Funny, You're So Sad - NYTimes.com The guy next to me had recently moved to Brooklyn from Cincinnati. When I asked him what he did in New York he said "comedy." When I asked him what he did for money in New York he said "temping." He and I both had little notebooks that we had written our jokes in. The relevant page in mine read "bidet, rats, Obama, Entourage." I had spent months working on that page. Then our host took to the stage. I know you all think you're comics. Let's see a show of hands, how many of you have made more than $500 in your lives from doing comedy? No hands. I know you all have your little notebooks and your same five minutes you do every night all over town. This was Ray Combs Jr. welcoming us to the Saturday afternoon open mic known as the Woodshed. "I'm going to go after you," he said. And he wasn't bluffing. The layperson thinks comedy is fun. It isn't. Bespectacled comics got up on stage to do their routines only to have Ray tear them to shreds - call them ugly, unfunny, sad. He used shockingly racist and homophobic language, said what he'd like to do to the anatomy of two female performers, and ended the show by exposing his own. And the audience, even the people he was attacking, ate it up. "If you can't take this abuse, you'll never be a comic," he'd said from the stage. The comedians, packing the room, taking up every chair - proving they could - were all in stitches. I don't think that was what my therapist meant when he said I should go to comedy shows because "laughter is good for the soul." I'd moved back to New York in 2009. That was a hard year. I was laid off from my job as a labor organizer; my father was given a diagnosis of cancer; I got married; my sister went to prison; my wife became pregnant; and my father died. It was a lot to deal with. My wife and I decided to move back to New York from Denver to be closer to her family when the child was born. When we got back I decided I needed therapy. The therapist I ended up seeing had an awful, splotchy beard that he trimmed right up to the jaw line. He wore sandals. His office was decked out in Zen rock gardens and little fountains and Japanese tapestries. He gave me exactly two pieces of actionable advice during the six months that I visited him. The first was that I should read Eckhart Tolle's "The Power of Now." I didn't do that. The second was that I should start going to comedy shows to cheer myself up. For some reason I took that advice. The more comedy shows I went to, the more I began to think like a comic. Every insight I would have, every observation, every anecdote, I started unconsciously turning into jokes. The scenes in my real life played out in my head as stories told on a stage framed by a spotlight - each beat followed by a comforting blanket of laughs from a sympathetic audience. It wasn't long before I started writing the stories down and signing up at open mics. I'd been to fewer than a dozen when I showed up at Ray's. And Ray's was my last. "The layperson thinks comedy is fun," Ray told me over the phone, about a year and a half later. It is all anxiety and adrenaline. I had called him up because I'd been telling a comic friend of mine about his show, and she knew Ray and told me I should talk to him. I took her up on it and called to ask him about that day and about his thoughts on comedy. "I like being uncomfortable," he said. I feel like it's offensive if you aren't being open, if you're not willing to break out of your comfort zone. Ray is talented at getting comics out of that zone; I remembered what he'd said that night about our little notebooks. I've seen people have breakdowns, start crying. It wasn't funny but it was engaging. It was painful but it was sincere. Did it help them? Was it interesting? I suggested that being interesting and sincere doesn't make something funny. He agreed but added: "If you're a naturally funny person then you can turn it into comedy. My family deals with tragedy with jokes. That's how I was raised. In the end you have to be funny. That's what all of this is about. My problem was, even if my jokes were funny, I wasn't sure that I was funny. By the time I went to Ray's show, I was beginning to think I didn't have the personality to really sell a joke. For another thing, stand-up comedy wasn't bringing the soul-repairing laughter into my life that I was hoping for. If anything it was adding stress. The people I was befriending at open mics tended to be people a lot like me: confused, depressed and insecure. Ray agreed. Comedians, he said, are "all messed up people. You have to have something missing to want to go up and be judged in front of people, seek their approval. ...We are wounded losers. If Ray Combs Jr."s name sounds familiar it may be because his dad, also Ray Combs Jr., was the host of the television show "Family Feud" and a comic, too. He killed himself in 1996 on Ray's mom's birthday, just weeks before Ray's high school graduation. Now Ray lives outside Austin, Texas, and he doesn't do comedy any more. But he was careful to say that "comedy isn't something you can quit. It is a part of who I am. My internal voice is a comedian. I told him that I'd stopped doing comedy, too. My 10 open mics hardly mattered compared with his 10 years of grinding. All the same, when I told him that the mic he hosted that Saturday was the last straw for me, he was overcome with guilt. The guys who run that mic asked me to be as offensive as possible. I wasn't sure I could do it. I hadn't planned all that stuff but the more people would react, the more I would dial it up. "There's no joke that doesn't hurt someone's feelings," he said. But all the same he felt bad when feelings got hurt. "Did you know I got choked out after that show?" he asked. I did - it was hard to miss an enraged member of the audience attacking him when he stepped off the stage. I wanted to make him feel better, so I told him that the show was a wake-up call for me. "I like comedy but I am no comedian," I said. I don't have the stomach for it. That seemed to be your point, separating the wheat from the chaff. Anyway I only got into it because my shrink thought I needed to laugh. He told me what he said was an old W.C. Fields joke. If you want to make an audience laugh, you dress a man up like an old lady, then kick him down the stairs. If you want to make a comedian laugh, you kick a real old lady down the stairs."" I suspect I'm in that first group, not the second. Everyone in comedy may be a wounded loser, but not all wounded losers can do comedy. Besides, if they did, who would sit in judgment and, if all goes well, provide the laughs? I haven't been back on stage. I went to a see some stand-up last week in the basement of a grocery store at midnight on a weeknight. I stood in the back near where all the comics hung out. Nothing too interesting happened. Nobody broke down. Nobody was choked. It was hilarious. I laughed so hard I wept. David Hill has written for The Awl and McSweeney's. He will be a regular columnist for Grantland.