Sense of humor

   Three comics wait out of sight at the Comedy Attic’s Wednesday night open mic. 
   “He’s from Terre Haute, so he’s probably addicted to methamphetamine … Ben Moore!”
    “He’s the man with the most unfortunate name in the state of Indiana, please welcome … Tom Brady!”
    “He just released his sex tape … which is just a roll of duct tape with blonde hair stuck to it … Jamison Raymond!”
    Ben, Tom, and Jamison make up three of the five guys who helped build the Bloomington comedy scene, the ones who started together four years ago when The Comedy Attic first opened as The Funny Bone on Walnut Street.
    Each man takes the stage for his own act, and immediately it’s a flow. It’s a beat. It’s an art. Stand-up comedy fits them. On stage, their dialogue feels unrehearsed, like talking to your funny best friend — if your best friend was the kind of guy who would joke about black cavemen, bathroom drinking, and four-day boners.
    There’s a bated-breath pause. Then the crowd erupts in a giant wave of laughter.
    This is it.
    This is the throw-it-all-away, addictive high, falling-in-love rock star moment.
    This is what ruins your life.

***

    Ben Moore sits in a downtown Indianapolis Starbucks, unwrapping Halls cough drops with his teeth, popping them in, and letting the mentho-lyptus work its magic. He’s not convinced. The economy-sized pack shrinks slowly.
    At 32, dressed in jeans, sneakers, and a weatherproof jacket, Ben is living life on the road as a professional comedian. He’s been around long enough to know the rules:
    1. Always bring your own plasticware and instant coffee.
    2. Don’t look anyone in the eye.
    3. Don’t get sick.
    To forget the rules is to pay the consequences and possibly end up eating Caesar salad with your fingers — it’s happened before. But it’s the last rule that’s the most important, and right now Ben is certain he has the flu. He takes off his glasses and begins muttering.
    “Damn it. No. I’m so stupid. I’m a dummy. This is the road. I blame the road for this.”
    It hasn’t always been this way, this featuring comic’s lifestyle of fluorescent-lit bus stations and pushing sleeping strangers off his shoulder driving somewhere between Cleveland and Syracuse, N.Y. First there was the move from Terre Haute to Bloomington with his identical twin brother in his early 20s. Then there was the hole-in-a-basement $100-a-month rental apartment, the slew of night jobs he took so he could stick it to The Man, the public access sketch comedy show airing to an empty audience at 3 a.m.
    There were guest spots at the Monday night Bear’s Place show and double-digit drinks to get over crippling stage fright. And then in 2008, there was a miracle: Bloomington’s first full-time comedy club opened its doors. Ben wandered in, stuck around, and quit drinking.
    “My worst fear was not making it,” he says. “I didn’t want to look back and think what if not quitting was what held me back.”
    Stand-up comedy turned out to be the only thing better than alcohol, and so Ben traded in bottles and booze for stage lights and a life on the road.
    The cough drops keep coming because Ben can’t be sick. It’s an inconvenience.
    “It’s just so stupid. I’m going to be sick. I’m going to be on the bus, sick, all because of this harlot, this whore in Milwaukee,” he says.
    Mistakes happen. Milwaukee happens. Ben tries to explain.
    “There’s nothing to do! I don’t do drugs. I don’t drink. I don’t commit crimes. But here, people get into trouble out there. Greg Giraldo. Mitch Hedberg. You’re out there, and you have all that time. Guys like that, they start doing drugs out of boredom or whatever. It kills people. The road kills people.”
    Printed on every Halls wrapper is a mini pep talk. “Get back in there champ!” says the cough drop. “Tough is your middle name.”

***

    From the back of 25-year-old Tom Brady’s Chrysler Concorde comes a sound like fireworks. He doesn’t flinch. He’s driven the black four-door for six years but can hardly remember a time when breaking down on the side of the road wasn’t a real possibility. Tomorrow, he says. He’ll take it to the shop tomorrow.
    He said that yesterday, too.
    Tom wants to make you laugh, but he doesn’t want to talk about that great touchdown pass last night. He’s not laughing at your Gisele Bundchen jokes either.
    “When people say comics don’t laugh, it’s not true,” Tom says. “Comics just don’t laugh at things that have been done to death.”
    The car radio temporarily drowns out the popping noise, but suddenly Tom reaches forward and changes the station, like listening to one more second of Dave Matthews Band’s “Don’t Drink The Water” might physically pain him.
    “I hate when I start tapping my fingers to a Dave Matthews Band song,” he says. “I’m like, ‘Oh shit! Dave Matthews! Not me! I’m cooler than that.’” He can immediately name his favorite band: Modest Mouse.
    It used to be Radiohead, but isn’t Radiohead the favorite band of every depressed comic you know? Tom’s not calling himself depressed. That downtrodden persona some comics take onstage may just be one more way to air out self-deprecating thoughts, he says.
    “There’s a sadness in everybody,” he says. “But we can laugh about it.”
    At 21, Tom wanted a fairy tale life. Raised by women and Disney movies, he called himself a sap, but four years and a broken engagement later, he’s making his own version of happily ever after.
    There’s no wife, no six-figure career, no pet dog running around a fenced-in backyard. He settles for visiting puppies in the College Mall pet shop and plans to move to Chicago, where he’ll finally be able to work his day job around comedy rather than vice versa.
    For now, Tom’s picked the fickle lover that is stand-up comedy.
    “Being on stage is the best and worst feeling. It’s isolating and the most alone you’ll ever feel if it’s not going well and no one’s with you,” he says.
    “But when it’s going well, it’s like this energy. It’s a drug and an adrenaline rush. When you haven’t done it in a while, it’s almost like an itch that in order to scratch, you must get back up on stage.”

***

    Buried in the sock drawer of Jamison Raymond’s dresser is a slim IU Credit Union envelope. Scrawled on the outside are words and numbers: Earned 2009. Do not spend. April 2011, do not quit. They’re personal reminders, written in the trying moments when leaving comedy behind seemed like the easiest thing to do. Tucked inside is a single dollar, one more reminder of the first time someone paid him to do what has become a compulsion and a need.
    He’s a 31-year-old with a Spiderman bedspread and comic books, a guy who yells obscenities while playing “Call of Duty” at night with his friends. And he’s not afraid to admit that maybe it’s a little childish. “That’s who I am,” he says. “My life is awesome.”
    He also knows if he wants to do comedy full time, he has to make a choice. Does he stay where he’s at, continuing to feature the odd show and working the local open mic scene? Or does he take the next step and move toward professional comic life?
    “I don’t want to be in my 40s, on the road, never married, no kids, drunk, and talking in a bar with 20-year-olds about comedy,” Raymond says. “I don’t think that’s something I’d ultimately be fulfilled by.”
    He says his friends think it would be a waste of talent if he quit, but trying to make it big requires a change of mentality, a change of lifestyle, and a change of location.
    He could quit his desk job at the hospital and hit the road like Ben. He could call it quits for now on the possibility of a relationship and move to the city like Tom.
    Whether it would be worth it all — that’s what he doesn’t know.

***

    The comics leave the open mic stage to cheers and applause. The crowd shifts in their seats, pulling on their coats as the lights go up.
    Ultimately they’ll all have to walk off that Comedy Attic stage for good, no more routine features as one of the five guys who stuck around.  
    They can’t stay because younger guys wait in the wings looking to become the next Ben Moore or Jamison Raymond. The scene must change and the characters up front must switch, pulling new material and jokes to relate with the crowd.
    In September, The Comedy Attic will celebrate its fifth birthday. The Fifth Annual Bloomington Comedy Festival will kick off in June, crowning the best comic in the city at the end of the summer competition. In the last four years, these five guys have passed around the title. One would only expect 2013’s result to be the same.
    But Ben, Tom, and Jamison don’t want this town’s last laughs, so the time to make a choice and part ways is approaching. They’re looking forward to headlining shows, recording albums, and settling down.  
    In 10 years, they hope Bloomington will be able to have the same draw as Chicago, New York, and Los Angeles. If fame’s spotlight hits one of them, The Comedy Attic’s name would shine, too.
    Young, up-and-coming comics could hop in their cars and bypass the big city in favor of starting their careers in southern Indiana.