Renowned NYC comedy journalist Sean McCarthy (thecomicscomic.com, The Laugh Track) is a former standup comic who participated in the 1998 Seattle Comedy Competition. He was then a young entertainment reporter for the Bremerton (now Kitsap) Sun, a local daily, kept this journal. We didn't have blogs back then; we had to keep journals, in the snow uphill both ways.
Here it is:
"Notes from Underground - Day 1
I'm sick.
I'm tired.
So officially, I'm sick and tired. I stayed up most of the night Tuesday balancing my day job (yes, some of us comedians -- that would be the bad ones -- still have one of those), watching election returns and desperately trying to figure out if I have any jokes.
And I mean any.
Some people laugh at me all the time, it seems. But I don't tell jokes. Not the kind you tell around the water cooler at work the next morning kind of jokes, or even the ones you tell at the bar or in a comedy club (by far the best place to tell jokes). I'm more of a walking specimen of uninhibited madness, unleashed nightly to shock and amaze unsuspecting audiences.
And I'm about to do battle for six straight nights with 17 people who write and tell jokes FOR A LIVING! I'm competing in the annual Seattle International Comedy Competition.