who come there; it makes this place one of a kind. When you left and went into “the real world,” there was a different set of rules.

Whereas I started in a room of all women, most of the venues for other open mics I went to were 75 percent straight white men. Their topics usually revolved around their penises, ranging from complaining about their penises in skinny jeans to seeing my boobs in a low-cut top and remarking how they would stick their penis between them. If they really wanted to appear edgy, they’d start telling rape jokes — something forbidden at Tao.

In the event there was a female comic, her appearance was often ballyhooed by the men. These women were often white, skinny and conventionally beautiful. They would often play into the same norm of hypersexuality, trying to be “one of the guys.” When I would talk to them during our shows together, the same story would come up: “My manager suggested that I try standup to diversify my portfolio as an actress.”

My jokes didn’t fit in here; sure, I talked about dating and sex, but I also joked about my mother’s breast cancer treatment, my family and leaving abuse. In comedy I sought to create and write, to tell funny stories, not necessarily to become an actor. The goal of standup was always to get to punchlines; that often meant sacrificing truths for the sake of the joke, glossing over the ugliness.

A fellow comedian committed suicide about five months into my fledgling standup career. I had known about his struggles with depression due to seeing his sets regularly. His death broke the hearts of everyone who knew him. But then, after a few weeks, I saw comedians joking casually about killing themselves. It was hard for me to continue after that; I ended up taking a hiatus.

I tried coming back several times. But although I could make people laugh onstage, there was something in me that couldn’t continue beyond those sputters. My comedy was skewing both political and personal, which isn’t often mainstream or appealing. It wasn’t the type that keeps bookers interested, and I certainly wasn’t pretty enough to get booked based on looks alone. There was no fulfillment in writing jokes simply for the sake of jokes. My heart needed to be in my jokes, and there wasn’t a place in for it in timed sets at drunken comedy clubs.

Instead of comedy, I decided to tackle storytelling; it seemed more of a fit for what I wanted to do as a written artist. It provided more challenges and a chance for something else that could help people feel not only laughter, but catharsis. I loved comedy, but I saw very few places at the table for someone like me.

Until Nanette came.

At first, 20 minutes in, I was getting bored. I stopped my Netflix and continued doing other things; after all, this was supposed to be comedy. John Mulaney, Ali Wong and other comedians had all graced my Netflix to deliver joke after joke, often loudly. This was a Tasmanian woman – not brash like Chris Rock, or beautiful like Iliza Schlesinger – who was just talking, and occasionally being funny. Not laugh-out-loud funny. More like, “Oh, that’s funny” statement funny.

Several weeks later, I was getting ready to do my storytelling show with KPCC. It was nerve-wracking, as my words were about to make me bare my soul. I was dressed, putting on my eye makeup meticulously. It was quiet, so I turned on the TV for some background noise, figuring maybe I should give Nanette another chance.

That’s when Hannah Gadsby lifted a mirror.

“I’m quitting comedy,” she said. And with those words, and all the precious words after, soared anger, heartbreak and rage at the status quo of what comedy had become. She was funny, but more importantly, she had a heart.

She rejected the idea that we had to suffer for our art. Threw away the conventions that we have to be driven to constant punchlines and feeding intoxicated hedonism, and if we weren’t we were doing it wrong. Objected to the idea of the comedic persona versus the real her – because the real Hannah is good enough, and it’s not worth destroying for the sake of making others laugh.

And I cried, because all I was thinking about the piece I wrote was not the fact that in a few hours’ time I would be emotionally naked. It was that the wish buried inside of me was that when I told stories that I would be as funny as I am during a normal conversation.

So many female comedians I know suffered the way Hannah did, rejected comedy the way she did. We left because we felt the pressure to push the envelope, to follow the status quo of the comedy clubs. There was no space for us to simply be and to share. Nanette not only gave us a battle cry, but an open space to explore and make our own that could be loved and accepted as a new art.

It’s time for comedy to come into the new era, and I hope to find the right people along the way to restructure it. Because we are all Nanette.

Playing Pretend

When I started comedy several months ago, I met a guy named Alvin in my classes. A tall Asian guy with thin-framed glasses, he had dropped out of medical school and decided to pursue his dreams as a comedian. There was no pretension with Alvin. He was funny and sweet as he explained his uptight Asian family who so desperately wanted him to become a doctor and joked about picking his American name, then finding out it was that of a cartoon chipmunk.

Today I found out Alvin killed himself.

He had depression issues, and I remembered that we once talked about how he felt that onstage was the only place he could be himself. It was the only place he didn’t have to pretend that everything was fine and that he didn’t think once in a while about suicide.

In his death, I heard the echoes of people around me every day as I have fallen into dark times. Stay positive and happy. Keep a smile on your face. Don’t ever let them see you sweat. And especially don’t let the Internet see you down, or else it could ruin you.

My depression has been taking a toll lately. In the stress of trying to survive I have been falling apart. The world seemed to know it too, as I watched people who I called friends reenact the cliché of “rats from a drowning ship.” I’m blessed to have quite a few good friends to catch me, but at the same time I’ve been hearing people tell me to push it down, play pretend. Don’t let the world see that, because how are you going to get a job/romantic partner/anything good if you are negative?

This time of year seems to be a trigger, especially with Seasonal Anxiety Disorder, commonly known as SAD. This time of year has brought it out for so long that it even has its own psychological diagnosis. It kind of makes sense: The holiday season is stressful. There are presents to afford, travel arrangements to make (also expensive) and family issues that can be ignored for most of the rest of the year. There’s a lot of work to wrap up before the financial year is finished, if you are so lucky to have a job. If you don’t and are looking, you have to patiently fold your hands and wait until the new year happens, and who knows what your situation will be like during that time?

All the while, the entire world is telling us to be happy. Joy to the world, have a holly jolly Christmas, be whimsical in the holiday spirit. When the world is difficult and everyone is telling us to be positive, it adds a toll on us. We have to play pretend and smile because we don’t want to ruin that most wonderful time of the year for everyone else around us. When we are worn thin, we have to give to everyone else that positive spin and act as if nothing is the matter in our lives, when in truth everything is.

Our lives have become that way in the social media age, where every day we have to pretend like it’s good when often it’s not. We have to become our very own public relations departments, and like with editing your own work, this is a very hard task when things might not be 100 percent great. Top it off with comparing yourself to your friends who seem to be getting engagements, job promotions and babies like they were falling from the sky, and there seems to be a recipe for disaster for anyone who is struggling through dark times.

Putting up a front destroys us. We want to tell people how hard it is, but we don’t want to lose our friends. At the same time hiding it becomes a hard task.

When it’s something that everyone knows about, it gets worse. I remembered how, after four years of struggling in my marriage, I got divorced to so many people saying, “I had no idea it was so bad.” Four years of marriage hiding counseling sessions, his threats and putdowns and my utter unhappiness had taken a toll on me; that game of playing pretend that everything was fine has come with a price I’m still paying.

Yet as I have sought transparency in my current emotional situation, unafraid of the truth in it, I also pay as people who I stood by in their dark hours run during mine. There is no winning this battle of emotional turmoil and depression. And in cases like Alvin, sometimes the depressed people pay for the careless actions of those around them who think the only answer to depression and darkness is to, “Stay positive.”

The other night, I had a friend call me to catch up. It was amazing to hear her voice after so long, as I missed her terribly; I could even see her smile in my mind’s eye through our conversation. We talked about people in general, and I will never forget what she said to me.

“There are a lot of people there who are all about appearances,” she said. “There are people who pretend to have money by flashing fancy things they can’t actually afford. Pretend to have love by surrounding themselves with people they call friends but aren’t. Pretend to have their shit together, and they really don’t, Reina. But they want to make the world think they do.”

As the conversation flowed between us as if no time had passed, I thought about this microcosm that our world had become. I was depressed as hell, but I then thought about the people who loved me, the authentic life that I was seeking. I’d rather have real ones who loved this person through the ups and downs than the fake ones who would leave as soon as what was in it for them disappeared, as that price is cheaper. I’d rather people know about the struggle rather than try to hide it, because struggle is what makes us human. It’s what makes us who we were always meant to be, and creates the beauty in our worlds.

If Alvin was open in life the way he was onstage, maybe things would have been different. I don’t know, though. All I know is that it should never have to come to this.

If you or someone you know has been thinking about suicide, call the National Suicide Prevention Hotline at 1-800-273-8255 or visit them at www.suicidepreventionlifeline.org.

The Kiss

It was three hours of conversation that led up to it, but it seemed like an eternity at the same time. I had put down my cold beer on his dresser and my hands began to fidget in the red light, staring out the window at the flowing trees. “I don’t know how this goes now…” I said nervously, but I didn’t need any more words anyway. His long hands found me and his lips soon caught mine in a kiss.

One hand was running through my hair, the other at my waist. I wrapped my arms around his neck and my back arched. We broke apart, his hands cupping my face just the way I like a guy to do after his lips are on mine.

“I’ve wanted to kiss you from the minute I saw you,” he whispered softly. “Standing at the microphone…”

The lights were fluorescent a few hours earlier as I took the mic at the Eagle Rock sandwich shop and began working through my material. I saw him in the back during my set: brown messy hair and beard, bright blue eyes, with a tall and lanky build.

He went up as well, but decided that comedy wasn’t his flavor; he preferred the beat of his drums. We stood outside for about an hour talking with another comic. Eventually the other comic left and this boy and I were left to ourselves. We walked towards my car, and as I arrived I asked, “Where’s your car?”

“Well, I took the bus,” he said. “But I’m going to be straightforward. I like you and I want to spend more time with you. So if you could give me a ride, I’d like to get you a drink.”

This is Los Angeles, land of indirectness and game playing, so I had never experienced anything this straightforward on these shores. So I took him up on it, and was led eventually led into the hills of Mt. Washington. And after much talking, beer drinking and laughter, I was ensnared in his lips, remembering what it was like to be possessed by kissing. It was truly a possession, and my stomach was on fire. I was left as a wide-eyed junkie, craving more.

The kiss is something that has been devalued in the hookup society. There are guys I know who refuse to kiss girls, even though they have sex with them. And to them, I say go back and practice your skills, because there is nothing more valuable. I am of the firm belief that the makeout is a lost artform; one that needs to be brought back for the sake of intimacy and humankind.

I’ve been kissing since the tender age of 14. The first one was with a boy named Jason at a Jewish youth group convention. The Eagles’ “Hotel California” was playing, I was looking pretty in my formal dress, and it was… slimy. I swore I would never kiss again. Somewhere G-d was laughing, because I’ve kissed a lot of boys since that point. (I have never kissed a girl, but I really never found a girl who I was attracted enough to kiss.)

I remember sitting with my friend with benefits at the age of 20, him moving my lips and spending hours teaching me to kiss properly as we hung out on his front porch with the dogs. As the years went on, I experienced many different sets of lips. All of them were different, from plump, pillowy lips to those that I had to coax to kiss correctly. Each one had its own flavor, and it was fascinating.

When life with my ex set it, kissing either turned into quick pecks or soul-sucking monstrosities. I remember feeling teeth against my cheek and more aggression than actual affection. At one point when things were really bad, our relationship counselor told us to build up intimacy by making out regularly. I was excited by this prospect and completely down for more kissing. Like the prospect of sex though, he shrugged it off.

My last birthday we were together, I got very drunk and proceeded to make out with him at the bar where we were celebrating, my long purple dress enveloping us both. Even thought I was inebriated, my body could still feel the reluctance in those kisses. I could feel him pulling away, but he couldn’t refuse because we were in a bar of all our friends and appearances mattered more to him than affections. To be with someone who couldn’t enjoy the simple pleasure of kissing… it was a matter of time before the destruction set in.

When the breakup set in, I was reintroduced to the kiss. Standing in the parking lot after my first “date” with a guy, and having him so close to me, his body present and standing in parallel with mine, I felt the energy flit in my stomach. And when his lips reached mine, I found myself in a state of shock and excitement. What had I been missing all this time? It was like music of the mouth, sensation and expression without a single word. It didn’t matter what happened later (which was he proposed marriage to me after two dates and I said no), but for that moment, I rediscovered the perfection that is the kiss.

There were a lot of frogs kissed since that day. Some boys were sweet and asked if they could kiss me (and for that, I thought, “For asking, you can have two.”) Some tried to be romantic and jar their way into my mouth when I didn’t want them there. There were horrible kissers who licked me so much that dogs would be standing in applause if they could manage it. And then there were those who were good, but got distracted by the other options that were available, such as the possibility of sex. The kiss got lost.

Yet after probably hundreds of kisses in my life, I never get sick of them. I sense more because of them and feel more elation in them than any sexual encounter could make me experience. I joke when I tell people that I never know if a guy is into me until his lips are on mine, but it’s true. As a writer, I am well aware that words can lie; bodies can’t. The body is just as important to read, because often you can find things that you need to find in its motions when the words fail. It starts when the voice ends and movement and sensation begins. And we all need to relearn this language — even myself.

As I kissed my open mic boy goodbye, him possessing me one more time with his mouth, I wondered if I would ever see him again. I’ve lived in this city long enough to know the answer was probably not; there are so many distractions and other lips in this town that most people refuse to settle on just one pair. But as I journeyed back out into the night, the scent of him on my body, I reflected on what my comedy teacher said: To paraphrase her, comedy certainly gets you some action.

Dying is Easy, Comedy is Hard

Pressing record on my iPhone, I place it on the stool and open up my notebook. I chose my jokes carefully as I grabbed the mic. It was comedy time.

“Hey, how y’all doing?” I ask the room as my classmates cheer, and then begin the jokes I wrote. About 20 seconds in, the blonde southern woman sitting on the couch next to the stage, also known as my teacher Bobbie Oliver, stops me.

“You have to slow down!” Bobbie yells in that southern drawl. “We can’t keep up with you. Take a deep breath, and begin again.”

I breathe deep and continue. As I tell one of my jokes, she laughs. But I continue my set and speed up again.

“You’ve got great content,” she said, looking at her notes. “The writing is funny. But you need to slow down. You know these stories, but your audience doesn’t. On top of that, they’re drunk. So you need to slow… down…”

I nodded as she continued her critique. I listen fully, never challenging her, but asking questions about certain things.

“Comedy’s all a learning process,” Bobbie said kindly to the room. It’s one of those Bobbie-isms that I have to take to heart if I’m really going to do this.

I didn’t want to do comedy, at least not at first. But I would go to parties, everyone would laugh at my funny stories and say, “You do comedy, right?”

“Nope, I’m a writer,” I said.

“But a comedy writer?”

“Nope. Just blog content and journalism.”

People would be flabbergasted. How could such a funny girl not be doing comedy?

The truth was I did standup once, by accident in 2011. It was when I was married back in Orange County, and we were at a comedy event at someone’s house. The mike went out as this one (unfunny) girl was doing standup. Luckily, I’m loud, so I decided to get up in front of everyone and entertain them as they fixed the problem.

Afterwards, one of the comedians came up to me. “Have you ever done that before?” he asked.

“Nope,” I replied.

“Have you ever thought about doing that professionally?”

I honestly hadn’t. He referred me to a guy he knew and told me to get in touch. But as life gets in the way, mine certainly did and the idea fell to the wayside.

Coming back to Los Angeles after the divorce, I followed a friend around the standup comedy circuit, supporting her since we were both going through divorces at the same time. She was using standup as a way to get her acting career going. She did pretty well and was very funny, but I saw the struggles she faced, from sketchy producers to male bias who would only cast pretty girls who they wanted to get with. It wasn’t an easy world, no matter how good she was. Eventually, she stopped and switched to doing improv and more acting-related things, and our friend circles took us far away from each other.

it made sense that people thought that I should do standup since they thought I was funny, but I didn’t want to be a part of that world that made it so hard for women to be involved with. I would come up with excuses: I was too fat. Not hot enough. Not interested in being an actress. My friend was in the comedy scene and I didn’t want to compete with her. And yet people kept coming back and telling me I should do comedy. Several people even offered to mentor me. But I kept refusing.

Around this time, I had a friend who told me about the woman he trained with, Bobbie.

“I think you’ll really get along with her,” he said, and gave me her number. We began messaging and we got along very well. I was getting ready to take her class… until the day after I got laid off from my job. It was like everything in the universe was blocking me from this path, and so I decided to go with it. Who was I to challenge the universe?

However, the months rolled on, and as I was getting ready to visit Israel, something was changing in me. I was getting anxious at the parties where I was normally just the funny girl. I was feeling my energy bursting out at the wrong times. It wasn’t doing me any favors, whether in my dating life or with my friends and potential work life. I needed to make an adjustment and fast.

Going to Israel soothed my soul, but then I went to Tsfat and had a vision: I had to make people laugh. The day after, I sat on the Eged bus on the way to Haifa, thinking as I watched the scenery shift around me. The Mediterranean sprawled out on the train while music played in my ears, and I wondered about this message. Was this just my imagination or something very real?

As I came home and hugged my mother, the thoughts continued rolling as I joined her through cancer treatment. At City of Hope, I spent my entire day making my mom laugh despite the nervousness, so much so my mom called me, “the human Xanax.”

As the sun set on the way home, my father looked at us as my mother and I were laughing.

“Was Reina always this funny?” he asked.

“Of course I was!” I said.

“You were, but I think you’ve gotten funnier since the divorce,” she said.

And eventually it dawned on me: There was a gift inside of me, and it couldn’t be quashed no matter how many excuses I made for it, and the bad things made it stronger. It was what made my mom smile while she was having her cancer treatment and my friends encourage me to step off in a new direction. It was meant for me to do.

So I talked to Bobbie again and found out she had an open mic on Monday nights. It was all women, and I figured that if I was going to do this, I was going to try it once to see if I could be funny. If I wasn’t, all I lost was one night.

Her room enveloped me in deep red and black couches, with tiny flickering electric candles. The lights onstage were bright. And as I put my name on the list and every person came up there with a notebook and an iPhone, I was ready to run out of the room. I wasn’t ready. I didn’t know what to do. How could I be funny, really?

Suddenly, my name was called and there was no backing out. I pulled the microphone out from the stand awkwardly and began to talk. I started with my grandmother, one of the funniest ladies I had ever known, and told the story of her getting drunk, stripping to her bra and underwear and running into the pool and riding around on a pool noodle. And she was terrified of water.

That’s when I heard it: Laughter. It made my heart sing in delight, and I decided to keep going. Told my stories. Heard the cackles. And I didn’t stop until the light in the back of the room to signify one minute.

As I got off the stage, I breathed deep. As the women around me circled and became shocked that I had never done that before, I realized I needed this. Comedy. The laughter. The applause. This was what I wanted, what I needed. And it felt better than anything in the world.

So I began to write. I tried jokes and some worked, while others didn’t. I “bombed,” which Bobbie lectured me never to call bombing. (“It’s part of the joke writing process. You try to succeed and sometimes you have to change things around to make it work. Bombing is when you have the joke right and it still doesn’t catch in an audience. And that will happen, too”) I observed and joked, and went to various open mics to try out my material. And I’m still going.

I have felt every emotion as I watched other female comedians: Happiness, jealousy, anger, surprise and even sadness. They were each beautiful and had their own rhythm and songs to sing. And somewhere in this quilt work was me, a little needle trying to poke through and see what was going on.

As I sat in class one day, the only guy there tried to attempt a joke. One of the parts of the joke he wrote was something that some Jews would consider offensive. I wasn’t, partially because I’ve heard these jokes a million times before.

During his critique, Bobbie said to be careful about that punch line.

“I was worried about that joke because I was concerned she would get offended,” he acknowledged, referring to me.

“Of course she wouldn’t get offended,” she said. “She’s a comedian.”

When she said that, something clicked in me. Yes, I thought. That’s right. I’m a comedian. And I was doing comedy. And it felt more right than anything else had in a long time.

So I decided I was going to keep doing it with no desperate quest for money, fame or agenda. Or rather, I would have just one: Make the world a little brighter for people by making them laugh. Because if there’s one thing we all have in common, we all smile.